blm activist arrested at anti-racism training after refusing to let a white woman shut her up

While engaging in the anti-racism training event she was attending Sharon Smith, 64, an educational director of Asheville Black Lives Matter, was arrested at a Racial Equity Institute event at Mountain Area Health Education Center in Biltmore Forest for what event organizers describe as “speaking out of turn” and causing a disturbance during said event. According to reports, after the event kicked off around 9 a.m. on March 16,  Smith answered a question one of three panelists had present to the group of several dozen participants. In doing so, Smith apparently “violated a Racial Equity Institute policy prohibiting alumni of the training from participating,” triggering a sequence of events that ended with Smith’s arrest.

Carol Rogoff Hallstrom, a fellow alumna of the training program and a veteran civil rights activist, was seated close to Smith and says that she tried to remind her that she wasn’t “allowed” to speak, a rule Smith disagreed with. “There’s no way, according to systemic racism theory, that any white woman should be telling a woman of color what she should and shouldn’t be saying. That’s just not OK,” Smith said.

She’s not wrong.

Even so, a MAHEC employe asked Smith to leave the event altogether, calling security who then called local police.

“We asked her to leave the premises multiple times, which she refused,” Chief Beddingfield said whose first day on the job was the day after Smith’s arrest. “Obviously, after multiple attempts, we have to escalate to an escort,” he said. “It’s kinda like soft hands, you’re guiding someone off the premise.”

But Smith disagrees with the characterization of “soft hands” as she described employing her training in civil disobedience to maintain the space she was invited to take up at the event and police responded to that as they historically have: with force. “They used force to get me out of the room because I refused to leave any other way,” said Smith.