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Forsyth County teens cancel Friday protest
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(GoogleMaps)

Forsyth County Democrats announced Tuesday that a peaceful protest planned by three local teens for Friday, June 5, in front of the courthouse downtown has been canceled.

Melissa Clink, president of the local Democratic Party, said that the three girls had released a flier for the protest on Twitter without ever having planned such an event before, and they never expected the flier to later gain traction on Facebook.

After seeing the flier, Clink found the girls and started to work with them and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office to try to pull the protest together and try to guarantee everyone’s safety.

Tuesday evening, however, the party and the girls announced on Facebook that they had to make the “difficult decision” to cancel the protest.

“We started this off by wanting to get our message across to not only our county and state, but also to our nation, that despite Forsyth County’s history we could still come together as a community to protest systemic, covert, and overt racism,” the girls stated in their post. “It has been brought to our attention that there has been a lot of commotion surrounding our event. We have always stressed that this would be a PEACEFUL event, but it has been interpreted as an excuse to cause chaos in our community, and that was never our intention."

Despite canceling the protest, the girls encouraged in their post for the young people in Forsyth County to continue to use their voice “for the greater good.” 

“We would also like to ask that no matter where you are on Friday, June 5th you hold a 9-minute moment of silence in honor of George Floyd and the many other lives lost to hatred towards the black community,” the post reads.