In Dallas, burgeoning movement overshadowed by shooting

DALLAS (AP) — The leadership of the Next Generation Action Network drove all night from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, arriving in Dallas early on July 7, just hours before the start of their hastily arranged march that ended in the worst attack on law enforcement since 9/11.

Dominique Alexander, a 27-year-old Baptist preacher and the civil rights group's founder, said that after the shooting deaths by police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, hundreds of messages poured into the group's shared email and social media accounts, asking whether Dallas would hold a protest like those in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis.

Otherwise disparate groups of young local activists — many of whom grew up on the South Side and have lost family or friends in police-involved shootings — have coalesced around the issue of police brutality, reviving a civil rights movement in a city whose leaders often tout its progress with diversity.

Yafeuh Balogun, 32-year-old co-founder of the group Guerrilla Mainframe, a community group that hosts cookouts and political discussions in Dallas' poorest neighborhoods, started out with a mobile vegetarian lunch counter that he would park in the middle of low-income apartment complexes.

After activist Stephen Benavides, 35, produced a report in 2014 based on 10 years of public data that showed a disproportionate number of Dallas police shootings involved black and Hispanic male suspects, Balogun said he "began to take more of a militant position."

[...] Benavides' group, Dallas Communities Organizing for Change, is awaiting a response from the U.S. Department of Justice to a complaint it filed in late 2014 alleging that Dallas police have engaged in a pattern of excessive use of force against black and Hispanic suspects.