Dallas tragedy showed a city’s grace under fire.
Jacquielynn Floyd says tragedy brought us together, if only temporarily, but showed our strength and grace under fire.
Dallas understands, with hardearned experience, that tragedy begets unity — if only for a while.
We were unified last summer, stripped of our tribal grievances and bound by our mutual shock and grief. North and south, white and black, black and blue, city and suburb, all of us understood each other because we all experienced the same horror.
So, yes, we stood together, and that’s what kept us all from falling apart. The price was so dear: Five dead police officers, and a bitter reminder for a city that already knew the destructive power of an angry lunatic with a gun and nothing to lose.
In the worst single attack on U.S. law enforcement officers since 9/11, Micah Xavier Johnson turned a peaceful protest into a shooting gallery, realizing a lurid fantasy of murdering white police officers.
Johnson holed up in a downtown parking garage, where he sang and babbled nonsense and taunted negotiators for two hours. The standoff ended when Dallas police made the decision to send in a robot armed with a brick-sized chunk of plastic explosive to blow him up.
A lot of armchair critics later reexamined that unprecedented action, questioning the morality of using a robot instead of a sniper or a SWAT squad or more negotiation efforts. No need: The robot ended the carnage. It saved lives.
“From a utilitarian perspective,” one robotics expert soberly told Time Magazine, “How they do it doesn’t matter.”
In our long season of mourning, what nobody quite said out loud but a lot of us were thinking was that Dallas had been martyred, and not for the first time. Micah Johnson’s supposed motive was the questionable police shootings of black men in other American cities; his rampage followed the back-to-back cases involving Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn.
If you had been around long enough, it mirrored the ugly burden Dallas carried for so long following the 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy. In that case, the city shared the blame with a long list of crackpot-theory conspirators; in the police ambush, it was consoled as a victim.
In truth, we were targeted by random chaos. Micah Johnson, like Lee Harvey Oswald, could have happened to anybody, but they happened to us.
It’s worth remembering that Johnson did not spontaneously formulate his plan to murder police officers following the Sterling and Castile shootings. He trained and drilled and practiced for weeks in the backyard of his mother’s house in Mesquite. He took tactical classes at a private self-defense academy. He turned himself into the skilled and stealthy combat soldier he never managed to be while serving in the U.S. Army.
He did not, in fact, embrace black nationalism and armed protest movements until his earlier dreams ended in humiliating failure. As a child, Johnson hoped to become a police officer or soldier; his Army career was abruptly ended after an embarrassing sexual harassment complaint was lodged against him by a former longtime friend.
“Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode,” writes historian Michael Burleigh. Micah Johnson, like so many other mass killers, was that pre-existing chemical mix in search of an ideological detonator.
Was Dallas then blameless? No more than any other American city struggling with the pressurecooker issues of race and inequality and angry mistrust of law enforcement by minority communities.
But it hurts the heart to look back at that hot summer evening protest a year ago today. Right up until Micah Johnson started shooting, it was a peaceful, mutually respectful event.
Protesters expressed their frustration and sorrow over police shootings, but the crowd was orderly and focused on its message. About 800 marchers, organized by the grassroots Next Generation Action Network (not, as others have mistakenly assumed, by the larger Black Lives Matter movement), chanted as they walked through downtown Dallas, some pushing children in strollers.
About 100 police officers were in attendance. They deliberately acted as escorts rather than enforcers, dressed in ordinary uniforms, not riot gear.
Early in the evening, the Dallas Police Department posted a memorable photo on its Twitter account: A black protester holding a “No justice, no peace sign,” flanked by two DPD officers, one black, one white. The three men pose, smiling, for the camera.
In retrospect, they offer an achingly fleeting snapshot of good humor and common humanity. It is a crystallized moment of unity created not by tragedy — that came later — but by deliberate good will.
Only hours later, five officers were murdered: Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Patrick Zamarripa, and Michael Smith from the DPD, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer Brent Thompson.
There were so many heroes that night, police officers and other first responders who ran toward the chaos to protect and rescue civilians. The fallen officers died heroes’ deaths, protecting the fundamental American freedom to protest, to make themselves heard without fear of reprisal.
“We risk our lives for those rights,” then-Police Chief David Brown later said. “Police are guardians of this great democracy.”
July 7 made David Brown a national celebrity. In one terrible night, he went from being an embattled civil servant, beset by routine departmental discontent and local political feuds, to a universal symbol of grace under fire, of reconciliation.
It was Brown — a black man, a career policeman, a Dallas native — who channeled that unity that everyone reflexively craved in the ambush’s aftermath.
At an interfaith memorial service for the fallen officers, former President Barack Obama pointed to Brown and to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, “a white man and a black man, with different backgrounds ... working together to unify a city with strength and grace and wisdom.”
Since, city and suburb have splintered back into their familiar spheres of self-interest, and the bitter divisions over concentrations of wealth and of poverty in our city remain. Has anything really changed? Maybe just this: Dallas endured. Our unity may not have been permanent, but the knowledge that it is achievable in a time of crisis might have moved us, if only an inch, toward mutual understanding without a precipitating tragedy.
In its grief, Dallas demonstrated strength and grace.
Those virtues aren’t always on display. But when when we needed them, they were there.