Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. –Rep. John Lewis
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Like many people, I followed all of the media and public responses to the killing of George Floyd. I will admit that I had very low expectations of the trial. After all, I’d followed my fair share of trials, legal attempts to get justice after the killings of Black people, that have resulted in the White defendant(s) walking free, despite a mountain of evidence pointing to their guilt. I was especially unimpressed when friends, political pundits and even legal analysts kept stressing the video, talking about how videotaping has made such racially charged police brutality undeniable.
I wondered if people had forgotten that the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Sgt. Stacey Koon was also captured on video. Mr. King was shot twice with a taser, each pulse containing a voltage of 50,000. All four policemen then used their batons to mercilessly beat Mr. King with more than 50 blows.
Mr. King suffered 11 skull fractures, a broken eye socket, a crushed cheekbone, facial nerve damage, permanent brain damage, a broken leg, a broken ankle, a burn on his chest and myriad internal injuries.
Over the years, Mr. King maintained his assertion that as he was being beaten, the officers told him, “We’re going to kill you, n****r.” In total, there were nine officers present during the beating, but only four were charged with excessive force. Three were acquitted, and the jury, which was nearly all White, deadlocked on the verdict of the fourth, Officer Laurence Powell. Let me tell you a little bit about Officer Powell. That night, after Rodney King had been taken to the hospital, Officer Powell typed into the computer in his squad vehicle, “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.” Even earlier that evening, before the Rodney King incident, Officer Powell had been on a domestic disturbance call at an African-American household. Afterwards, Officer Powell entered into his computer that it was like something out of the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”
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So, there we were, nearly 30 years later in 2020, having watched a police officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Officer Chauvin seemed callously unconcerned as he was literally killing Mr. Floyd, who at one point even called out for his dead mother.
I thought I’d be elated if Officer Chauvin were found guilty and handed a significant sentence. Yet, when the guilty verdict was announced, that’s not at all how I felt. Of course, I was pleased that justice was finally being served, that we were finally able to start chipping away at the qualified immunity that shields law enforcement officers from prosecution. But as I watched Mr. Chauvin listening to the verdict and taking in his fate, I felt deeply sorry for him. Because of his hatred and sense of entitlement and superiority, he had taken the life of another human being, and in doing so, he had destroyed his own life.
But that’s what hatred does, isn’t it? It destroys lives. Particularly the hatred of an individual or a group of individuals for something they didn’t choose and have no control over—the color of their skin.
So, here we are, a year later, another trial. This time it’s for the senseless murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was out for an afternoon jog. Gregory McMichael, a former police detective and private investigator, his adult son Travis McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan got into their trucks and chased down Mr. Arbery, who was jogging and not a threat to anyone. The men claim they were attempting to make a citizen’s arrest because there’d been break-ins in that neighborhood and they’d seen Mr. Arbery enter a home construction site, look around, then leave to continue his jog. Interestingly, there were no complaints lodged or police reports filed about those alleged break-ins. Nothing was taken from the construction site, and the owner testified that his security camera had shown a number of other people entering the site and looking around; those individuals, of course, were White. Furthermore, he stated that he’d never authorized or empowered the McMichaels to oversee his property or confront anyone for entering it.
The long and short of it is that the McMichaels shot and killed Mr. Arbery; the neighbor, Mr. Bryan, captured it on video. A pretty clear-cut case, right? Not at all. It took months to even arrest the McMichaels and Mr. Bryan because of the elder McMichael’s former employment with the police force. Two district attorneys had to recuse themselves and a third, DA Jackie Johnson, was ultimately charged with violating her oath of office by obstructing their arrests.
The defense lawyers insist that race had nothing to do with their clients’ suspicion of Mr. Arbery. Yet, last week when Reverend Al Sharpton attended the trial and sat with Mr. Arbery’s mother to comfort her, one of the lawyers for the defense, Kevin Gough, objected to his presence, saying that it might intimidate the jury, which, with the exception of one individual, is all White. On another day, Rev. Jesse Jackson also attended the trial to show support to the family. In response to his attendance Mr. Gough once again objected. “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here,” he told the judge. The reason for this, he explained, was that “the seats in the public gallery of the courtroom are not like courtside seats of the Lakers game.”
Individual acts of racism are on the rise. I don’t have to read a newspaper or watch another trial to know this. In the past four years, I have been called a n****r by random people in public places more times than I ever had during my previous 50 years of life. Last week during a conversation with my friend, Kojo Nnamdi, a popular radio and television talk show host, he said, “I imagine this is the sort of shock that Black Americans felt right after Reconstruction. You think you’ve made progress and you’ve come so far in your battle for basic civil rights, then all of a sudden you look up and you’re almost right where you started.”
His words stayed with me long after our conversation had ended. I’d never thought about civil rights, particularly as it pertains to Black people and racism, in quite that way, as a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back type of journey. I’d always assumed it was a fully forward march—through struggle, yes, but always forward nonetheless.
