more [...]ed from yours to “We shouldn’t fear the police,” Alvin Manago, 55, who was Floyd’s roommate for the past four years, and still hasn’t been able to bring himself to begin packing up the slain man’s belongings, told me through tears as we stood next to the colossal memorial that has sprung up at the scene of the killing. “Like when I was a little kid—‘Oh, the police is here, they’re going to help us.’ That’s what I want us to believe and feel again.”
Though they sometimes diverge on tactical questions, the activists who make up the core of the movement desire to create, for the first time in our nation’s history, a reality in which black people aren’t routinely robbed of their livelihoods and lives by armed government agents. The aftermath of Floyd’s death has left many activists as encouraged as they’ve ever been that true change is on the horizon. Still, if the aim is a full recalibration of the American justice system, the task ahead remains monumental.
Public discussion about fixing the criminal-justice system often accepts as a premise that the path forward involves “reforming” thousands of individual state and local law-enforcement agencies and prison systems. But what if it doesn’t? What if the activists are right, and the solution is to dismantle American criminal justice and build something better? What might that look like?
“I would never condone violence, ever,” says Elijah Norris-Holliday, a 24-year-old activist in the Twin Cities who has been organizing peaceful daytime protests and who was so distraught after seeing the video of Floyd’s death that he didn’t sleep for days. “But sometimes, when people feel like their voices are being ignored over and over and over, violence is the only other answer. They have to burn their own community down to get people to listen to them. We’re at a breaking point.”
“When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction,”Colin Kaepernick tweeted .. https://twitter.com/Kaepernick7/status/1266046129906552832 , as massive protests—both violent and nonviolent—spread across the country in response to Floyd’s death.
For some, Kaepernick’s words may feel shocking. Yet they are the same words that echo through hundreds of years of black American activism, inescapable to anyone who bothers to pay attention. James Baldwin’s explicit allusion in the title of his 1963 masterwork, The Fire Next Time, is to coming riots in the streets. The Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes cautioned ominously in the 1940s that “sweet and docile” black Americans may one day “change their minds.” The poem is literally titled “Warning!”
Decades earlier, there’d been the determined journalism of Ida B. Wells, whose Memphis newspaper was burned to the ground by white supremacists. Wells is best remembered for her crusading work in the 1890s, which not only documented the frequency of southern lynchings but also provided what we’d now consider data analysis in order to disprove the racist lie that lynchings were happening because black men had a particular lust for and inclination to rape white women. Less well known is that Wells also dispatched herself to the scene of cases of police violence, providing essential scrutiny of an equally American strand of homicidal impunity.
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want the rain without thunder and lightning,” the former slave Frederick Douglass proclaimed in 1857. “They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
“This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle,” Douglass continued, before arriving at a more widely quoted sentence: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
The power that is American policing has conceded nothing. Black men and women are still dying across the country as police unions continue to codify policies designed solely to shield their officers from accountability—such as rules ensuring that officers who kill can’t even be interviewed by investigators about it until their victims have been dead for days.
In the days since one of their own killed George Floyd, many American police officers have shamelessly brutalized the protesters whose chief demand is that the police stop brutalizing people.
In the days since the streets began burning, many have appealed to former President Barack Obama for intervention. Yet to suggest that Obama could silence the enraged screams of the streets is to fundamentally misunderstand the origins of the protests of recent years: They were, in part, a direct response to the perception among young black activists that his administration had failed to address persistent racial inequalities with adequate urgency.
“I voted for Barack Obama twice and still got teargassed,” the Ferguson activist Tef Poe said in 2014, after consecutive days of protests in which police deployed violence indiscriminately against demonstrators.
Obama did as much as, if not more than, any other American president to push for policing reform—yet as the former chief spokesperson for and political figurehead of the country whose police officers are carrying out the extrajudicial killings of black people, not even he can claim absolute moral credibility on these matters. Beyond that, though, is the reality that American policing as currently constructed is a matter of state and local government, and is not within the power of a president to single-handedly change. The symbolism of the first black presidency was potent. But the Obama-era reforms, ultimately, did not reduce .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/protests-spread-over-police-shootings-police-promised-reforms-every-year-they-still-shoot-nearly-1000-people/2020/06/08/5c204f0c-a67c-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html .. the number of police killings.
The Obama Justice Department launched an unprecedented number of “patterns and practices” investigations to force reform in local police departments, but those investigations were launched in response to only the most egregious viral videos and most questionable police killings. The department’s Civil Rights Division, limited in both resources and statutory authority, could not reform 18,000 American police departments.
“The inability of the Civil Rights Division to take on anything but willful misconduct, as much as I love Obama and (Former Attorney General Loretta) Lynch and everyone else—we failed on that one,” Roy Austin, a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights and a key Obama adviser on policing, conceded to me.
Not one activist I’ve spoken with over the years has suggested that Obama does not get it. But, on an issue rife with impassioned activism, they note the former president’s cool calculation—his studied avoidance of any comment or action that could backfire. (Recall, for instance, the outcry when he weighed in on the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.) Activists in Missouri observe that Obama never visited Ferguson, while allies of the former president note that his doing so could have prompted accusations that he was putting his foot on the scale of the investigation his Justice Department had launched into the police there; they also note that he dispatched then–Attorney General Eric Holder in his place. Obama has signaled for years that he does not see it as his ministry to lead protest chants.
“Obama has always said to me, ‘I was into community service, not community activism,’” the Reverend Al Sharpton, an adviser to both the Obama White House and George Floyd’s family, told me, by way of explaining the former president’s hesitation to insert himself more directly into these matters.
