Chris Potter, Tom Riese, 90.5 WESA; 'Above and beyond disgusting': Mount Pleasant parade display depicts Kamala Harris with hands bound
"(Note: This story below contains disturbing content and images.)
A community Halloween parade in Mount Pleasant Borough has drawn controversy after participants joined it with an elaborate display that appeared to depict Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris with hands bound, accompanied by a vehicle with a roof-mounted rifle. Witnesses alternately described the woman as bound with chains or another restraint.
Images of the display spread across social media Thursday, the morning after the Westmoreland County community’s parade. It appeared to feature an ATV bedecked with flags, a Trump sign, and a roof-mounted sniper rifle, apparently made from cardboard. The photos also displayed a woman walking behind the vehicle with her hands bound. At least two men wearing dark sunglasses, apparently impersonating security forces, accompanied the vehicle.
Mayor Diane Bailey said she was ”shocked” by the display.
“The borough had no part in that parade,” she said. “That has been handled by the fire department and organized by the fire department for as long as I can remember, and I’m old.
“We were observers the same as the citizens who came out, and we were as shocked by it as anyone else would have been,” she said. “We had no idea that that particular float or whatever you want to call it was going to be in the parade...
The Westmoreland chapter of the Republican Party directed calls to a spokesman from the Trump campaign.
The Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP, in a statement Thursday, condemned the display as “a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America."
