Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] The many other Trayvons
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http://socialistworker.org/2012/04/05/the-many-other-trayvons
Comment: Lee Sustar
======== THE MANY OTHER TRAYVONS =============================================
The U.S. has a long history of violence against African Americans, committed
by racists and police--but as Lee Sustar explains, there is also a history of
resistance.
April 5, 2012
POLICE AND racist killings of African Americans are horrifyingly familiar. So
why the protest movement around the case of Trayvon Martin--and why now?
Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking at a March 30 press conference with Black family
members of young people recently shot and killed by police in the Chicago
area, put his finger on the issue. The mainstream media "has adjusted" to the
routine deaths of African Americans at the hands of cops--but their family
members haven't.
"The traditional media did not break this story," Jackson said. "It was
Facebook and Twitter that really broke the story. Here, when young brother
Watts is killed, it's a one-night story, and we move on and wait for the next
one."
Jackson was referring to the police murder of Stephon Watts, the young Black
man with autism shot by police in Calumet City outside Chicago in February.
Stephon's father, Steven Watts, also spoke:
>My son has autism, and he just wanted to get out of the house. He saw the
>police. He's afraid of the police, and he just wanted to get past them. He
>had a butter knife in his hand, and just because he had a butter knife in
>his hand, the officers came to the conclusion that it was okay to use deadly
>force.
>
>They shot him once. He fell. He tried to get up, and they shot him again.
>They did not try to wound him. They did not try to shoot him in his arms or
>legs. They did not try to hold him or Taser him. They shot him in the torso.
>They meant to kill my son. And now he's gone, and I have no answers.
>
>I feel compassion for Trayvon. I really do. But what about my son? I feel
>pain and anger inside of me. I see my son getting shot every night before I
>go to sleep. I see the same thing over and over. I see smoke coming out of
>the gun. That's how close I was.
>
Also at the press conference was Angela Helton, mother of Rekia Boyd, killed
by an off-duty Chicago police officer who opened fire at an unarmed young
Black man in Chicago's Douglas Park neighborhood.
Helton was shocked at the killing of Trayvon, but angry that the death of her
daughter barely made the nightly news in Chicago. "My daughter was murdered
for no reason at all," she said. "I just want justice for my daughter, and I
want the person who murdered her prosecuted to the fullest extent."
Trayvon Martin, Stephon Watts and Rekia Boyd have joined the uncounted
numbers of African Americans murdered by racists or law enforcement in the
nearly 150 years since the end of the Civil War.
A century ago, such killings were commonplace in the South--lynchings aimed
at terrorizing a Black population denied basic and political rights under the
Jim Crow system, America's version of apartheid. These days, the majority of
such racist killings are carried out by police--sometimes even African
American ones--as part of a system of social control that author and activist
Michelle Alexander calls "the new Jim Crow."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MY NEARLY 30 years as a reporter for /Socialist Worker/ spans much of the
"law and order" era that today has put more African American men in prison
than were enslaved in 1850. Over the years, I've witnessed the agony of the
parents and family members of African Americans killed not only by police,
but by racists who took their cue from the cops and pulled the trigger
themselves.
In October 1984, a few weeks after I moved to New York City, police officer
Stephen Sullivan shot and killed Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66-year-old African
American grandmother, in her apartment after she allegedly brandished a
kitchen knife. Somehow, Sullivan and the other five cops on the scene
couldn't manage to subdue Bumpurs without firing two shotgun blasts into her.
And if the murder of Bumpurs wasn't shocking enough, there was the
demonstration of 10,000 NYPD officers--the force numbered 25,000 at the
time--in support of Sullivan when he was indicted for second-degree
manslaughter. A judge ultimately acquitted Sullivan of all wrongdoing in a
nonjury trial.
Racist vigilante justice is nothing new, either. The police coddling of
George Zimmerman and support for him in the conservative press reminded me of
the media embrace of Bernhard Goetz, the New York City "subway vigilante,"
who in December 1984 shot four African American youths after they asked him
for $5.
When a wounded 19-year-old Darrell Cabey tried to get away, Goetz followed
him. "You don't look so bad, here's another," Goetz said as he shot Cabey in
the side at point-blank range. In Goetz's statement to the police, he
justified his action by describing the young men as "savages" and said he was
prepared to "murder" them.
Goetz ultimately did just eight months in prison for unlawful possession of a
firearm--but was acquitted of attempted murder. Meanwhile, Cabey's injury put
him in a coma that left him brain damaged, with the mental capacity of a
third grader [1]. Cabey's mother won a $43 million lawsuit against Goetz, but
was unable to collect.
Of course, police account for far more shootings and murders of unarmed
African Americans than vigilantes like Goetz. Meeting Rekia Boyd's mother in
Chicago brought back memories of Veronica Perry, the mother of Edmund Perry,
a 17-year-old Phillips Exeter Academy graduate who was bound for Stanford
University when he was shot and killed by a New York City police officer in
upper Manhattan in 1985.
The cop who shot him, Lee Van Houten, claimed that Perry and another African
American youth had tried to mug him. But Perry's body had no cuts, bruises or
powder burns indicative of a struggle--just like there was no evidence that
Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman.
Like the Martin murder, the police tended to the killer, not the victim. As I
wrote then: "Why did Van Houten's fellow cops take him to St. Luke's Hospital
for cuts and bruises and leave Perry bleeding on the sidewalk, just 100 yards
from the hospital door?" Veronica Perry, died just six years later at the age
of 44 [2], reportedly as a result of a heart condition.
The anguish of Steven Watts, the father of Stephon Watts in Chicago, reminded
me of the horror on the face of Jean Griffith Sandiford, the mother of
23-year-old Michael Griffith, who was chased by white racists onto a Queens
highway, where he was struck by a car and killed in 1986.
Griffith's car had broken down near Howard Beach, a white neighborhood where
he and his friends walked to try to get help. They found a lynch mob instead.
The NYPD's 106th Precinct--which months earlier had been exposed for
torturing Black prisoners with electric cattle prods--failed to respond to
three emergency calls about the attack on Griffith and two companions.
It took a series of protests in Howard Beach to force Gov. Mario Cuomo to
appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the murders.
It was racists again who took the life of 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins for
daring to visit another white neighborhood, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, to buy a
car in 1989.
I'll never forget the hatred and threats hurled at those of us in the
multiracial weekly marches in Bensonhurst--or the courage of the African
Americans who led that struggle to bring Yusef's killers to justice. Rev. Al
Sharpton, who usually headed the weekly marches, was stabbed in the chest
while preparing for one Saturday protest.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE RACIST police shootings in New York City from the 1980s on--including,
more recently, Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006--stand out for
their brazenness. Even the mainstream media had a hard time ignoring the fact
that police fired 41 bullets at Diallo and fired 50 rounds at Bell.
Yet the fact is that police carry out racial profiling of Blacks and Latinos
in every city in the U.S.--and that members of these groups are vastly more
likely to end up dead in encounters with police than whites.
That's certainly the case in Chicago, where I moved in 1997. In June 1999,
Robert Russ and LaTonya Haggerty--two young African Americans, both
unarmed--were killed in separate police shootings within a 24-hour period.
Those killings highlighted the role of police as the primary enforcers of
institutional racism--the cops who fired the shots that killed Russ and
Haggerty are themselves African Americans. It's the social function of
police--not simply the racial identity of individual cops--that leads them to
regard all Blacks, especially young Black men, as dangerous suspects, whether
they are armed or not.
But it's the white cops who cultivate a culture of racism and a code of
silence that allows police to kill African Americans with impunity. In my
hometown of Cincinnati, the police brass and Fraternal Order of Police were
for decades dominated by men from the historically white west side of town,
where I grew up.
