Beastie Boys Fans Had An Anti-Hate Rally After Trump Supporters Graffitied Adam Yauch’s Memorial
Ad-Rock also spoke at the rally.
Over the weekend, a New Yorker named Karen Wang tweeted that the Brooklyn Heights memorial park named after deceased Beastie Boy, Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, had been defaced with pro-Trump graffiti.
The playground — which was dedicated to Yauch in 2013, a year after he died from cancer — was sprayed with swastikas and “GO TRUMP” slogans. Although he was a practising Buddhist, Yauch was born Jewish.
.@beastieboys Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights was left defaced with ugly symbols of hate today. This cannot be the new normal! pic.twitter.com/xWjS7HLNyG
— Karen Wang (@kw492) November 18, 2016
One day later, Beastie Boys fans began to mobilise and announced an anti-hate rally at the park. Apparently several hundred people attended the rally, including fellow Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz and his wife, Kathleen Hanna.
“Spray painting swastikas in a children’s playground is a messed-up thing to do,” Horowitz said to the protestors. “And for many of us, it has special meaning, because this park is named for Adam Yauch, who was my friend and bandmate for over 30 years. But he was also someone who taught non-violence in his music, in his life, to all of us, and to me.”
Horovitz went on to say to the crowd, “These incidents and this type of graffiti have been popping up all over our country because we’ve elected a president that’s given our children the message that it’s okay to write ‘white power’ in their high school hallways. That it’s okay to attack to women and girls. That Latinos and Muslims and Jews are bad people and that you can electroshock the gay out of somebody.”
“We’ve got to stand up against hate.”