During the Reconstruction Era, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, America attempted, along with other forms of redress, to make amends for slavery by extending constitutional protections for Black people. During that time, over 2000 African-Americans held public office, from local levels all the way up to the United States Senate.
Hiram Revels became a US Senator in 1870. Blanche K. Bruce, who’d been born into slavery and escaped, became a US Senator in 1874 when he was elected by the Mississippi State Legislature. That’s right: Mississippi!
1865 is also the same year, in Tennessee, the next state just north of Mississippi, that the Ku Klux Klan was founded. When, with the Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction came to an end, federal troops were removed from the South. With them went many of the protections that had been extended to African-Americans. Enter the era of Jim Crow, cross burnings, lynchings and bombings. It would take nearly a century for another African-American to be publicly elected to the Senate. That was Edward Brooke, from Massachusetts, who was elected in 1967.
It would take until 1992, another 25 years, for the next African American, Carol Mosley Braun, to be elected to the Senate. Another 12 years would pass before the third African-American would be elected to the Senate post-Reconstruction, making him, Barack H. Obama, only the fifth African-American Senator in the history of this country.
Many African-Americans learn their history at home because the history of Black people is often not taught in schools. And even when it is, the truth is often watered down or completely revised.
Because I was not born here, and am a child of African immigrants, much of what I know of Black American history—which is still woefully inadequate—I learned by reading books on my own and by listening to older Black folks, the parents and grandparents of my friends. Truth be told, a good amount of that education has come quite recently, over the past four years, as I have noticed the almost seismic shift in race relations. Growing up as I did with The Jeffersons, Soul Train, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, it was easy to believe that the incidents I saw in the black-and-white films shown during the Civil Rights Era portion of American History in school—people being beaten while peacefully protesting, or their bodies swinging from trees, little girls being bombed in churches—were, as presented to us, a thing of the past. Hmmm….
“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote. And how true that is. When the Reconstruction Era ended, one of the first privileges of full citizenship of Black people that was attacked was the right to vote. It should come as no surprise, then, that voter suppression has become a primary objective of the GOP. State-sanctioned intimidation and violence were also par for the course. Black people were killed with impunity and if the murderers were ever brought to trial, it was in front of an all-White jury that almost always issued an acquittal.
When seen within the larger context of history, what is happening now in this country becomes quite clear. It has happened before. And if we don’t fight back, push back, it will happen again. Even if we do, that may still be the case; but we must at least try. We can’t go down without a fight. I remind myself of this when I grow weary of politics, of donating to progressive politicians and organizations, of hearing about one more killing of an unarmed Black person, of waiting for the verdict in one more trial, of watching police officers and judges coddle young White killers like Dylann Roof and Kyle Rittenhouse.
There are days when the microaggressions are more than I can handle: being followed while shopping in a store, being told in that tone of surprise-mixed-with-condescension that you are articulate, being asked to work for free when you know your White counterpart is not just being paid but paid well.
There are days when I have to remind myself that hatred should never be the response to hatred.
There are days when I feel I just cannot anymore.
Still, we must keep pressing forward. We—like those who came before us—must resist in any and all ways. We must resist with pen and paper, in song, in film, in dance, in visual art, on foot in marches, in schoolhouses, on college campuses, at City Hall and in the halls of all the buildings where decisions are being made. We must vote at the ballot box, vote with our wallets, vote with our time and our support. When necessary, we must act up and act out, refuse to be silenced.
We must also remember that we aren’t just dying at the hands of racist police officers and hateful neighbors. We are dying in hospitals because of medical racism, and in our homes because they are often located in underserved communities, areas with food deserts where there are purposely placed liquor stores on every corner but not a grocery store in sight that sells fresh produce. We are dying from hypertension and diabetes. It’s easy enough to call them lifestyle diseases when your lifestyle doesn’t involve such dismal statistics, and a constant release of cortisol from the fear that a simple trip to the mall or traffic stop could result in your death, turn you into one of those statistics. We are dying of depression and suicide because not every rose can bear the excruciating pain of pushing itself through concrete to grow in the light of day.
We must, then, also resist with self-care and the knowledge of our worth, our inherent value as Black people throughout the history of this nation and indeed the world. We must resist with laughter, by finding joy and making joy wherever and whenever we can. We must resist with love of self, and love of one another, with love of this earth and sky that is our home, and all the living plants and creatures and beings with which we share it.
We must resist by choosing to live.
We must resist by choosing to live free.
We must resist by knowing that we can be free.
Knowing that we already are free.
In a way nobody else can make us, or take away from us.
We already are free.
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Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary struggle.—Rep. John Lewis
Thank you for writing this exquisite piece. The whole world needs your voice.
I always enjoy your beautiful writing…it’s very sad we haven’t come further along in our prejudices, but have gone backwards….truly breaks my heart! we must push forward to open the minds & hearts of the small thinking people.