With Liberty & Justice for Some or for All?

The past is the present rolled out for understanding,
and the present is the past rolled up for action.

Will Durant

Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside of her apartment building in the early hours of March 13, 1964, right across the street from where she lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, in New York City. A week later, a story came out that 37 people, who were in their apartments at the time directly across the street, witnessed the attack, but none of them wanted to get too involved by picking up a phone and calling the police. Since the attacker then fled and returned later to finish the job, the two attacks occurred over the span of 30 minutes, the second ending Kitty’s life. If anyone had picked up the phone, she would have survived. But they didn't.

It would later turn out that the news story that reported this yarn to the public was in fact inaccurate, but it nevertheless became part of the lore of our society, one of fiction based on facts. That lore served as only one of the various different cryptic meanings symbolized in the room number in The Shining, of 237: as two danced with death in the pale moon light, and 37 watched as if they were fuzzy pictures on a wall. It turned out there were actually 38 people who witnessed the crime, but only two claimed to have called someone about it: one called a friend, and the other the police, an hour later.  

Today, a black man was murdered on TV, and 328 million Americans all saw it happen - a permutation of 2 callers out of 38 witnesses; how ironic. And the protests today, where much of the violence is instigated by people who are not acting on the part of the protests themselves, are nevertheless still more civilized than how white mobs reacted to far less crimes with far less evidence a century ago. 

 

One hundred years ago, for example, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history unfolded in Elaine, Ark., a small town on the Mississippi. Estimates run as high as 800 African Americans ended up dead, 67 indicted for inciting violence, and 12 black sharecroppers being sentenced to death. What was their crime? They tried to establish the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America to fight for better pay and higher cotton prices. 

That massacre was not an isolated incidence, however. Similar such massacres occurred that same summer in Annapolis, Maryland, and Syracuse, New York, and in big cities like Washington and Chicago. Hundreds of African American men, women, and children were burned alive, shot, lynched, or beaten to death by white mobs. Thousands saw their homes and businesses burned to the ground and were driven out, many never to return. And this all occurred over the summer of 1919, which, because of the bloodshed, was eventually branded as "Red Summer." It was the worst white-on-black violence in U.S. history.

In 1921, it happened again, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Known today as the Black Wall Street Massacre, this race massacre took place over Memorial Weekend, ironically enough, from May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history."

The attack came from land and sky, as the mob rented private aircraft to bomb buildings.  When it was all over, more than 35 square blocks of the district – at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street" – had been completely destroyed. According to a 2001 state commission, overall estimates of deaths ranged from 75 to 300 – of both blacks and whites. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (the equivalent to $32.25 million in 2019).

What was the crime that kicked off such white rage? A 19-year-old black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. Rumors of plans to lynch Rowland spread like wildfire through the black community, because such a practice was common in those days and in those parts. In response, people rushed to the courthouse to stop it. Tensions were high, shots were eventually fired but we have no idea by whom, and the race war was on. Charles Manson would’ve been proud. Because all you need is one person in such a crowd to be crazy and angry enough to want to see blood in the streets to start such a ball rolling.  

As if becoming a national pastime, it happened yet again, this time on January 1, 1923, in the small predominantly black town of Rosewood in central Florida. The massacre was instigated by the rumor that a white woman, Fanny Taylor, had been sexually assaulted by a black man in her home in a nearby community.  It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. A mob of white men – or what in today’s parlance we would calls “thugs”- marched out, not to determine if it was true, but to capture who they believed the alleged rapist to be: a recently escaped convict named Jesse Hunter. They then marched to people’s homes like Sam Carter and tortured him to reveal where Hunter was. When Carter failed to divulge Hunter's whereabouts under torture, because being black did not make Carter a GPS system for all other black people, including black people he had never met, they shot him. When the violence was over, the town was entirely destroyed, and the residents were driven out permanently.

In the 1960s, a kinder, gentler form of social massacre was instituted, this time by the rule of law, under the ruse of Nixon’s War on Drugs. With the help of Ronald Regan and Bill Clinton (Clinton later admitted it was a mistake and apologized to the black community for it), that system has been kneeling on the necks of poor black communities ever since, as people escape the pain of poverty through drugs are labeled as criminals while in more affluent neighborhoods, people hooked on opioids are treated like repeat customers suffering from a disease called "boredom." In fact, even Regan's top economic advisor, Milton Friedman, called the war on drugs "completely immoral," as has Thomas Sowell.  As former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman confessed to Harper’s Dan Baum: 

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the (Vietnam) war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The only difference between the massacres of 100 years ago and today is that today the killing is carried out one at a time, on your television, in living color, while the massacres have been replaced with mass incarceration. And the brutality of the penitentiary is now pouring out into the public square, transforming the American flag into the effigy of a hangman's noose swinging from a tree, and the ghosts of a century ago now rise from the grave and walk among the living. And as officers morph into jackbooted storm-troopers hungry for blood, they beat and stomp on the innocent, as they chant for Chucky in a blood red tie:

“one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”