Tonight's top headlines:
Parents and other community members rallied for improved career and technical education, and science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics programs in Portland public schools;
Portland labor activist Francisco Aguirre pled not guilty yesterday to charges that he illegally re-entered the united states;
The Oregon state legislature ended its 2015 session yesterday, so we hear from Representative Lew Frederick about police reform.
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Also on tonight's news:
A student at Portland State University notified the KBOO News Department that there were three people patrolling the campus yesterday afternoon waving a large Confederate flag. The flag has been in the news recently as Alabama decided to remove its confederate flags in the state capitol, and South Carolina is currently debating a bill to do the same.
Following the killing of nine black worshipers in a church in South Carolina several weeks ago, white racist groups like the KKK have rallied around the Confederate flag, while anti-racists have called for its removal.
This is not the first time that white racists have openly marched through downtown Portland. Several years ago, a group of ten people marched through the Portland waterfront carrying signs against what they called ‘white genocide’.
This is a term referring to a paranoid fantasy by some white racist groups that quote ‘oceans of non-whites’ are flooding what they call ‘white’ countries' in order to quote ‘eradicate the white race’. This was a term used often by murderer Dylan Roof in his racist manifesto that he posted in advance of his massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston South Carolina.
Portland state University officials did not respond to a request for comment on the presence of a group parading around the campus carrying a confederate flag.
- KBOO