12 August, 2017
Several journalists in attendance at Friday's conference tweeted pictures showing several black women and men standing with their backs turned to Ms. Manigault as she spoke.
"If you want to get to know Omarosa, feel free to", she said.
Omarosa Manigault has said today that President Trump joking about police roughing up people is wrong.
Omarosa Manigault's appearance on a panel at a black journalists' convention in New Orleans nearly immediately degenerated into an intense encounter with the moderator, Ed Gordon of Bounce TV, and, at times, members of the audience.
"I'm not going to stand here and defend everything about Donald Trump", Manigault said, according to BuzzFeed reporter Adrian Carrasquillo.
April Ryan, a White House reporter who has at times been the target of attacks from Manigault and who has accused her of trying to ruin her career (the pair used to be friends), is being honored as the organization's journalist of the year.
"When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon - you just see them thrown in, rough - I said, please don't be too nice", Trump said.
"You immediately go to Donald Trump!".
"It would be foolhardy that we could assume that anyone would come here and sit here and not ask certain questions", Gordon said.
When asked about what work she was doing with the Justice Department, Manigualt-Newman tersely replied "Google me".
Manigault-Newman could not say what, if anything, she had done to address these issues within the administration, but continuously defended her role as a convener. Civil rights leaders have "refused to meet with the White House", she added.
And she argued that the issue of police brutality is front and center for the Trump administration, despite the president's recent comments, which were widely interpreted as endorsing the use of excessive force by officers.
All day Thursday, as word spread that Manigault would be on the panel, attendees expressed private dismay that she had been invited to participate with the relatives of Castile and Sterling, even after Trump's comments about police treatment of suspects.
Sarah Glover, president of NABJ, tried to take control of the panel after some 45 minutes of confrontation on the stage. "Her personal experience is her personal experience". By the end of the event, though, Gordon called things a "quagmire".
