In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Dr. Alveda King, niece of the great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said if he saw these Baltimore riots, “he’d be heartbroken, I am.”
High school students stormed the street in protests and riots Monday afternoon, throwing rocks at police officers.
The protests come on the same day as Freddie Gray’s funeral. He died earlier this month while in police custody.
“As I watched the protest, I’m reminded of several years ago… I was part of the first children’s march in Birmingham, Alabama,” King told Breitbart News. She added that those protests were peaceful and supervised.
“These children are not supervised—they are angry,” she said.
King said that she is very concerned that the Mayor of Baltimore has appeared to give these people an opportunity to destroy.
King went on to say when she sees the children on television running into a CVS and stealing—and police not doing anything because they have been told not to—that it’s not giving these children any compassion at all.
“That’s discouraging,” King stated.
She recalled what her father said to a group of people when their family home was burned in Birmingham, Alabama. She said he stood on a car and said, “Don’t riot, don’t destroy, go home”—“Go home and pray.”
“These children need help. They need guidance,” King added.