But in this arena too, Floyd’s death has spurred change. Those who have spoken with Obama in recent days say the former president is eager to use his platform to address American policing. Members of the Floyd family told me that they were impressed with the directness with which the former president tackled the subject in a recent online town hall, and some longtime activists are “increasingly satisfied” with Obama’s willingness to jump into the fray, Sharpton told me. After years of reluctance, the nation may be witnessing the birth of Obama the activist.
“We have seen in the last several weeks, the last few months, the kinds of epic changes and events in our country that are as profound as anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Obama said during his address on June 3.
Even more frequent than public appeals to Obama are calls for a “new Martin Luther King Jr.”—someone who could “heal” the nation by persuading the thousands who believe their government is criminally apathetic to their humanity to join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.”
These yearnings for a new Martin Luther King Jr. presume such a figure would have sufficient standing among white Americans—a group that collectively despised the original MLK while he lived—that he could succeed as a national unifier in a way the actual activist never did. This is such an outlandish assumption that one of the country’s most prominent young black comedians “joked .. https://twitter.com/jaboukie/status/1267069591072772096 ” that white Americans are obsessed with finding the next Martin Luther King only so they can make sure to kill him, too.
Such suggestions also require the absolute confidence that, were King alive today, he would continue to advocate for precisely the same tactics in response to today’s injustices as he did in response to those of the 1950s and ’60s—a conclusion that presumes unknowable things about what a man who has been dead since 1968 would believe today. For all we know, King might by now have become so fed up by this nation’s persistent failure to address the injustices he made it his life’s work to expose that he too would be picking up a rock. Even saints have their limits. The real King, the one who lived and died fighting American white supremacy, openly declared that American police “make a mockery of the law.”
“While he did not want to see violent protests, he understood violent protests,” Martin Luther King III, the civil-rights leader’s son, told me last week. “Someone had their foot on the neck of George Floyd, and society has had its foot on the neck of black people. And black people and others now are saying that’s not going to happen anymore.” Yet when the living Martin Luther King quoted one of his father’s most famous statements—“A riot is the language of the unheard”—his Twitter mentions promptly filled with comments from white people eager to explain to him what his own namesake would have wanted at a time like this.
“When I saw the video, I cried, and I wanted to destroy everything in my house. That’s the truth,” Yolanda Renee King, 12, the sole grandchild of the slain civil-rights leader, said during a private moment with the Floyd family on the day of his Minneapolis funeral service. “We have been mistreated for 401 years! This is enough! I’m tired of this!”
Family and friends of George Floyd visit the memorial site that was made by community members in his honor.
Martin Luther King III and other activists I’ve spoken with in recent days share a unanimous belief that this time is different. Years into the movement, the potential for true progress may finally be at hand, in no small part because the same cycle of unabated violence that has infuriated black activists is finally, due to the unrelenting stream of video evidence, forcing many white Americans to wake up.
For decades, police violence and impunity had been problems that, polling suggests .. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/03/10-things-we-know-about-race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/ , only black people could see. The street uprisings of recent years—in Ferguson and Baltimore, Baton Rouge and Chicago—were propelled by black rage; although they had allies, those who flooded the streets in response to those incidents of police violence were primarily black men, women, and children. Now white eyes have been opened too.
A Monmouth University poll .. https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_060220/ .. taken a few days after Floyd’s death found that 71 percent of white respondents deemed racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States—up 26 points from 2015. Nearly 80 percent of Americans—and 75 percent of white Americans—told pollsters that the protesters’ anger was either “fully” or “partially” justified. Forty-nine percent of white respondents said police are more likely to use excessive force against a black culprit than a white one, nearly double the 25 percent who acknowledged that fact in 2016.
“People finally see it. White people too,” Floyd’s younger brother Philonise told me as we talked in the lobby of the Minneapolis hotel where we were both staying. “My brother is going to change the world.”
When the day came for the first of Floyd’s funerals—his family held three services, in Minneapolis, where he died; in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he’d been born; and in Houston, where he’d spent most of his life—I stood silently, flush against the back wall of the hotel meeting room where they had gathered until it was time to depart. Gianna, Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter, twirled in front of me in her white lace dress. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, the black man killed by New York police in 2014, briefed Floyd’s family members about how difficult the coming hours would be.
As we walked to the limos that had lined up outside the hotel, I asked Carr how many funerals like this she’d been to. She paused before softly responding: “You know, it doesn’t matter. This one will be different. Because this one was just like Eric.” Garner, like Floyd, had spent his final moments crying “I can’t breathe.”
After a short, largely silent drive, we all filed down the center aisle of the sanctuary at North Central University. The crowd, probably about 100 people, rose to its feet and sang “Total Praise,” a gospel staple. To attend a funeral in the midst of a global health pandemic was an act of protest in and of itself. Most attendees wore masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. About half were dressed in dark suits and dresses. The others wore T-shirts and hoodies that declared “I can’t breathe” and demanded “Justice for George Floyd.”
To the left of the stage sat the dignitaries. Martin Luther King III in the front row, Senator Klobuchar—who now says she regrets never charging any police officers—and Representative Ilhan Omar in the second. A few rows behind them was Clyde Bellecourt, 84, a White Earth Ojibwe who in 1968 co-founded the American Indian Movement, one of the most influential movements in the nation advocating for Native peoples. The movement had been launched in direct response to police violence against Native people in Minnesota—the available data show Native people are killed by police at the highest rate of any racial group—and Bellecourt had brought with him an eagle feather to present to the Floyd family, which is the Ojibwe tradition’s highest honor. I asked him what he thought of the video of Floyd’s death. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” he told me. “Me and my people—” He paused. “We’ve seen a lot.”
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