As Black Lives Matter continues its polarizing push onto the presidential campaign scene, a bipartisan group of black mayors, city councilors and community leaders is set to offer presidential candidates an alternative to the activist group’s “antagonistic approach.”
“To have a serious conversation about criminal justice reform, community policing, the militarization of police, the oxygen is being taken up by a group that doesn’t understand what it’s going to take to actually make this happen,” Ashley Bell, the Republican co-chairman of the 20/20 Club, says of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bell’s group, which he co-founded earlier this year, is scheduled to host a presidential forum at Allen University Nov. 21-22 in hopes of creating a space for candidates of both parties to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Because so far, as the 34-year-old Bell, a former Georgia county commissioner, pointed out in an interview with The Daily Caller, Black Lives Matter has controlled the conversation using fiery rhetoric more in the mold of Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, Jr.