Why It’s Scary That the Mall of America Can Crush Dissent
Alleen Brown
ON DECEMBER 23, the day before Christmas Eve, the United
States’ largest mall moved to shut down a potentially landmark Black
Lives Matter demonstration before it even really began.
Management at the shopping center, Mall of America, located just
outside Minneapolis, had stores lower their metal security gates about
half an hour before the protest started, part of a “lockdown”
that cleared shoppers from that wing of the mall. Only moments after
Black Lives Matter organizers entered the mall’s east rotunda, the
cousin of Jamar Clark, whose death
at the hands of police was the center of the protest, was led away by a
throng of police. Organizers directed demonstrators to exit the mall
toward the light-rail station. As protesters walked out, the mall broadcast
a looping announcement in a friendly Midwestern voice: “Mall of America
is now going into lockdown. Seek shelter in the nearest store, and
follow employee instructions.”
In an earlier victory, mall attorneys won
restraining orders against three protest organizers, even as they lost a
more ambitious bid to force Black Lives Matter Minneapolis to take down
all mentions of the protest on social media and to declare the
demonstration cancelled.
A year earlier, Black Lives Matter protesters were able to spend
close to 90 minutes in the shopping center, chanting slogans and
staging a “die in.” This December, Mall of America threw its massive
security and legal resources behind stifling the Black Lives Matter
protest. Although the activists still managed to have mall stores
shuttered during the holiday shopping period, organizers redirected the
protest to the airport (Black Lives Matter Minneapolis says this
facility, not the mall, was its real target all along).
