(Image: CHOP Art)
The City of Seattle backed away from creating a mountain of controversy and issued a last-minute permit to allow the CHOP Art group to hold a Juneteenth celebration in Cal Anderson Park this weekend, organizers say.
A collection of tents and shades went up along the park’s Bobby Morris playfield Friday along with a small stage area.
Thursday, the ACLU of Washington and the Public Defender Association threatened legal action on behalf of the group that formed out last year’s occupied protest in an effort to preserve and continue the artistic work from the protest zone.
CHS reported here on the plans for the Juneteenth celebration on the one-year anniversary of the formation of the CHOP protest zone and the city’s denial of permits for the event as officials said it is holding Cal Anderson area events to “higher-than-usual safety and security standards” due to the protests and two homicides around the occupied zone last summer.
The city also said community backlash shaped its decisions. “We have heard from community members expressing concerns that any events celebrating or commemorating the protests that occurred at Cal Anderson in the summer of 2020 would be disturbing or even traumatic to the community,” the city’s denial letter reads.
Friday’s decision in response to the legal threat allowed the city to take a different approach as officials issued a “provisional” First Amendment permit for the gathering, the Seattle Times reports.
Seattle City Hall will also soon face another potentially controversial decision on a Cal Anderson and Capitol Hill event.
While organizers of the official Seattle Pride downtown parade and celebrations have opted for virtual events this June and will hold off on in-person festivals and events until late this summer and fall, the small Capitol Hill Pride group that was denied five years ago as the permit holder for the annual LGBTQ street fair on Broadway has been moving forward with growing plans for a 2021 festival, rally, and march in the neighborhood as COVID-19 concerns are finally being lifted. An Office of Economic Development spokesperson tells CHS that two permits requested by Capitol Hill Pride remain under review.
CHOP Art’s Juneteenth celebration is slated to continue Saturday and Sunday, noon to 8 PM.
You can learn more at facebook.com/TheOfficialCHOPart.
As a long-term neighbor of the park I’m not happy with this. I’m pretty sure they do have the right to deny a permit based on the violence that happened last year.
Of course they do and they should have stood for what was right instead of buckling under the mere threat of a lawsuit. Almost everything that comes from Sawant and the SCC results in at least 1 lawsuit and yet that never stops them.
I think you could find a pretty sound argument against issuing a permit to commemorate an event where multiple people were murdered and that the city is still facing multiple lawsuits for. The problem was with the initial wording from Parks. If they had said something to the effect of, “due to ongoing litigation and the continued investigation into multiple unsolved murders we cannot at this time issue a permit to celebrate the events that lead to the lawsuit and murders”. Instead they issued a statement that was obviously problematic from a 1st amendment standpoint, which allowed ACLU and others to force them into a reversal. Probably worth filing an FOI to get all the emails and text related to the initial decision, the wording of the statement, and then the reversal.
Really strange reversal on the part of the city government considering that Horace Anderson, the father of one the chop murder victims and a party to one of the many lawsuits facing the city as a result of chop was shot Friday night in white center. The potential for a chop celebration attracting bad actors and retaliatory violence that turns Cal Anderson back into the shooting gallery it was last year would not seem insignificant at this time.
Very good points. I totally agree.
Given the nationwide number of gun violence victims of last year’s July 4th “celebrations”, are you proposing to ban all commemorations associated with that holiday as well or are you just particularly allergic to Juneteenth or the name of one of this year’s organizers at Cal Anderson? Your chosen alias suggests the latter…
Yeah there’s just a level of tolerance for things that shouldn’t be tolerated.
Some of the protest community isn’t happy with this. https://twitter.com/alyss4nator/status/1403804877688430594
Looks like the event could be pretty cop-adjacent or cop-friendly. Which in turn means it might draw some protests of its own.