As a journalist, Gayle King tries to stay in the middle of the road, but she’s hurting over the recent string of racial injustices, especially as the mother of a black man.
King appeared on Thursday’s The Talk and co-hosts brought up how she became emotional on CBS This Morning last week while she first reported on the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody as a Minneapolis officer pinned him down by the neck for nearly nine minutes. That same day, the news show had also reported on NYC birdwatcher Christian Cooper being falsely accused of harassment by a white woman.
Seeing a clip of herself crying, King immediately started crying again, “I haven’t looked at that moment and I’ve tried not to think about it, but it brings back memories.”
She continued, “At the time, we didn’t even know his name,” she said of Floyd, whose death has led to demands for justice in that case as well as an overhaul of the judicial system and racial equality for black Americans. “We didn’t even know his name. We couldn’t even give him the dignity of his name. It was just a black man underneath a car. All we had seen was the knee on his neck — and that was hard enough to see.”
A crying King said going from that report to the one about Cooper was like a punch to the gut.
“You go from that story to … the Central Park woman who called police about an African [American] man who we all saw wasn’t threatening her or her dog,” King said. “She was practically strangling the friggin’ dog trying to call the police about something that wasn’t true. When you think about that, if it had gone another way, that man — the birdwatcher — could have been George Floyd.”
Christian Cooper Speaks Out About Viral Central Park Incident
‘That particular act was definitely racist’ — Christian Cooper, the Black birdwatcher who was threatened by a white woman in Central Park, is speaking out about the now-viral incident. In US news and current events today, Christian Cooper is speaking out after his video of a white woman threatening him with police went viral. Cooper had been bird watching in Central Park when he says he asked a woman to put her dog on its leash. The woman, identified as Amy Cooper, became upset by the ask she then threatened to call the police and claim that an African American man was ‘threatening [her] life.’ The video quickly went viral after Christian’s sister posted it to social media. For more world news, subscribe to NowThis News. #ChristianCooper #AmyCooper #NYC #News #NowThis #NowThisNews This video “Christian Cooper Speaks Out About Viral Central Park Incident “, first appeared on https://nowthisnews.com/.
She said police could have come and thought Cooper was really harassing the woman, saying, “Who do you think they’re going to believe between this white woman and her dog [and a black man]?”
King said she was also feeling emotional because more of Floyd’s story has been revealed since that initial report.
This article was originally posted on yahoo.com/entertainment/.
