Activist Ashley Williams confronted Hillary Clinton at a private fundraiser this week, and asked her to apologize for calling black youths "superpredators" in a 1996 speech.
After paying $500 to attend the event in Charleston, Williams silently unfurled a fabric sign that had
Hillary Clinton's infamous quote from her January 25, 1996, speech on policing in Keene, New Hampshire: "We have to bring them to heel."
"I’m not a superpredator, Hillary Clinton," the young Black Lives Matter activist said Wednesday night,
according to Salon.
"Can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?" she asked the Democratic presidential front-runner.
Clinton, who was on the microphone, read aloud her old words that were printed on the sign.
"Can I talk? And maybe you can listen to what I say," said Clinton. "Okay, you want to hear the facts, or you want to just talk?"
"I know that you called black youth 'superpredators,'" Williams responded. "Please explain for the record. Please explain it to us. You owe black people an apology."
After she was escorted out by Secret Service agents, Williams
told The Huffington Post she wanted Clinton to "confront her own words."
"We did this because we wanted to make sure that black people are paying attention to her record, and we want to know what Hillary we are getting," she explained.
"Hillary Clinton has a pattern of throwing the black community under the bus when it serves her politically," Williams said in a statement prior to the confrontation.
"She called our boys 'super-predators' in '96, then she race-baited when running against Obama in '08, now she’s a lifelong civil rights activist. I just want to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from '96, '08, or the new Hillary?"
Video of the confrontation soon went viral on social media sites, and people began echoing Williams' question using the hashtag #WhichHillary.