Thirty-three people filed into a White House conference room on July 13 for a meeting with President Obama on race and policing, and at times, it got tense, The Washington Post reports.
Based on the seating arrangements, that’s probably not a surprise — activists sat between police chiefs and mayors, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police sat between the NAACP president and a Harvard professor. But eventually, it paid off.
“After about an hour, people got comfortable, and people began to speak their mind and say what they really felt,” said J.B. Jennings, a Republican from the Maryland Senate.
According to The Washington Post:
“The president lived up to his reputation as a former law professor,” NAACP's [Cornell] Brooks noted after the meeting. “He spent quite a bit of time listening, probing and guiding the discussion, occasionally deploying the Socratic method to get some of the day’s best responses.”
Attendees, even some who had been skeptical of the utility of such a meeting, described an unsparingly frank discussion in which police, protesters, academics and the president debated many of the disagreements playing out across the nation.
At one point, Chris Coleman, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn. got into an argument with Mica Grimm, an activist with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, until an unnamed police chief voiced a word of support for Grimm, and then the Rev. Al Sharpton redirected the conversation.
Despite the contentiousness, or perhaps because of it, participants seemed to be happy with the outcome.
In a Facebook post, Sen. Jennings wrote about the meeting:
No press in the room, just honest, frank and sometimes uncomfortable discussions about what is going on and how to fix it. It was an honor to be a part of this panel.
DeRay Mckesson, who was arrested during a protest in Baton Rouge, La. on July 9, wrote:
The meeting with @POTUS was nearly 4.5 hours. It was productive and there's a lot to reflect on.
— deray mckesson (@deray) July 14, 2016
Brittany Packnett, who sat next to the president during the meeting, was impressed with Obama’s commitment:
.@WhiteHouse staff keeps telling us this is the longest meeting they've personally been in w @POTUS.
— Brittany Packnett☔️ (@MsPackyetti) July 13, 2016
I'll say this: he cares.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards recognized both sides — activists and law enforcement — in a statement following the meeting:
Law enforcement officers must carry out their sacred duty to protect and serve in a way that earns the trust of our communities. At the same time, all Louisianans must make their voices heard in a constructive way that brings us closer together and makes true progress a reality. That is how we honor the lives of Alton Sterling and the police officers who lost their lives in Dallas.
And Cornell Brooks, the executive director of the NAACP, made it clear that ultimately, the issue isn’t about words, but about lives:
Blunt mtg. w' @POTUS. Our words will b defined by lives saved: black, brown, blue.. @washingtonpost washttp://go.shr.lc/2a9ozoO - @washtimes
— (((Cornell Brooks))) (@CornellWBrooks) July 14, 2016
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