| On February 1, 1960, Ezell A. Blair Jr. (also known as Jibreel Khazan), David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and Franklin Eugene McCain - all students at North Carolina A & T, walked into a Woolworth's in Greensboro NC and sat down at the lunch counter. Seats were for whites only. On that first day, the four were not arrested, but they had started a movement that would soon spread, first across the South, then across the nation. By Feb. 5 more than 300 students were showing up to sit in at that Woolworth's, to protest the fact that whites could be served while sitting but not blacks.
These were not the first sit-ins, not even of lunch counters. Previously blacks had sat in at libraries, and at lunch counters in places like Oklahoma. But this 1960 event began a mass movement, and it is properly commemorated as one of the signature events of the Civil Right Movement, with part of that lunch counter now enshrined here in DC at the Museum of American History.
Let's return to Herbert. He gives us the statistics from the first 3/4 of 2009 of random stops by the NYC police:
84% were of Blacks or Hispanics
Percentage of those stopped with contraband:
Blacks 1.6%
Hispanics 1.5%
Whites 2.2%
But Whites were stopped much less frequently.
Weapons found:
Blacks 1.1%
Hispanics 1.4%
Whites 1.7%
Only about 6% of the stops resulted in arrests for any reason
How about who is frisked by police?
Blacks 56.6%
Hispanics 59.4%
Whites 46%
But keep in mind, whites composed fewer than 16 percent of the people stopped in the first place.
These encounters with the police are degrading and often frightening, and the real number of people harassed is undoubtedly higher than the numbers reported by the police. Often the cops will stop, frisk and sometimes taunt people who are at their mercy, and then move on - without finding anything, making an arrest, or recording the encounter as they are supposed to.
... or recording the encounter as they are supposed to
Perhaps you are tempted to say something like, if people are doing nothing wrong, why should they object? After all, are not the police attempting to keep them safe?
That would put you in the company of Paul Browne, spokesman for Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has called the stops "life-saving" and argued that the racial makeup of the people stopped and frisked is proportionally similar to the racial makeup of people committing crimes.
One slight problem. It is called the 14th Amendment. There is this little thing called the Equal Protection Clause, which as it happens we have just studied in my non-AP classes, which are majority Black and Hispanic. It says that no state (and a city is constitutionally part of the state) shall deny any person the equal protection of the law. Race is a suspect classification, subject to strict scrutiny by the Courts, for which a state/local government has to demonstrate a compelling state interest to sustain such discrimination. The statistics on contraband and weapons would seem to undercut any such compelling interest, wouldn't they.
But it is much more basic. Consider what this means. Allow me to offer another quote from Herbert to illustrate: People going about their daily business, bothering no one, are menaced out of the blue by the police, forced to spread themselves face down in the street, or plaster themselves against a wall, or bend over the hood of a car, to be searched. People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct.
I am white, middle-class, and middle-aged. That is not likely to happen to me. When I was in my early 20s and long-haired, I might experience a small sense of that because NYC cops viewed me as a dirty hippy. The one time I got grabbed by a cop, watching a demonstration in Grand Central Station, I quoted his badge number back to him and he let me go. I might have had long hair, but I was white, and knew how the system worked.
That is not the experience of some of my students, of their families.
Fifty years ago black college students sat in for basic dignity - the right to be served at a lunch counter.
Fifty years later what are they supposed to do to protest this continued discrimination?
And how pray tell is how the NY Police Department acting not redolent of a Police State, at least in incipient form?
How am I supposed to teach my young Black and Hispanic students about the rights to which they are entitled when this kind of inappropriate, illegal, and unconstitutional violation of rights of those like them goes unchecked,is even justified? That it continues even after a prominent columnist in the most important newspaper in the country writes about it repeatedly?
Think about Skip Gates in his home in Massachusetts?
Think about prominent, well-dressed black men who still cannot get a cab.
Think about how anti-immigrant feelings are enflamed by the talk-radio and mean-spirited politicians seeking to gain an advantage, and what that means for anyone who looks Hispanic, or has a Spanish-sounding last name, even if his or her family has been in what is now the United States for several hundred years before the first ancestor of that Irish cop arrived after the potato blight? And has that Irish Cop forgotten the discrimination against his forebears? Or the working-class white cop from the South whose forebears were considered "white trash"???
I am white, middle class, and middle aged. Discrimination against anyone is wrong. It does not matter that this time it is not me. Next it could be my two great-nieces, who like Barack Obama, are half black. It could be my niece who is half Native American. It could be my three nephews who are half Hispanic. It could be any of my students, of mixed background, or completely of some "minority" group - although I remind people that increasingly White are no longer a majority.
And then it could be you, or me. Why? Perhaps you look "gay." Or you practice a different religion, or no religion. Or since you are a Wiccan you are a witch and represent a threat. Or - heaven forbid - you look or sound Muslim (although most Arabs in this country are Christian and most Muslims are not Arab).
Plessy v Ferguson is now supposed to be totally obsolete. We are not supposed to be making such distinctions. But even the election of a President with a Muslim name and a Black skin has not changed the racism that is still a part of our culture.
We may not be able to change the hearts and minds of some people. But we sure as hell can stop official government action that is discriminatory, on race or any other non-legitimate grounds.
Jim Crow Policing? That phrase should be repugnant to any sentient creature. It is a betrayal of the principles of this nation that I am supposed to teach to my students. It is a betrayal of the peaceful attempts to get this nation to live up to those principles, an attempt we call the Civil Rights Movement.
Fifty years ago yesterday four young men sat in at a lunch counter for basic dignity and started a movement that helped begin to change this nation.
If we allow Jim Crow Policing, we turn our back on what progress was made.
I am white, middle class, and middle aged. I am appalled by what the NYC police are doing. It offends my basic sense of decency. In a city that saw the abuse of Abner Louima, even petty indignities need to be stopped immediately.
These are not petty indignities. Let me repeat what this means: People going about their daily business, bothering no one, are menaced out of the blue by the police, forced to spread themselves face down in the street, or plaster themselves against a wall, or bend over the hood of a car, to be searched. People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct.
I don't want that for you. I don't want that for me. I don't want that for my students. I don't want that for anyone.
I am white, middle class, middle aged. I lived through the Civil Rights Movement. I played some very minor part in my own participation.
How sad to think that a half century later we still need to remind people that racially disparate treatment is not only morally wrong, it is a violation of what should be our core principles.
I am white, middle class, middle aged. I do not wish to be the beneficiary of Jim Crow Policing, or any other improper disparate treatment.
What about you? |
