UNEQUAL RESPONSE
The Capitol insurrection contrasts with 1963 Birmingham.
The underwhelming response to the storming of the Capitol by thousands of Trump-crazed insurrectionists in which a police officer and a protester were killed is a reminder of how largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in several cities were met with excessive force. Such disparate treatment, however, has a much longer history.
Seeing police give way to the violent throng determined to invade the House and Senate chambers Wednesday brought back memories of the spring of 1963 in my hometown, Birmingham, Ala. That’s when peaceful demonstrators were beaten, bitten by dogs and arrested for marching for justice with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
When I read on Thursday that fewer than 30 of President Donald Trump’s seditionists had been arrested for breaking and entering the House and Senate chambers, I thought of the hundreds arrested in Birmingham nearly 60 years ago; so many that police used buses to cart them off to overflowing jail cells.
One of the youngest arrested was a third-grade classmate of mine, Audrey Faye Hendricks, age 9. Audrey and I weren’t close friends, and it was years later that I learned her parents, unlike mine, were active in the civil rights movement and had agreed with King that children should march to show America how serious the issue was.
So, Audrey marched, was arrest
ed, and went to jail. “I didn’t know what they were going to do to me,” she recounted in Ellen Levine’s book, “Freedom’s Children” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993). “The worst thing I thought was that they might kill me.” Audrey said she was in jail seven days, sleeping in a little room with about a dozen other children in bunk beds. “My parents could not get word to me for seven days,” she said. “I felt like I was helping to gain what we were trying to get, and that was freedom.”
In truth, what King accomplished was much more modest — an agreement with Birmingham leaders to integrate department store sitting rooms, rest rooms, lunch counters and water fountains, promote “Negro” sales clerks and release all demonstrators still in jail.
Even that was too much for the Ku Klux Klan. Four months later, it bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls, including 11-year-old Denise McNair, who also attended my elementary school.
The Klan’s dastardly deed on Sept. 15, 1963 — a day I will never forget — exposed a mindset still evident in the debacle this country experienced Wednesday. The virtually all-white mob that briefly occupied the Capitol was just as determined as Klansmen decades ago to preserve the status quo.
Trump’s supporters have been egged on for more than four years by a candidate, then president who not only sympathizes with them but exploits their fear of an America where greater diversity wins elections and helps this nation come ever closer to resembling the “beloved community” King envisioned when he and Audrey marched in Birmingham.
The shame of this moment is that other politicians who have marveled at Trump’s ability to tap that fear of an inevitable future are trying to siphon it, too. Seven senators and more than 130 Republican House members voted not to accept the presidential election results, knowing full well their objections had already been properly vetted in the courts as having no merit.
The Klan had no respect for the courts, but how can someone such as Sen. Ted Cruz, an accomplished lawyer who has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, suggest with a straight face that the election challenges to Joe Biden’s victory have not been seriously and correctly adjudicated? His denial of that fact suggests he cares more about political advantage than truth, or democracy, or his country.
The same can be said of any other elected Trump sycophant who refuses to accept a degree of responsibility for what happened Wednesday in the Capitol. They are just as guilty as Trump for leading the gullible to believe the election was stolen from him and that their only recourse is insurrection.
One of the rioters, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a police officer and three others died of medical emergencies, but for the most part the insurrectionists appeared to break windows, breach barricades and lounge in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office with impunity. Some even got police to pose for selfies.
Their treatment was a reminder not only to Black Lives Matter supporters but Black and brown
Americans in general that law enforcement in this country has never been color blind.
Indeed, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told the Washington Post this week that a lack of preparedness among Capitol police may have stemmed from a perception that the largely white group posed less of a threat.
“They see Black Lives Matter and go ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to be ready.’ But, hey, these people have their blue lives matter flags all over the place,” said Acevedo, president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. “And that bias and that false sense of security bit them. And it bit them in a historical fashion yesterday.”
There were signs that the protests Trump invited might get out of hand. The federal force that safeguards the Capitol should have been better prepared. The scarcity of arrests during and in the hours after the riot of Trump rioters who destroyed property or otherwise disregarded the law was an unacceptable double standard compared with how equal justice protesters were treated just months ago. One Capitol Police officer, Brian D. Sicknick, died of injuries after being hit with a fire extinguisher during the attack.
Assertions by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and others that Black Lives Matter protests have been just as violent simply are not true. In fact, a study by Harvard University and Manchester University researchers found violence or vandalism occurred in fewer than 4 percent of more than 7,000 BLM protests since 2017, and some of those acts were committed by bystanders, not protesters advocating for racial justice.
And in what is an unacceptable attempt to justify the unequal treatment, federal law enforcement agencies are reportedly claiming that they tried to keep a low profile after being scarred by criticism of their response to those largely peaceful protests after the death of George Floyd last summer.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, a French philosopher once said. That applies not only to the kid-glove treatment the mostly white Capitol insurrectionists seemed to receive at critical moments, but it also applies to the disproportionate treatment of so many Black and brown people imprisoned in this country.
Thankfully, President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t shirked from acknowledging the reality of unequal treatment that infests our justice system and reared its ugly head in the Capitol Police response.
“You can’t tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday at a press conference announcing Justice Department nominees. “We all know that is true. And it is totally unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view.”
Real change must come, but it can’t until this nation exits the quagmire that those who refuse to accept Trump’s defeat find comforting. Their comfort comes at too great a price, one that threatens to destroy the democracy that so many Americans have died to preserve. It’s time for Trump to go.