After Jail Death, Dallas Protesters Say No Justice, No Pizza

DALLAS — A series of videos — all seemingly all recorded Tuesday — depict Black Lives Matter protesters descending on a local restaurant, yelling obscenities and confronting customers.

It's not clear why the eatery was chosen as a site for the disturbance. Signs carried by the group, some of whom were armed, suggest the incident may be related to the as-yet unexplained death of 26-year old Marvin Scott III, who died in custody last month.

Scott died after being booked March 14 into the Collin County Jail following a misdemeanor marijuana possession arrest. The family attorney, S. Lee Merrit, said that following his schizophrenia diagnosis two years ago, Scott sometimes self-medicated with marijuana. When he was arrested, police said he was holding less than two ounces — hence the misdemeanor charge.

While Scott's death remains under investigation by the Texas Rangers, there's still no official cause of death, and no officers have been identified in conjunction with the investigation. The Collin County Sheriff's Office maintains that protocols preclude the release of personnel information pending civil service appeals.

To date, Scott's death has resulted in the firing of seven sheriff’s officers who were first placed on administrative leave. Another has resigned under investigation. But Scott's family and protesters have said they won't relent until charges are filed against the officers responsible.

Much of the fracas was captured on videos timestamped as April 13 and surfaced quickly on social media. Later, a group identified as Next Generation Action Network responded to online critics who wondered why armed protesters were "harassing people." In response, a NGAN poster wrote that those carrying weapons were their security guards.

“Our security team is licensed to carry ensuring the safety of our protest" the poster wrote. "We cannot depend on the Police for that.”

In one of the videos, a woman is shown climbing on top of a table and kicking glasses off onto the floor while yelling and holding a cardboard sign bearing Scott's name.

So there are either two unanswered questions here — or only one.

Most importantly, how did Marvin Scott die in police custody? Second, what were protesters hoping to accomplish by going to a restaurant, kicking glasses from atop a table and swearing at restaurant customers?

Maybe the second mystery is explained by the first. At the moment, racism in America is a gaping wound ripped wide open, and just as Civil Rights protesters understood their inflection point in time, so too does the Black Lives Matter movement.

Certainly the press might cover a protest at city hall or the jail. And while that may make the news, does it change hearts and minds? Apparently these protesters have decided to make everyone as uncomfortable as they feel in a society where people die incarcerated on a misdemeanor charge.

During the riots of the 1960s, a Black advisor to LBJ tried to explain a similar circumstance to him when he didn't get why race riots continued after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Looking back, Johnson aide Roger Wilkins said, "He did not understand that generations of heaping inferiority into our souls needed to be purged. And you're going to put that awful stuff into people — when people begin to expel it, it's not coming out pretty."