Colbert King is the Deputy Editor of the editorial page at the Washington Post. He has won a Pulitzer for his commentary. Today he writes about Ferguson in his Saturday column, in this must-read piece.
He starts with an incident from almost a century ago, where an employee of a Black college shot to death a dog that was part of pack killing the college's sheep. The White owner of the dog came and shot that man 8 times, killing him. Despite the demand of the college's president, there was no indictment, the all-White grand jury refusing to indict. The President resigned when the colklege's all-White board refused to demand justice.
King writes
That was Mississippi in the 1920s — a time when white men were justified in taking the law into their own hands in matters involving black men. That white Okolona farmer was simply exercising his delegated, albeit unofficial, police powers. The incident gave meaning to the assertion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott that the black man has “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Before you continue below the squiggle, remember this: Dred Scott is buried only a few miles from Ferguson.
Colbert places what happened in Ferguson in a much larger, longer history of the relationship of White police and Black communities. He starts with this:
In places like Ferguson, police represent white authority. Authority empowered to enter the community backed by the extralegal support of white sentiment. Authority whose word is taken against the word of an accused African American. Authority that not only arrests, but punishes, too.
Where else can you fire 12 shots at an unarmed teenager, at least six of which strike his body, and walk away?
He continues on quoting the Swedish sociologist and economist (and Nobel Laureate in Economics) Gunnar Myrdal, whose
An American Dilemma (for which his researcher was Ralphe Bunche, later himself a Nobel Laureate in Peace) was hugely influential upon the Supreme Court when it wrote Brown v Board and the parallel Bolling v Sharpe cases on school segregation, is quoted by King as follows:
“weak man with his strong weapons — backed by all the authority of white society — [who] is now sent to be the white law in the Negro neighborhood. There he is away from home.”
King reminds us that was written in the 1940s. He turns to the Grand Jury testimony by Darren Wilson in which the policeman offers his sense of palpable fear of being in a Black neighborhood.
I read Myrdal's words and thought about Wilson describing himself as a 5 year old grabbing the arm of Hulk Hogan. Read them again: weak man with his strong weapons
Wilson describe the neighborhood where he shot Michael Brown as a hostile environment, to which King responds
We are in a bad place.
King then goes on to describe his 20 year old grandson as gentle and respectful before quoting from the nephew Will's Facebook page:
“Regarding the recent events in Ferguson: I’ve always wanted to believe my country was free. But today’s grand jury decision tells me this cannot be the case. No country that refuses to hold the police, those so-called ‘defenders of the law,’ accountable for its unjust brutality — and yes, it is often very brutal — can be free. When the grand jury declined to charge Darren Wilson for his actions, what kind of a message does that send? . . . It doesn’t seem fair that police can commit brutal acts against innocent people and get away with it.”
Ponder those words.
Consider the impact of what has happened to the trust of the Black community in the Justice system.
Think back to the history, as I did when I saw the title of King's column. There were cases where Whites were indicted for killing Blacks, and then all White juries would quickly acquit them, with jeopardy thus attaching for the murders. I can remember the Federal government coming in and winning some convictions for violating the civil rights of the murdered - after all, one of the basic civil rights is not to be denied life (as well as liberty and property) without due process of law.
Colbert King is not an angry man. I have read his work for years, watched him on television. He often writes about imbalance in justice. I think particularly of the columns he wrote about missing Black girls about whom the media (including his own employer) and the general public did not seem to care when we would have media frenzy over Chandra Levy in DC, or another missing blonde.
Keep that in mind as you read these final words in the column, written in direct response to his grandson's Facebook post quoted above:
It’s not, Will. Not today. Not in your great-grandmother’s day when that Mississippi grand jury let that white farmer get away with murder. Not ever.
As I have noted in previous diaries, as a white who grew up in an upper middle class family in a comfortable neighborhood, who had the advantage of a good public education and attendance at an elite liberal arts college, I am the beneficiary of White privilege. My own activities in civil rights a half century ago and the fact that my nephew has children with his Black wife do not by themselves mean I am fully aware of the impact of the continued racism and the racial disparity in justice in this nation.
That is why the words of Blacks who are part of the intellectual elite of this nation speak so powerfully on what has occurred in Ferguson.
What I can do is ensure that those words get a wider audience.
Read the King column.
Pass it on.