The anti-racism march scheduled for this Saturday, the 13th of June in Funchal, following the death of George Floyd in the United States of America, has been cancelled. The meeting was scheduled at the Church of São Pedro, at Rua das Pretas, at 10 am. However, the organisation has now decided to cancel their peaceful ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstration due to threats of violence against the organisers from ‘Legs Eleven Coffee’ and those attending the march.
Writing on Instagram, the organisers said “when we came up with the idea of organising a peaceful march for ‘Black Lives Matter,’ showing solidarity like any other European city, it came from a place of pure compassion and love that we wanted to express for our fellow humans, oppressed by the colour of their skin. We used our cafeteria page as a springboard to advertise, as it had the largest local audience we could use. We are not politically motivated people, and politics never crossed our minds when we decided to do this. We are peaceful and spiritual people, but others have shocked us with their aggressive threats.
We never expected this to happen, and we thank people who were so motivated to stay together in this demonstration of love and unity. So many opinions and emotions were expressed on both sides of the conversation, and some were stronger than others. Today we received an anonymous email individually threatening us in a very graphic way, and also, threatening to harm the protesters.”
Samantha Gannon
info at madeira-weekly.com
