Mitt Romney becomes first Republican senator to march for Black Lives Matter

Utah senator put on face mask and tweeted selfie from protest on Pennsylvania Avenue

Utah senator Mitt Romney has become the first Republican senator spotted at a protest over police violence and the death of George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis when a white police officer knelt on his neck.

Mr Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and 2012 presidential candidate, tweeted a mask-clad selfie taken on the streets of Washington accompanied by the words “Black Lives Matter.”

In an on-camera interview, Mr Romney said he and the other marchers were there “to end violence and brutality, and to make sure that people understand that black lives matter”.

His appearance at the rally puts him at odds with Donald Trump and other Republicans who have focused their criticism on the violence at some of the protests since Mr Floyd’s death, and who over the years have countered the phrase “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”.

Mr Romney has given his views on Black Lives Matter and systemic racism before. During his run for the senate in 2018, he posted a statement on the anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where a left-wing protester was killed by a white supremacist.

In it, he wrote that “my personal experience working in communities of colour is that in the great majority of circumstances, it is still a distinct disadvantage of opportunity to be African-American or Hispanic-American.

“My understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is that it is not intended to elevate minority lives above white lives; it is intended to draw vivid attention to the too frequent reality of deadly racial discrimination in law enforcement and in the courts.”

Mr Romney over the weekend posted on Facebook in memory of his father, George Romney, who was the sitting governor of Michigan during the 1967 Detroit riots, one of the US’s worst incidents of urban unrest in the 20th century, which erupted after years of racially motivated police harassment and brutality.

In 1968, the elder Mr Romney became secretary of housing and urban development, and set about trying to fight urban segregation through housing policies directly combating discrimination in zoning and funding, famously calling the suburbs “a high-income white noose” around poor black inner cities.

His view was that the right response to the Detroit riots was to understand what had caused them – that is, systemic racism, including violence, and inequality. As he put it: “Force alone will not eliminate riots. We must eliminate the problems from which they stem.”

George Romney’s efforts met fierce resistance from his president, Richard Nixon, who took the view that forced integration of housing was just as wrong as legal segregation – even as he acknowledged that blocking Mr Romney’s efforts would condemn black people to live in segregated, poorer neighbourhoods.