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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
As statues fall, liberty and justice still eludes black Americans
Despite the size and vitality of the Black Lives Matter movement that has gripped the US, its progress will be slow in a country where racial equality is a relatively new concept, warns LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
'White Lives Matter' was scrawled on the base of the statue to black tennis player Arthur Ashe erected in Richmond, Virginia

THE man who defaced the plinth of the Arthur Ashe statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, remonstrated to passers-by “Don’t all lives matter?” Why should the Black Lives Matter movement have the upper hand when it comes to spray-painting slogans, he wanted to know. “Everybody matters, right?” he asked.

But that’s not what he wrote on the Ashe statue.

He wrote: “White Lives Matter.”

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