VIOLENCE RECALLS CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
Experts: Troubled times tied to economic uncertainty
Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier, shot by Chicago police on Christmas weekend. Sandra Bland found hanged in a Texas jail cell last summer following an arrest. Nine killed in a mass shooting at a Charleston, S.C., church in June. Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore while in police custody in April 2015. Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by police in Chicago in late 2014.
All of the incidents involved African-American victims and were followed by protests and allegations of injustice.
Black History Month in 2016 comes at a time of escalated violence against African Americans — much of it involving police — that recalls the troubled times of the late 1960s.
Activists and scholars say the current spurt of violence isn’t greater than a half-century ago, nor is it surprising. They say periodic bouts of violence against African Americans by white supremacists and heavy-handed police have occurred since at least the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, and tend to happen following a period of civil rights gains coupled with times of economic uncertainty.
“You get an uprising of white violence against communities of color when white folks think they are losing their power,” said Judy Richardson, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist and producer of PBS’ Eyes on the Prize series, which is being shown again this month on WORLD channel.
Insecurity among whites who fear progress by blacks will cost them economic status and political power is to blame, Richardson said. She pointed to lynchings and stepped-up efforts to deny voting rights after black veterans returned from World War II, and Southern lawmakers’ actions to retain segregated schools after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered integration.
Richardson lived in New York in 1986, when white youths beat and then chased Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old man from Trinidad who was fatally struck by a car in Howard Beach while running away. There was the 1982 death of Willie Turks, pulled from a car in Brooklyn by an angry white mob, and Yusef Hawkins, shot to death in 1989 after being attacked by a crowd of whites in New York.
The failure of a grand jury to indict a New York police officer in Eric Garner’s chokehold death reminded Richardson of a New York state judge’s 1985 dismissal of an indictment against an officer for shooting to death Eleanor Bumpurs, a diabetic 66-year-old Bronx woman, during an argument over her eviction.
UCLA sociology professor Joshua Bloom said violence against blacks seems more frequent now because of cellphones and social media. When police in Ferguson, Mo., used tanks and tear gas against protesters after the 2014 shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown by a white police officer, cellphone video and images went viral.
The current Black Lives Matter movement needs to take a page from the civil rights movement and “find ways of making business as usual impossible” for those who perpetuate such violence against blacks, he said. Bloom, author of Black Against
Empire, a history of the Black Panther Party, said the Panthers launched their own investigation into the shooting deaths of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police in 1969, and galvanized public opinion against the police. He contrasted that with protests for details in Garner’s death, which he said were not as effective.
Bree Newsome, 30, an artist and civil rights activist in Charlotte, said she and others in the Black Lives Matter movement were spurred to action by the July 2013 verdict that found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Aggressive police tactics against protesters in Ferguson were a turning point for activists who had attended rallies recalling the spirit, but not the danger, of 1960s-era demonstrations. “It was the first time we realized that you could still die from doing this work,” Newsome said.
The Charleston shooting deaths of Pastor Clementa Pinckney and eight others in Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist has parallels to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Newsome said she removed the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina Statehouse flagpole in response to galvanize people “to really show defiance to that kind of terror.”
“You get an uprising of white violence against communities of color when white folks think they are losing their power.”
Judy Richardson, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist