Cell phone video uploaded to YouTube yesterday shows a group of Cleveland protesters chanting the chorus to rapper Kendrick Lamar's single "Alright."
View this video on YouTube
The protest took place outside of a Movement for Black Lives conference at Cleveland State University on Sunday.
After a 14-year-old boy aboard a bus was arrested under suspicion of public intoxication, a crowd of people at the conference refused to allow a police cruiser carrying the boy leave, ABC5 reported.
The video's caption reads:
Today after the ending of the convening as everyone was walking down the street CPD arrested a 14 yr old. While everyone was demanding his release an officer pepper sprayed the crowd and further escalated the situation. In unity and solidarity everyone was demanding that he be released, and we stayed and protested until they released him!
Additional video from the protests captures police officers pepper-spraying the crowd in order to disperse it.
View this video on YouTube
“They began to form a barricade around the car urging the police to let the young man go but they wouldn’t, and when they were linking arms and doing chants one of the police officers began pepper spraying the whole line," conference attendee Destinee Henton told Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC. "They were on the ground covering their faces. He was still spraying them toward the ground so that’s when more people started coming out.”
Lamar’s music video for “Alright,” which the MTV Video Music Awards nominated last week for Video of the Year, centers around the theme of police harassment.
View this video on YouTube
Fox News pundits accused Lamar's performance of "Alright" at last month's BET Awards of "inciting violence." Lamar responded, "How can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred?"
