Demonstrators gathered again Saturday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after a tumultuous week of protest and counterprotest over the police shooting of a Black man.
"Justice is a bare minimum," Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes told a crowd of over a thousand, according the Associated Press. "Justice should be guaranteed to everybody in this country."
Kenosha has been the center of the latest protests after a police officer in the southeastern Wisconsin city shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last Sunday. Two nights later, two protesters were killed and a third was injured in a subsequent shooting.
A hearing to extradite the 17-year-old suspect in that case, Kyle Rittenhouse, from his home state of Illinois was delayed for 30 days.
Saturday's demonstration was attended by several family members of Blake, who's reportedly partially paralyzed. His sister, Letetra Widman, said the police had shown "their true colors," adding that she was ready "to stand up not just for Jacob but for all the people who have not gotten justice." His father also spoke.
Other protests and counterprotests were scheduled around the nation, near the end of an unsettled election-year summer. On Saturday afternoon, Chicago's Magnificent Mile was the focus of both sides, slated to turn out within an hour of each other.
A Black Lives Matter march was scheduled at 5 p.m. local time, while a group organizing what it coined as "Back to the Blue Shopping Spree" called for its own demonstration an hour earlier.
"Are you done with seeing our police officers attacked with rocks, brick, frozen water bottles and incendiary devices?" asked an advertisement for the rally, according to a Twitter post.
The words echoed criticism the night before from President Donald Trump, who took aim at people protesting racism and police brutality, saying they are "just looking for trouble." He later said he will "probably" visit Kenosha.
"They're not protesters," Trump said Friday at a rally at the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. "Those are anarchists, they're agitators, they're rioters, they're looters."
With Trump running an explicitly law-and-order re-election campaign, Democratic nominee Joe Biden told the National Guard Association Saturday he would never put them "in the middle of politics or personal vendettas."
"I'll never use the military as a prop or as a private militia to violate rights of fellow citizens," he said in a virtual talk from his home in Delaware, according the Washington Post. "That's not law and order. You don't deserve that."
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