A series of police killings and beatings of unarmed African Americans over
several years finally boiled over in April 2001, when a white cop killed
19-year-old Timothy Thomas in a downtown alley in a neighborhood targeted for
gentrification. When several hundred African Americans protested at City
Hall, the police attacked them, sparking several days of riots. As I wrote
about the police crackdown that followed: [3]
>For Cincinnati cops, every African American was a target. One 53-year-old
>Black man was shot by beanbags 10 times--for simply walking down the street
>in daylight. Another woman's scalp was partially torn off by one of the
>projectiles. Hundreds of people--almost exclusively Black, many of them
>homeless--were arrested by the cops for curfew violations.
>
I arrived in town amid the curfew and watched police in military gear
swarming through African American neighborhoods, peering down riflescopes and
kicking in doorways. I could witness this firsthand because my white skin
gave me a passport onto streets that were off-limits to anyone Black.
A major riot in sleepy and conservative Cincinnati got national attention, as
worried politicians and pundits weighed the implications of such a rebellion.
It was one thing for Los Angeles to erupt in 1992 following the acquittal of
the cops who beat Black motorist Rodney King, and were caught on videotape
doing it. But if Cincinnati could explode over racist police killings, it
could happen anywhere.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A DECADE later, it's the murder of Trayvon Martin that has once again put a
spotlight on the reality of racist murder in the U.S. While the police didn't
pull the trigger this time, they certainly conspired with George Zimmerman to
promote his claim that he killed Trayvon in self-defense.
Tellingly, both protesters and the media have put the murder of Trayvon in
the context of racist police violence nationally, rather than dismiss it as
the isolated act of a white vigilante. Every day that Zimmerman walks free
highlights the racist character of the criminal justice system. Everyone
understands that if the shooter in the Sanford case were Black and the victim
white, arrest and prosecution would have followed immediately.
As Jesse Jackson pointed out, it was grassroots activism that made the murder
of Trayvon Martin national news and sparked a movement to demand justice. And
the outrage over Trayvon is amplified by the growing discontent over the mass
incarceration of African American men, which author Michelle Alexander has
described as a new racial caste system.
After all, even African American men who survive their encounter with law
enforcement find themselves facing trumped-up charges--and are compelled to
plea bargain in order to limit time in prison, resulting in felony
convictions that often strip them of voting rights and severely limit their
employment prospects.
Another factor sparking activism around Trayvon is the Occupy movement, which
put grassroots protest onto the political map and won the sympathy of
millions of people fed up with rising inequality and corporate-dominated
politics. Crucially, the massive outpouring of support for Trayvon has
brought the question of racial justice to the fore for a new generation of
activists who themselves got a taste of police repression when cops cracked
heads to clear Occupy encampments last fall.
The challenge now is to give the movement against racist and police killings
some local focus and staying power. Whether or not George Zimmerman is
arrested, prosecuted and convicted, in every city, racist police brutality
should become a focal point for activism. Speak-outs and panel discussions
featuring those targeted by police--or their surviving family members--can be
a starting point for campaigns against racial profiling and police harassment
of people of color.
It's the duty of activists to cast a spotlight on the bitter experiences of
African American and Latino youth at the hands of police and racists--because
if they don't, no one else will. Since the great African American journalist
Ida B. Wells undertook dangerous journeys to the South a century ago to
document lynching, it's always been the Black, socialist and radical press
that has taken the lead in exposing racist violence.
The racist murder of Trayvon Martin is, as many have pointed out, our
contemporary version of lynching. Wells' words from her 1895 pamphlet, /The
Red Record/ [4], still ring true:
>In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the
>frequency and severity of the scourging, but with freedom, a new system of
>intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged;
>he was killed.
>
The groundswell of protest demanding justice for Trayvon shows that, once
again, people are prepared to take up Wells' legacy of fighting to put an end
to these racist atrocities.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1995-01-08/news/mn-17496_1_south-bronx
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/22/obituaries/veronica-perry-teacher-44.html
[3] http://socialistworker.org/2011/04/08/rebellion-in-cincinnati
[4] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm
