San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Historic turning point may be at hand
Some local black leaders now see a real chance for change
This time feels different, black leaders say.
Cries for police reform in the United States have gone unheeded for decades, even as officers have aimed their brutality disproportionately, again and again, at African-Americans.
But as the city and nation continue to convulse with grief and rage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, some local leaders see another historic turning point in the long struggle for civil rights.
Like the open-casket funeral in 1955 of Emmett Till and the televised attacks in 1965 on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the excruciating cellphone video of Floyd's asphyxiation death under the knee of a white officer has galvanized a sweeping coalition of supporters demanding change.
“This is our Emmett Till moment,” said Lawrence Scott, a professor at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
Scott, who was part of a successful push this year for the State Board of Education to approve an elective African-American studies course for Texas high schools, said people more than six decades ago were outraged and spurred to action by the sight of Till, a 14year-old black boy who was murdered in Mississippi by
two white men.
“People got to see his mutilated body,” Scott said. “People got to see the horrors. This has been going on forever, but now people have cellphones. What we've been articulating for years, we're able to show you through the cellphones. Everyone has a sense of agency and urgency.”
For nearly two weeks, largely peaceful demonstrations have filled the streets of at least 600 cities as thousands of people of diverse backgrounds protest systemic racism and police brutality. The grueling video of Floyd's death, Scott said, has struck a collective nerve.
“From slavery days, we were not considered humans. We're property,” he said. “And I think that's the difference with the George Floyd situation. People resonated that this is a human being crying out to his mom, who is dead, for help while he's dying slowly. And I think that's the difference. It wasn't some nebulous abstraction. There's a human being being killed. Not a dog or an animal.”
Everett Fly, 68, is old enough to have watched white police officers attack Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Rep. John Lewis as they marched toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
The local landscape architect knows the thin line between quick assumptions by police and danger.
One of the few African-Americans in 1970 to graduate from Alamo Heights High School, Fly was 18 when he attended a party at his friend Richard Planto's apartment. As he was leaving, he was approached by two white security guards when his car wouldn't start. He recalled they yelled for him to get out of the car and show identification.
When he asked what he had done, one of the guards raised his gun and cocked the hammer.
They marched Fly to Planto's apartment, where his friend's mother vouched for Fly and lambasted the men for the treatment of their friend. He said prejudices, biases and stereotypes from that era still exist — as do people with the courage to walk beside the disenfranchised.
“Seeing this event and seeing the young people and different ethnic groups, it seems like this could be a watershed moment,” Fly said. “That is what it takes for any kind of reform, a national consciousness. We need more than police reform.”
Mateen Diop, principal of Sam Houston High School, echoed that progress only is possible by changing minds. And he was skeptical that even the current moment was a watershed.
“I doubt it's going to bring about any change whatsoever because the change doesn't need to come from within, from us,” he said. “It needs to come from the police side.”
As principal of the East Side school, Diop said he coaches the students to be wary of police, whom he calls “the foot soldier of the enemy in the black community.”
“The things we're calling for now, none of it is new,” Diop said. “I don't think white people really, truly understand what it's like to be a black man in America. When I get up in the morning, I have to put on an entirely new face for the world to see.”
He added, “It's just something about our skin, that natural fear comes out in (police). You can fine them and fire them, it doesn't matter. It's all in their head. When you pull me over, just treat me like everyone else.”
A long struggle
Despite the hurdles, longtime civil rights activist Mario Salas sees in the moment an opportunity for critical change at the local level.
“It does feel different,” Salas said. “It's almost the perfect storm from the standpoint of years and years and years of cover-ups from the San Antonio police association and the contract they have. It's coming to a head. At this point, we're going to strategize some things.”
In 2016, then-Mayor Ivy Taylor, the city's first African-American mayor, tried to incorporate police reforms into a new contract with the police union. But union president Mike Helle resisted the measures. One would have allowed a police chief to rely on prior discipline of an officer to determine punishment.
When an officer appeals his or her punishment, it triggers an arbitration process that proceeds like a trial. Arbitrators often reduce punishments, in part because the current contract limits how far back a police chief can invoke prior misconduct in arbitration: 10 years for drug and alcoholrelated issues, five years for acts of “intentional violence” and just two years for all other misconduct.
The reform stymied by the union would have allowed the consideration of an officer's entire discipline record.
“I hate to call it a union,” Salas said. “It's an association. They should not be in charge of how police officers are disciplined. There are these layers and layers of protection in that contract.”
Helle has said he plans to retire from his long-held union leadership post early next year.
Salas, 70, has struggled against police in San Antonio for decades. He was a member of the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group formed in reaction to the brutal death of Bobby Jo Phillips in San Antonio police custody in 1968.
That year, police responded to a call of a man threatening bar patrons with a knife. After pulling Phillips from a car, officers quickly disarmed the 28-year-old black man. A witness later described six officers beating him with pistols and nightsticks even though he offered little resistance.
Phillips died from a broken neck. He also suffered two broken ribs, a punctured lung and 13 lacerations to the top of the head, three of them deep enough to expose the skull.
A nurse allowed a black reporter to photograph Phillips' battered body in the hospital. Salas said he saw the image in a local African-American newspaper, and it helped to spur his lifelong activism.
“It looked like Emmett Till,” he said. “It was horrible. That actually got me more involved in police abuse cases.”
According to the San Antonio Light, then-Police Chief George Bichsel praised the officers' response: “They handled the situation real well.” A civil service commission ruled a month later that no unnecessary force was used in the incident.
The officers later were indicted for killing Phillips, but a jury found them not guilty.
A year after Phillips' death, the SNCC organized a protest against police violence. In April 1969, thousands of protesters blocked a Fiesta parade route downtown, triggering a massive and aggressive police response. In retaliation, some of the protesters looted downtown stores.
Salas was there: “Of course, I had an afro and I was about 200 pounds lighter,” he said.
A half-century later, the death of George Floyd and its aftermath can make any progress seem fleeting.
“This has been going on for a very long time,” Salas said, “and nothing for me has changed when you have police being able to get away with such things. A lot of it has to do with education, because when you grow up in a society of white supremacy, you think it's OK to treat people of color that way.”
Nonetheless, Salas is heartened by the broad coalition that has emerged to protest Floyd's death.
“We're seeing these huge, huge numbers of young white people joining in these protests.” he said. “So what is backfiring on people who believe in white supremacy is this is an entirely different generation, many of whom have totally rejected the concepts of white supremacy. And it makes me happy.”
A new moment
Former Mayor Julián Castro told the San Antonio Express-News Editorial Board last week that the limits to daily life imposed by COVID-19 has helped to focus the nation's attention on the injustice of Floyd's death.
“It has the nation's attention,” said Castro, who pushed for police reform last year in his failed presidential bid. “Usually, something like this is competing with a million different other things for people's attention.”
He added, “Also, unlike in 1992 with Rodney King, or even I would say six years ago with Michael Brown in Ferguson, there is a lot more footage, a lot more video out there. And every single day of these last 10 days, the police have been giving people more and more evidence of a rotten inside culture of acting out, lashing out when they shouldn't.”
La Juana Chambers Lawson, 32, hasn't emotionally digested Floyd's death yet.
“The names keep coming,” she said. “Our ancestors didn't fight for this. We're not there yet.”
Lawson is owner and consultant of Tacit Growth Strategies. She said the black community still is fighting for human rights, though its leaders aren't in the streets as they were during the civil rights movement.
She said many people have benefited from previous marches by local civil rights leaders Claude Black and Raymond Callies. The time has come, she said, for people to stop looking for others to lead and do what can be done for themselves.
Wednesday she responded to a Facebook invitation from Neka Cleaver, owner of Tha1Radio, for San Antonio residents to meet and discuss community policing in the future. The gathering included small business owners, and members of sororities, fraternities and the San Antonio African American Community Archive & Museum.
She said the group wants to inform the community of their rights through educational seminars, and provide a roster of emergency phone numbers residents can call for the right circumstance.
“People don't know the resources available to them,” Lawson said. “If you call 911 because someone may be having a (medical) episode, you're calling the cops because you don't know who to call.”
Community activist Nettie Hinton was among the crowds downtown May 30 protesting Floyd's death.
She wasn't on foot, but in her car, parked outside of the St. Anthony Hotel as marchers headed to San Antonio Police Department headquarters.
Hinton, 81, said that, unfortunately, things turned ugly that night when some protesters broke business windows and egged police cars.
Hinton has been at the forefront of many protests for justice. She was at the 1963 March in Washington, D.C., led a petition drive for the restoration of the Hays Street Bridge and is part of the coalition to preserve the Woolworth Building, where lunch counters were desegregated through efforts of religious leaders and the NAACP.
She said people realized the seriousness of the situation when the world saw the video of Chauvin pressing his knee on Floyd's neck.
“What you have to do is police the police department,” Hinton said.
She said she plans to take part in future calls for action as she has for more than 50 years.
“I'll drive downtown and park and be in the midst of it,” Hinton said, “in spirit.”