On May 23rd, during the Citizens’ Participation portion of the Charleston City Council meeting, members of the Charleston Area Justice Ministry (CAJM) spoke about the need for the city to hire an external auditor to investigate racial bias in the police department. At CAJM’s Nehemiah Assembly in April, we highlighted this issue in more detail and asked elected officials from Charleston and North Charleston to respond. Several Charleston City Council members attended that Assembly and made a public commitment to support the hiring of a qualified external auditor. CAJM had invited each city’s mayor and other elected officials to attend, but no white elected officials showed up. (Optics: less than ideal.) So now CAJM members have begun attending City Council meetings and making our case to all the [white] elected officials who had not attended our Assembly. After the third time we did this, on May 23rd, one of those council members spoke up, complaining that he felt “disrespected” by our organization and wondering whether he and his colleagues should continue to allow this kind of participation, which he described as an “orchestrated assault on City Council.”
Source: Charleston City Council’s Surprising Conversation – The Glebe Street Hacks