WASHINGTON – Some have huddled in the corners of the United States Capitol, sending text messages to their loved ones. Others were glued to their televisions at home while their workplace was invaded by protesters who broke windows, destroyed offices and dropped American flags, shocking the country.
For many members of parliament and Capitol workers, particularly people of color, the damage done on Wednesday was visceral. It will be a long time before they feel safe at work again, they say, knowing that a building once considered one of the safest in Washington can be invaded by a crowd carrying, among other things, a Confederate flag and displaying Semitic anti-Iconography.
“They came into our house with the worst of intentions,” said Tré Easton, a legislative assistant to Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington. “Do you add, moreover, this open fanaticism in what should be sacred halls? I don’t know if I can feel safe, just knowing that it is possible. “
Capitol Police have been criticized for sometimes appearing to offer little resistance to the pro-Trump crowd. While some experts defended their actions as prioritizing the protection of lawmakers over the security of the building, many members of Congress staff, along with custody and food service officials, were left wondering if they were safe.
“I have a lot of mixed feelings about the Capitol Police stance and its strategy,” said Julian Purdy, who works for the Chamber’s Veterans Affairs Committee. “It could be said that the Capitol Police chose to protect the people, employees and members over protecting the property and iconography of the Capitol itself.”
Noting that he is an Army veteran, Purdy, who is black, said that prioritizing people above all is understandable. But he said it is difficult to reconcile this stance with the destruction that his colleagues personally witnessed and that he watched a staging on television.
“I don’t think I have fully processed it yet,” he said.
Some food service and custody employees feel even more vulnerable. Rickie Toon, a cook who works at the Capitol but was at home on Wednesday, said he knew colleagues who were caught in the violence and sprayed with tear gas.
“I always thought they were never safe enough,” said Toon, who is black. But he said the response to the evacuation was better handled than on September 11, 2001, when, he said, the police didn’t even inform kitchen workers about the terrorist threat to the Capitol, let alone evacuate them.
Many say they have always recognized the risks of working at Capitol. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the site regularly hosted protests. Even bomb threats were common. But Wednesday’s siege was a shock.
“When you’re an employee, you know when something like this happens, you won’t be the priority,” said Nicole Tisdale, a black consultant who spent 10 years working for Democratic and Republican lawmakers before leaving to help train parliamentarians, officials and advocacy groups. . “I never felt insecure at Capitol itself. But now it all seems to have been a security theater. “
Black members of the team, in particular, said the turmoil reminded them of the struggles they often had to face to work for Congress.
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“I’m a black gay guy from rural Georgia – and it’s a shame I work here,” said Easton. He noted that he worked in a commercial building named after Senator Richard B. Russell Jr. of Georgia, who was a strident advocate of racial segregation and white nationalism.
“But the images of hatred and violence were especially raw and resonant to me,” said Easton, who observed the destruction while working at home. “This is something that the colored employees especially felt, when we’re just a few of us in this place, relatively speaking.”
A leading African American Democratic aide spent nearly six hours locked up in the Rayburn House Office Building. Having worked in Congress for 14 years, she said, witnessing the police’s lackluster response to the crowd compared to how she saw people of color being treated was the last straw.
“I am planning to leave,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as she was not allowed to speak to the media. “I am exhausted from this battle. Wednesday was like a nail in a coffin. “
Another Democratic aide said he was disturbed for a moment in the midst of the violence on Wednesday, when he saw some white colleagues, with their ties loosened and looking impassive, walking around the Rayburn building with red plastic cups.
“They were acting like this was normal,” said the man, who is an Asian American.
Ms. Tisdale, who works with national security policy, said she and some of her colleagues on the Capitol viewed the event as a terrorist attack. But she said they were disappointed by the public’s lack of sympathy for the people on the Capitol who were caught up in the violence.
“I know how the police react after a terrorist attack and after a mass shooting, and I know how the public responds,” said Ms. Tisdale. “This is not what happened here. Because all these people work at Morro, people are fighting over politics. “
Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, saw a certain arrogance in what the protesters did. “When people invade – they literally tear down America’s door and desecrate this temple of our democracy and this flag – it shows that they think they are bigger than this country,” he said. “They think they are better than our institutions.”
Mr. Kim walked the Capitol corridors on Wednesday after the building was secured. He said he felt compelled to help clean up the mess that had been left behind. He borrowed a bag of trash from the Capitol cops and started picking up water bottles, broken flags and even tactical equipment that had been left behind.
“Whoever bought it, bought it for the purpose of this event, which scared me tremendously,” said Kim of a military vest he found, his voice choked on the phone as he spoke through tears.
A member of the black Congressional team, who also toured the Capitol to assess the consequences on Wednesday night, said that, despite all the damage, he had been stopped in front of Mr Steny Hoyer’s office, where a poster honoring John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader who died in August, was shown. Was missing.
He searched feverishly and found only a broken piece on the floor beside a trash can. Mr. Lewis’s image was gone. All that was left of his famous quote, “Have problems, necessary problems”, were the final two words – blurred by a boot print.
“This portrait was wrapped in black cloth,” he said. “They destroyed it.”
Pranshu Verma contributed reporting.