Donald Trump and controversy are never far apart. During a campaign rally on Nov. 21 in Birmingham, Ala., Trump told supporters to get a protester "the hell out of here, will you, please? Get him out of here. Throw him out!" reports Washington Post.
Trump was referring to Mercutio Southall Jr., a Black Lives Matter activist who had been shouting, "Black lives matter!" Southall had co-founded a Black Lives Matter chapter in Birmingham.
"Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing," Trump said later, approving the actions of security members and supporters who reportedly punched and kicked Southall, reports the New York Times.
Southall compared the experience to facing a "lynch mob."
"I got punched in the face, I got punched in the neck. I got kicked in the chest. Kicked in the stomach. Somebody stepped on my hand," Southall said according to CNN. He said the attackers also called him and two fellow protesters "monkeys" and used the N-word. The allegations could not be independently confirmed.
According to Southall,a man in a blue-checkered shirt tried to choke him. "Don't choke him, don't choke him, don't choke him," a woman in the video is heard shouting, according to CNN.
"When you have a candidate going around spewing hatred and racism, that's to be expected. He was really inciting the entire thing," Carlos Havers of the National Action Network, who had accompanied Southall to the rally, said.
Meanwhile, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said "the campaign does not condone this behavior."
"This is the ugly truth of America. It was there like literally and figuratively in black and white. We saw it. We see it daily. It shows what kind of America we live in now and what kind of America it will be with Trump at the helm," Southall, a father of three sons, said to CNN.
