Hundreds of Americans have taken to the streets in Atlanta, Georgia in the wake of a deadly ambush in Dallas, Texas that killed 5 police officers and wounded seven more on Thursday.
The protesters were blocked by Georgia State Patrol Troopers from entering the Downtown Connector or I-75/85 at Williams Street on Friday.
"If you enter the highway, you endanger your own life, the lives of innocent motorists & the lives of our officers. We are better than that,” Mayor Kasim Reed tweeted Friday night.
The Georgia president of NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Rev. Francys Johnson, addressed the protesters, saying that “the logical conclusion of racism is genocide.”
The protesters were chanting, “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it?” Now” and “Vote, vote, vote.”
The new protests come after demonstrations were held in Dallas and several other cities Thursday following the fatal police shootings of Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb on Wednesday and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge the day before.
Protesters in Chicago, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities took to the streets to slam the killings of African Americans.
President Barack Obama will cut short a trip to Europe and travel to Dallas next week after he was invited by the city's mayor over the shooting of officers, the White House said Friday.
"The president has accepted an invitation from Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to travel to Dallas early next week," spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement, adding that Obama would return to the US Sunday night, one day ahead of schedule.
Obama was in Warsaw, Poland this week to attend a NATO summit. He delivered a speech on the attack, calling it "vicious, calculated and despicable."
The shooter, identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, had served as an Army reservist from March 2009 until April 2015.
According to Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown, Johnson “was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings."