Dallas reveals its true face, again.
But see the New York Times, FWIW, "Black Lives Matter Was Gaining Ground. Then a Sniper Opened Fire":
It felt like a watershed moment for a scattered and still-young civil rights movement.Still more.
Inside Black Lives Matter, the national revulsion over videos of police officers shooting to death black men in Minnesota and Louisiana was undeniable proof that the group’s message of outrage and demands for justice had finally broken through.
Even the white governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, in a pained public concession, embraced the movement’s central argument. “Would this have happened if those passengers — the driver and the passengers — were white?” he asked. “I don’t think it would’ve.”
Then, in an instant, everything changed.
Black Lives Matter now faces perhaps the biggest crisis in its short history: It is both scrambling to distance itself from an African-American sniper in Dallas who set out to murder white police officers and trying to rebut a chorus of detractors who blame the movement for inspiring his deadly attack.
“What I saw in Dallas was devastating to our work,” said Jedidiah Brown, a Chicago pastor who has emerged as an outspoken Black Lives Matter activist over the past year. The moment he learned of the attack on the police, he said, he immediately sensed that any emerging national consensus would “tear down the middle.”
“The thing I vividly remember thinking was, this is going to show exactly how divided this conversation is,” he said.
For those who have harbored doubts or animosity toward Black Lives Matter — among them police unions and conservative leaders — the Dallas attacks are a cudgel that, fairly or not, they are eager to swing.
In Texas, several state officials, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, lashed out at the group, directly linking its tone and tactics to the killings. Mr. Patrick acknowledged that the demonstration in Dallas on Thursday night had been peaceful until the gunman struck, but he accused the movement of creating the conditions for what happened. “I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests,” he said.
“This has to stop,” Mr. Patrick said, adding of the police officers, “These are real people.”
State Representative Bill Zedler, a Republican, was equally blunt in his assessment of the group’s influence on the 25-year-old gunman, Micah Johnson.
“Clearly the rhetoric of Black Lives Matters encouraged the sniper that shot Dallas police officers,” he wrote on Twitter.
But a bigger problem for Black Lives Matter, supported by many liberals, is that Mr. Johnson’s actions could jeopardize the movement’s appeal to a broader group of Americans who have gradually become more sympathetic to its cause after years of highly publicized police shootings.
In the days before the Dallas massacre, Aesha Rasheed, 39, an activist in New Orleans, felt that at long last, white and black America were watching the same images with the same horror: two Louisiana police officers tackling and then shooting Alton Sterling, 37, at point-blank range; the slumped, blood-soaked body of Philando Castile, 32, after a Minnesota police officer shot him through a car window, with his girlfriend and her daughter sitting inches away.
“It seemed like a national consciousness was sinking in,” Ms. Rasheed said.
After the massacre in Dallas, she said, “it turned on a dime.”
She now worries that the episodes involving black men may be overshadowed and overlooked.
“Does this get ignored?” she asked. “Do five officers take center stage?”
