White House Crowd Cheers Bin Laden's Death

Written by Noah Kristula-Green on Monday May 2, 2011

Shortly after reports that Osama bin Laden had been killed in an American raid, a crowd gathered by the White House to celebrate the news.

The crowds in front of the White House kept growing as more and more people came down from Lafayette Square. At 11:30pm the crowd was maybe 300 people large, and it was still possible to walk around, but less than an hour later, the crowd filled up the entire public walkway, and cheers of “USA! USA!” rang out.

There was a man on Skyrunner Jumping Stilts, wearing a Texan flag, jumping up and down exclaiming “It’s the Pax Americana! It begins right now!” There was a Bush-Cheney sign, a handmade banner proclaiming “Ding Dong Bin Laden’s Dead!”, dozens of American flags, and even a man in an American flag latex suit climbing up a tree.

The crowd was young, one person I was standing near commented that all the hipsters had turned the square into an impromptu capital bike share.

But not everyone was in their mid-twenties. A family had gathered near the top of the square away from the White House. Quinn Kaufman was posing for a photo with an American flag. His mother, Laine Shakerdge, told me that this was not just a regular American flag.

Laine told me the story: the flag had been painted by Quinn and his grandfather (Laine’s father) Albert Shakerdge. Albert had been an Iraqi Jew who immigrated to America in 1939. In Laine’s words “He came to live the American dream, and he did it.” He had painted the American flag with his grandson to help teach him about the country that he loved: “He wanted him to know how many stars there were on the flag, he wanted him to know what it meant to be an American.”

Albert had passed away before today, but his daughter and grandson clearly still remembered him.