March Madness

Last week, in East Flatbush, two New York cops shot 16 year-old Kimani Gray eleven times, believing Gray held a weapon while making threatening gestures towards the undercover officers.  Eyewitnesses claim the boy was fired on while lying on the ground, and that he was unarmed, though a .38-caliber Rohm's Industry revolver was reported to have been found at the scene. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke to the press about the investigation.

The killing inspired a mass vigil by local Brooklyn mourners, but soon reports of looting at a nearby Rite Aid escalated police response.

A community march was organized the following evening from 52nd Street and Church Avenue to the 67th Precinct, and included activist members of Stop Stop-and-Frisk, the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement, the New Black Panthers, Mothers Resist, and Picture the Homeless.  The march was blockaded by riot cops, mounted police and two helicopters.

The next night “nearly four dozen” people were arrested demonstrating in East Flatbush.  On Saturday, District 45 City Councilman Jumaane Williams organized a student workshop called "Students Taking Action Today," at Samuel J. Tilden High School.  The community event offered students "know your rights" training and primers on social activism, gang violence and police action.  There was also a radical performance by teen step dancers Limitless Regime.  “We decided to come because we wanted to show love for the person that died,” said 16 year old Kristina Agosto, “and inspire people through our step and the message we give in our step.” 

Last week also marked the anniversary of the 1965 Selma-Montgomery marches in support of black voting rights in Alabama. 

When SCLC field secretary James Orange was arrested in Marion, Alabama, demonstrators marched from Zion United Methodist Church to the city jail.  The marchers were pushed back by police and took refuge in Mack’s Café, where 26 year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by police while shielding his mother and father.

Jackson suffered eight days before dying from the stomach wound, and 45 years later retired state trooper James Bonard Fowler was sentenced to six months in jail for the shooting.

In response to Jackson's murder, civil rights groups SCLC and SNCC organized a march from Selma to the state capital.  As with last week's marches in East Flatbush, where factions of demonstrators split between Councilman Williams, who sought to corral mourners at a local church, and the rowdier outsider group End Stop and Frisk agitator Jose LaSalle, who called on followers to confront the police at the barricaded precinct headquarters, members of SCLC and SNCC often clashed on tactics.  SNCC wanted to avoid association with the politicking of the much larger and mainstream SCLC, while SCLC was cautious to adopt SNCC's bruise-browed ethos and backroads militancy.

The Selma marchers were besieged by Alabama law enforcement at Pettus Bridge.  

A white Unitarian minister, James Reeb, who had come from Boston to participate in the Selma protests, was later attacked at a local “integrated” restaurant by white thugs, and died two days later from club wounds to the head.  Reeb’s death made national headlines and was eulogized by Martin Luther King.   

President Johnson sent a private plane to escort Reeb’s widow, and made a speech in support of the Voting Rights Act which in his signature Texan drawl co-opted the archetypal mantra of the movement, "We Shall Overcome."  

As SNCC organizer and intellectual James Forman noted, "we felt that federal government should be utilized to break the power of the reactionary racist state governments, because people were living in a climate of fear from the state governors and sheriffs and so forth. And that we had to have some fire to break this grip of fear and this torture and terror inflicted throughout the South... and we were successful in that."

The resulting national attention to the unrest in Alabama, triggered by Reeb's death, served to popularize the President's signing of the Act in August. 

Issues related to Section 5 of the Act, which allows federal intervention in the election process of States where voter discrimination is “disproportionately concentrated,” will be decided by the Supreme Court this June.  In Shelby County v. Holder, local districts in Mississippi are disputing the oversight of the Justice Department which the 1965 Act initiated in State voting laws to ensure racial disenfranchisement would abate.

Also this past week was the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.  When the 15^th Amendment was ratified in 1870, allowing black men to vote, Harper's Bazaar satirized the change by comparing ethnic politics to a mud-pit of Irish brats.  Anglo city fathers saw no difference between the freed slave and County Cork boglander...