After a week of violence, local race activists grieve

IOWA CITY - In the wake of the shooting deaths of two black men at the hands of police, members of NAACP chapters in Iowa are in mourning.

Not only for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, but for the police officers gunned down at a peaceful protest of police violence in Dallas on Thursday.

'Wrong is wrong,” said Aspyn Johnson, the president of University of Iowa's NAACP chapter. 'Just like those officers should not have been killed, those two men should not have been killed.”

Dedric Doolin, Cedar Rapids branch president of the NAACP, said he is praying for all victims of the recent violence.

'We've got to get to a place where we as a country and community can reconcile that being different is not all bad,” Doolin said. 'Being different doesn't make you evil.”

That coming together is crucial to healing and to reckoning with the United States' persistent racism problem, Doolin said.

'It's not any one group of people who is going to resolve this problem,” he said. 'This violence is not going to stop if we don't all recognize we can be part of the solution.”

Since January, police officers across the country have killed at least 137 black people according to The Guardian project 'The Counted.”

'All officers are not bad,” Doolin said. 'It could happen anywhere you've got somebody with a gun and they've got the same emotions of the officers in Minnesota and Louisiana.”

Officers should be trained to de-escalate those situations, he said.

Johnson said people need to accept that racial oppression still happens today, and that she experienced a 'deafening silence” on social media from people who aren't black after the shootings on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Doolin said Iowans should reckon with a denial of the state of racism in the Cedar Rapids area.

'If you don't recognize there's a problem, if you stay in denial that there's a problem, you're not going to ever solve the problem,” he said. 'We still have people in our community who haven't really accepted the severity of this problem.”