Black Lives Matter protests in rural America (Part II)

The Los Angeles Times brings us this story this morning by Brittny Mejia and Hailey Branson-Potts, "George Floyd protests reached deep into rural California. The reactions were mixed, sometimes scary."  This paragraph, which follows a longish anecdote regarding threats to young organizers of a protest in Angels Camp, California (population 3,836), sums up the story:

While protesters in urban areas have been met by police batons, rubber bullets and tear gas, demonstrators in rural California have faced militias, death threats and conspiracy theories.

The journalists report not only from Calaveras County, but also from some other California counties, some with overwhelmingly white populations.

In Tuolumne County, people threatened to bring guns and dogs to a protest in the park. In Lassen County, people shouted racial slurs at a man who protested alone near the McDonald’s in Susanville. The Black teenage organizer of a demonstration in Plumas County got a message on Facebook calling her a “domestic terrorist.”

In a claim he later walked back, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said antifascists had tried to wreak havoc during a demonstration in Eureka, citing “substantiated law enforcement reports” that there were buses full of antifa protesters in Southern Oregon and the Central Valley. 

In Shasta County, where street signs declare there is “No Room for Racism,” militia members in tactical gear showed up to a protest in Redding. Armed militia members also came, at the request of a local business, in anticipation of a protest in the Stanislaus County town of Oakdale that never happened.

Regarding the latter incident, the Stanislaus County Sheriff issued a statement:

This ‘militia’ has no official standing, no authority and their presence was counterproductive to keeping the peace in the City of Oakdale. Their activities were a drain on law enforcement resources and did nothing to protect the city.

Oakdale's population is more than 20,000, in the context of metropolitan county with a population of  half a million, albeit in the great central valley of California, which is generally associated with agriculture and therefore rurality.
 
This reminds me of the story here out of Idaho.  And don't miss this from NPR's Codeswitch on the "Outside Agitator."

Also, the New York Times has now mapped all Black Lives Matter protests.  I can see the dot on the map representing the one closes to my hometown, which I wrote about here.  One gripe about the New York Times feature, though:  All of the photos are of cities.  The smallest city I can find featured in any of the photos is Petal, Mississippi, population 10,454, essentially a suburb of Hattiesburg.  Indeed, many of the unfamiliar place names in the featured photos are suburbs of major cities.  The second smallest city featured in the photos is Helena, Montana, population 28,190, and the state capital.  Other smallish cities whose photographs are included are Longview, Texas, population 80,455, Twin Falls, Idaho, population 44,125,  and Hammond, Indiana, population 80,830.  Some small cities are college towns and therefore predictable venues for protests, e.g., Stillwater, Oklahoma, population 45,688, and Bryan, Texas, population 86,276. 

Postscript:  PBS reports this afternoon under the headline "Protests in Trump country test his hold in rural white areas."  That reminds me of this from Thomas Edsall of the New York Times, "How Much is America Changing?"