Group gathers in Duluth to support protests in Ferguson

They sprinted to protest in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday.
They trickled in to support the protesting in Duluth on Tuesday.
The feelings people brought to the steps of city hall were raw, especially from the youngest people - some of them excused from Harbor City International School.
“I needed this,” said one student.
In the crowd that swelled around a coffee dispenser, they processed the grand jury decision not to indict a police officer in the death of a Ferguson teenager - and all deaths of its kind.
“For so many police officers to get off scot free after killing young people of color is appalling,” said Kyra Helbert, a senior at Harbor City.
Helbert was among a chorus of Harbor City students who’d had their parents excuse their absences to participate in the six-hour rally that began mid-morning. The students agreed that the commiseration helped.
The databases of officer-involved shootings that result in deaths are not comprehensive studies. But the people outside city hall cited numerous such events from across the United States. The 12-year-old Ohio boy who was shot over the weekend and died Sunday after brandishing an imitation gun last week resonated in the group commentary.
Like trick birthday candles, comments lit and relit from people standing around the cold brick patio. The protestors included elders, but it was the reactions of the youngest people that set the tone. Theirs were protest and epiphanies coming out at once.
“Racism is not gone,” said Harbor City’s Linnea Hinkel. “We still have it completely.”
To a person, the protestors said the conversations were continuations of those that took them late into the night Monday. It was cathartic for people to let it all out on social media, said 23-year-old farmer Kevin Hard. After the grand jury decision that sparked nationwide rebukes, he said people needed to address the things they watched unfold on television.
“This is big,” Hard said. “We all knew it instantly.”
Elliot McAllister, 23, agreed.
“I was just really heartbroken and really upset,” she said. “I needed to talk to people and have a dialogue.”
She said she admired the resolve of the Missouri protestors who’ve made Ferguson a new milepost on the timeline of civil rights in the United States.
“People reacted and didn’t stop bringing attention to it,” she said.
McAllister said she struggled to grasp others’ callous reactions to the protests.
Hard said he didn’t excuse things like the looting of tires at auto stores, but he empathized with the cause.
“You can’t do that to people,” Hard said of the violent deaths as a result of officer-involved shootings. “It’s not what we’re about.”