Paris (AFP)
About 1,000 people were gathered Saturday afternoon near the American Embassy in Paris in tribute to George Floyd and to denounce police violence in France, despite a prefectural ban, found an AFP journalist.
Rallies were held during the day in other cities in France in memory of this African-American whose death on May 25 at the hands of the police aroused a wave of indignation around the world.
Claiming "justice for all!" and holding up "Black Lives Matter" signs, Parisian demonstrators gathered in the middle of the afternoon at Place de la Concorde before being kept away from the American Embassy by mass deployed law enforcement and riot barriers.
"I find it scandalous that all these injustices (police, editor's note) go unpunished and that the state does nothing," Dior, a Senegalese-Ivorian student aged 21, told AFP.
Coming for the first time to a demonstration, Idrissa wanted to denounce "the omnipresent racism everywhere" in French society.
The mobilization spread in particular to Rennes where 700 and 1,000 people, mainly high school students and students, were gathered in very tight rows on the Charles de Gaulle esplanade, the main square in the center of the city.
In Albi (Tarn), nearly 200 people gathered in the morning of Saturday. "United States / France same fight", "Racism suffocates us! We want to breathe", could be read on the placards of the demonstrators. About 200 people participated in a mobilization in Béziers.
A first rally against police violence had gathered Tuesday evening in Paris more than 20,000 people at the call of the family of Adama Traoré, a young man who died in 2016 after his arrest in the Val-d'Oise.
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© 2020 AFP