Like many D.C. college students, Howard Brookins III is a political junkie with many friends and classmates who have interned on Capitol Hill.
Then he watched the shocking video footage of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol to disrupt the congressional proceedings.
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around what took place,” Brookins, the student association president at GWU, said Thursday in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. “The words I’ve used: crazy, insane, wild.”
As an African American, Brookins said, he was also dumbfounded that the mostly White rioters were so easily able to break into the Capitol. “Where was the police in this situation?” he said. “Where were the armed guards that were there over the summer throughout the Black Lives Matter protests? The stark difference in police enforcement, it was staggering.”
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Michael Franklin, a senior at Howard, had similar thoughts while watching news from his home in Kansas City, Kan.
“I was worried that Howard would have been a target, given that we’re a historically Black college and given that the vice president-elect is from our university,” Franklin said. The campus is largely empty, and there was no sign that it was vandalized.
Franklin said the rioters had inflicted harm on the citizens of Washington. “It hurts my heart,” he said.