(Director’s note: Dr. Abel A. Bartley, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University where he received his BA in History and Political Science, his MA in History, and his Ph.D. in History in African Americans and Urban History, is Professor of African American and Urban History at Clemson. Author of Keeping the Faith: Race Politics and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940-1970 (2000), Akron’s Black Heritage (2004), and In No Ways Tired: The NAACP’s Struggle to Integrate the Duval County Public School System (2014), which received the Stetson Kennedy Prize for best book on civil rights history. In 2004 he accepted the challenge of running the African American studies program, then a minor, at Clemson University. In 2007 he created the new Pan African Studies Program, a major, at Clemson, and served as its first Director. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
I cannot believe that we are here again. It seems as if I am stuck in a bad dream that keeps recurring. I remember my older brother marching in 1980 after a 33-year-old African American insurance salesman named Arthur McDuffie was murdered by police officers in Miami, Florida. McDuffie was accused of committing the grievous crime of running a traffic light. The officers originally reported that McDuffie died when he crashed his motorcycle, but the coroner found that his injuries did not match the autopsy. Eventually, the officers were accused of using their flashlights to beat McDuffie. We all believed that with the autopsy, the officers would be convicted of murder. However, amazingly, the officers were acquitted. African Americans and their white allies protested and marched, but black deaths like McDuffie’s continued.
In 1991 a video surfaced of Black motorist Rodney King being brutally beaten by four Los Angeles policemen. After a change of venue and lengthy trial, the officers were all acquitted. Like my bad dream, this sort of scenario does not end. African Americans get killed by the police or their acolytes, we march, we pray, we cry, we make high sounding declarations and yet the bad dream endures.
As Einstein once stated, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Why do the juries keep coming back with the familiar refrain, “Not guilty!”
After years of studying this phenomenon, I am convinced that we are aiming at the wrong target. Our anger, though understandable, is misplaced. We are blaming the police for our problem when we should be blaming the courts. Blaming the police for all of the wrongs misses the point. The police are just a part of a systemic racism that has historically oppressed people of color. African Americans were brought to America to serve as slaves and the American courts have never come to terms with seeing us in any other condition other than that of servitude. Consequently, Black life, progress, and, most importantly, deaths have never been celebrated or properly mourned by most Americans. It is obvious that the courts have never be viewed or treated African Americans as equals under the law.
During Reconstruction many progressive-minded Americans attempted to write equality before the law into American jurisprudence. The resulting 14th and 15th Amendments became precedent-setting pieces of legislation that ensured that all Americans are to be treated fairly and equally under the law and courts and provided them a powerful weapon to protect their rights. Unfortunately, the courts quickly undermined the Amendments. Despite the legally sound arguments of lawyer Albion Tourgee in defending Homer Plessy’s right to ride anywhere he could afford on a train in the South, the courts said that African Americans could be separated and subjected to disparate treatment. Therefore, White Americans were given carte blanche to establish an elaborate system of legalized segregation, now known in the South as Jim Crow, which separated and subjugated African Americans in all social, political and economic settings. The courts allowed the South to establish capricious unfair restrictions on the franchise, unilaterally disarming African Americans of their most powerful weapon.
The nation’s worse period of racial violence ensued. Of the violence Frederick Douglass wrote, “If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven … Alas!, even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven–yet we must still think, speak, and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.” Since that period, African Americans have been the constant victims of extralegal killings, whether at the hands of the police or their devotees. From Maceo Snipes to Emmett Till, the one constant that keeps these killings going is the assurance that the courts will acquit the accused. Therefore, we continue to get angry at the police, the lynchers, or the ugly racist when what we really need to do is reform a racist judicial system that consistently vindicates the accused if the victim is black and the defendant is white. I suspect that if police, racists, or others really feared that they would be held responsible for their actions, they would think twice about whether it was worth choking a man over a counterfeit $20 bill, shooting a 12-year-old boy over a fake gun, shooting Trayvon because he walked through a white neighborhood, murdering a 26-year-old because he jogged through your community, murdering a woman in her house playing video games with her nephew, or murdering a sleeping EMT.
So how do we reform the system? Let me suggest a few modifications. First, we must reform the laws to ensure that police are subject to the same use of force standards as the public. Secondly, the laws have to be changed so that police are no longer allowed to just stop people without a legally defensible reason. African Americans must become much more active on juries. Next, the Supreme Court must remember its role. The courts speak for those who are voiceless. They must maintain their objectivity and protect the unprotected. Lastly, juries have to see the victims as them. Juries have to be able to put themselves in the victim’s shoes. Whites see police officers as protectors, while African Americans see policemen as enforcers of an unjust society. Therefore, when police face juries, the juries have to see both sides.
I suspect that we would see dramatic reductions in these crimes if those who were horrified by them would mobilize. If the politicians who are so concerned about law would spend half of that energy on justice, we could solve this problem. But, as Frederick Douglass wrote, “But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence.” So, I say protest against police violence, make your speeches, say your prayers, remove your statues, change your building names, and make your resolutions. I applaud all of those who have demonstrated their outrage and participated in protest activities demanding change. Nevertheless, until and unless our courts are ready to hold those responsible who wantonly kill our brothers and sisters, we are just experiencing a recurring bad dream. Those in power know that if the law applied equally to all and if everyone had unfettered access to the franchise, it would mean a real realignment of power in this nation and challenge to their power and privilege. So, I suspect we will rearrange the furniture, change the drapes, fulminate and yet nothing meaningful will change. As a historian, I fear that after these rallies and protests end, we will go back to “American normal”—that is, back to this same bad dream.
Please America, reach into your soul and prove me wrong this time!