Unmasked protesters gather in downtown Raleigh, demand end to COVID rules
Protesters returned to downtown Raleigh Friday, calling for the state to immediately reopen and drop the mask requirement that was scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m.
Ashley Smith, cofounder of ReopenNC, said her group would hand-deliver a petition with 6,000 signatures to House Speaker Tim Moore, asking lawmakers to block the mask requirement and to investigate Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order.
With just under 100 people, she downplayed the pandemic’s effects and scolded the General Assembly for retiring while Confederate monuments are coming down and businesses are suffering.
“How can they even consider ending the session?” she asked. “People are suffering. Businesses are closing. People are weary and tired and ready to get back to normal.”
Near noon, the protesters lined up to go into the Legislative Building, getting screened one by one. Many declined the temperature screening and stayed outside, calling it an intrusion.
Once they cleared the temperature check, protesters filed upstairs to Moore’s office, where they met a staffer. Moore did not appear to be there. The General Assembly’s final-day session on Thursday stretched on until a 4 a.m. Friday adjournment.
Adam Smith, Ashley Smith’s husband, gave a long speech in Moore’s doorway where he referenced North Carolina’s state motto “to be, rather than to seem.”
“We are going to be, not to seem,” he said. “We are going to be free, not seem free.”
Ashley Smith and her supporters rejected statistics from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services that show COVID-19 cases and people hospitalized by the disease have grown sharply this month.
“We’re not constitutionally guaranteed a...virus-free existence,” she said. “To live is to take risks.”
Smith complained that the coronavirus pandemic does not yet match the 2017 influenza season. More people contracted the flu in 2017 than have been confirmed with coronavirus this year, but COVID-19 has already killed almost twice as many people.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017 was a high season for influenza. CDC estimates that 45 million people were sickened, 810,000 people were hospitalized, and 61,000 people died.
About 2.4 million people in the U.S. have been confirmed to have COVID-19, the CDC estimates, but its director, Robert Redfield, said Thursday that the number could be 10 times as high — 24 million. More than 121,000 people in the U.S. have died from the disease, CDC reports.
North Carolina’s statewide mandate on the wearing of face coverings in public was to take effect at 5 p.m. Friday.
Smith’s supporters carried signs that read, “Don’t tell me what to wear,” and “Masks didn’t work in Hubei.”
Hubei is the province in China where the city of Wuhan is located and where the first novel coronavirus outbreak was recorded.
Reopen NC started holding weekly rallies in April, shortly after Gov. Roy Cooper issued his stay-at-home order. They sounded their car horns in unison outside the General Assembly, calling for the state to immediately reopen.
The rallies began with just 100 people but soon swelled past 1,000, prompting police to arrest several for violating police instructions. Several Republican legislators joined the protests, one in colonial garb.
An offshoot of the group began gathering on Saturdays and marching through the streets carrying guns. Though the marchers said they had no group affiliation and were getting “exercise” rather than protesting while armed, which is illegal, several of them held prominent roles within ReopenNC.
As the state moved into Phase Two of its reopening plan, crowds began to dwindle and ReopenNC canceled its weekly protests. Since then, the group’s Facebook page has celebrated sheriffs across the state who are declining to enforce the mask mandate.
As the protest was beginning Friday morning, another state with a rising number of COVID-19 cases announced it was dialing back its reopening. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s bars closed on Friday morning, the Associated Press reported.
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Unmasked protesters gather in downtown Raleigh, demand end to COVID rules."