I’m a devout pacifist, and always have been one. During the Vietnam draft I was classified 3-A due to the fact I was married (far, far too young at age 17) and had two children that my then-wife and I were going to work every day to provide for, so my lottery number never came up. If it had, I would have been off to Canada in a hot New York minute. I didn’t even know any Vietnamese, so why would I go halfway around the world to shoot at them? As Muhammad Ali once famously said, “No Vietnamese has ever called me ‘ni**er.’”
Violence only begets more violence … an “eye for an eye” until everyone is left blind.
With that said, the threat of violence does have its place. During the Civil Rights era America was faced with the choice of dealing with the calm and reasoned voice of Martin or the fiery rhetoric of Malcolm … and make no mistake that the threat of violence issued by the latter (there is no known or documented instance of the organization he headed, the Nation of Islam, ever perpetrating an illegal act anywhere in America) nudged the country in the right direction.
So, while I, on a personal level, abhor the violent uprising taking place in Baltimore (and pray no loss of life results from it) as the cry of “Burn, Baby, Burn” that was heard in various cities throughout the United States during the turbulent ’60s as they became engulfed in flames forced political leadership to deal with the long festering underlying conditions that drove mobs of angry youth out into the streets, I’m afraid history appears to be set to repeat itself.
Our nation has a long history of using unfair and unjust laws to protect and perpetuate official wrongdoing; the criminal justice system has a long tradition of pissing on poor, black and disenfranchised people … and then (often accompanied by a knowing wink and a nod from men in black robes) telling them that it’s only raining. But at some point people get damned tired of being pissed on. Sadly, uprisings (I refuse to use the pejorative term “rioting” when the cause is just) often are the only means by which voiceless citizens can be heard.
Baltimore, similar to most other American cities has tolerated mistreatment of the “other,” those on the margins of society — the homeless, the mentally ill, and young blacks — by police officers for so long that wrong is now thought of by some cops as right. Our elected officials have allowed police to run roughshod over the rights of citizens to the extent that it appears a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, was handcuffed by a group of cops and thrown into the back of a police van with such carelessness and force that his spinal cord was severed, an injury from which he later died.
His crime? Being black in Baltimore.
As I write this, parts of Baltimore are engulfed in flames over the incident; the National Guard has been called out to restore order and protect the peace — but, over the years, who has been called out to protect young black lives from overzealous cops? Who indeed.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in announcing that a curfew was being imposed on the city starting Tuesday, both stated emphatically that the “city will be safe.” But again, safe for whom?
The fear spreading across the country is palpable. Elected officials in city after city are tiptoeing through the spring tulips, hoping and praying that their city isn’t the next one that will erupt in violence. After all, that kind of shit can impact political careers and aspirations. Just ask Mayor Rawlings-Blake, a once rising political star in the Democratic Party, who, up until recently, was getting tons of face time on national TV to engage in political punditry. She is bright, attractive, seemingly dedicated — and now she’s finished, undone by her own failure to rein in an out-of-control police department.
In Cleveland, after the uprising started, a group of black ministers took to the TV airways (looking as nervous as a bunch of ’hos in church) to call for calm. They know the broken criminal justice system is not going to serve up any justice in the Brelo case, and probably not in the case of the killing of Tamir Rice either. The only problem is, they have no currency with the angry young people who might take to the streets in protest. Few churchgoers will be among any angry mob that forms. We’re not going to be able to pray our way out of the potential Armageddon that might come.
The one person in Cleveland who could defuse the tense situation seems totally unwilling to do so: Mayor Frank Jackson. He’s courting disaster by only listening to those insiders in the bunker with him instead of accurately assessing the mood of the citizenry.
To his credit, Jackson has tried, but virtually every time he fires a rogue cop some arbitrator (backed up by the courts) forces the city to give the outlaw his badge and gun back. After all, it’s not their lives that will be endangered by an out-of-control cop.
The plain fact is, Lady Justice has already been turned into a prostitute for the status quo, and absent some serious changes in police departments across America — and yes, here in Cleveland too — virtually no local community will be able to adjudicate a case against a cop in a fair manner — no matter the evidence. The fear now, after Baltimore, is that every time an unjust verdict is rendered anywhere in the country uprisings will occur.
As Malcolm once prophesized: Chickens do eventually come home to roost. It might well be a very long, hot summer.
[Photo: SocialJusticeSeeker812]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.