In broad daylight on Tuesday morning, a bomb, also called an improvised explosive device (IED), was set off next to the exterior wall of the local offices of the Colorado Springs, Colorado, NAACP headquarters.
According to the FBI and pictures from the scene, a gas can next to the bomb, intended to make the destruction worse, did not catch fire when the bomb was detonated. While a balding white male in a dirty pickup truck is wanted for questioning, no arrests have been made yet.
Thankfully, no injuries were reported, but the fear it struck in the local community and in citizens concerned for issues of racial justice everywhere were felt immediately. In 1951, NAACP leaders Harry and Harriet Moore were killed when their Florida home was bombed by domestic terrorists on Christmas Day. No suspects were ever convicted, charged, or even arrested for their murders.
Just 12 hours before the bomb was detonated in Colorado Springs, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund publicly announced it was asking Missouri Circuit Court Judge Maura McShane to consider appointing a special prosecutor in the case against former Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson. While we have no way of knowing if the bomb was a direct result of the announcement, the timing makes it a real possibility.
In a time when racial tensions in our country appear to be growing, the troubling nature of this act of domestic terrorism should be blatantly obvious, but the lack of mainstream media coverage of the bombing for most of Tuesday morning, afternoon, and night was downright disturbing. CNN released its first piece about the bombing a full 16 hours after it happened, and the incident wasn't mentioned on national nightly news broadcasts.
By Tuesday night, the hashtag #NAACPBombing was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter and people were shocked and frustrated that they were just learning of such a disturbing incident and had to learn about it from Twitter so long after it happened. Ingrained in hundreds, maybe thousands, of those tweets was a frustration at what appeared to be a minimization of the importance of the attack. Below is a collection of many of the tweets, but they can be read live on Twitter here.
