Post 84 - June 3, 2020
Day 84…
At the Hotel Braddock, up in Harlem, police were in the process of arresting a woman. A guy, Robert Bandy, tried to stop it from happening and got into an argument with the arresting officer. The argument escalated and Bandy tried to grab the officer’s nightstick and the officer shot him.Bandy, an army private on leave, was taken to the hospital, where, it was rumored, he died.
This happened on August 1, 1943 and the incident sparked what came to be known as the Harlem riots. Hundreds were injured. Six people were killed. Many arrested. And stores, mostly white-owned, were looted.
Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor at the time, said that the riots had been sparked by radical agitators. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. a Harlem activist and church pastor instead blamed “a callous white power structure.” LaGuardia imposed a 10:30pm curfew, but only in Harlem, and that was the last time in our city’s history that we were put under any sort of curfew.
Private Bandy survived. He’d been shot in the shoulder and made a full recovery. The white officer was placed on probation for a year.
Bandy may have recovered, but nothing was done to deal with the underlying problems that sparked the riots when he was shot.
There have been other racially motivated riots in our history. A decade earlier, the riots of 1935 were sparked by rumors that a black Puerto Rican shoplifter had been beaten by employees at a Kress 5 & 10 cent store. There were lots of injuries and three people died. Many white-owned businesses were vandalized.
Two decades after the 1943 riots, came the Harlem riots of 1964. Those riots were sparked by the shooting death of James Powell at the hands of an off-duty police Lieutenant named Thomas Galligan.
A white building superintendent named Patrick Lynch who was annoyed by the presence of young black students sitting on the steps of his buildings, turned a hose on them. The angry and wet students started to pick up bottles and trash can lids and then throw them at Lynch. This attracted the attention of Powell and two of his friends who chased Lynch inside his building. As James Powell exited the building, Galligan shot and killed him. Six days of rioting followed with injuries, vandalism damage at least one other person dead.
The off-duty officer Thomas Galligan was cleared of any wrongdoing by a grand jury and all charges were dropped. His claim, that Powell had a knife, despite being challenged by every single witness to the event and the complete absence of any proof of its existence, was believed.
Nothing has changed today in 2020. We are demonstrating against the exact same systemic racism that has been a part of our American society since it was created. Nothing appreciable has changed.
During the Depression, people of color were often the first to be fired and the last to be hired by struggling businesses. In the 1940’s, soldiers of color were treated as second class citizens and segregated into separate units. In the 1960’s, the continued segregation, inequality, lynchings and overwhelming oppression of the rights of people of color all lead to the rise of the Civil Rights movement. 1992 - Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
And here we are again, right on schedule, because despite having made some tiny surface steps forward, NOTHING has really changed.
Last night our city-wide curfew went into effect at 8:00pm. No vehicular traffic was allowed in Manhattan below 96th Street. From the roof of our building last night, we could see police cars blocking off Columbus Avenue heading south. North of that, there were still busses running and there were more passenger cars, frankly, than we’ve seen in weeks. People were out walking their dogs despite the curfew. And there were demonstrators.
For the most part, apparently, the demonstrations remained peaceful throughout the city last night. There were some arrests for breaking curfew, but by and large the various crowds of people defying the curfew remained organized and focused.
Sometime around 10:30pm, a large group of vocal demonstrators was escorted by the police from the direction of Central Park past our building through to Columbus and allowed to proceed downtown at the blockade.
Yes, they were breaking the law.
“Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, revolutionary action, militant protest and organized forcible resistance, on the other hand.” So says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Henry David Thoreau wrote Resistance to Civil Government in 1849. In it, he argued that individuals should not allow governments to overrule their moral consciences. He was motivated to write this, in a large part, because of his revulsion to the institution of slavery. Martin Luther King spent his life engaging in Civil Disobedience despite the inherent danger to himself and his family. When Rosa Parks bravely took her seat on that bus, she broke the law.
I am not for one second suggesting that all laws should be broken. When there are laws on the books that deny segments of the population their basic rights, however, then it behooves us all to resist them. Any law that discriminates against one group at the expense of another needs to be resisted.
What about laws that protect the white supremacists’ way of life? Don’t we discriminate against them when we fight for equality?
White supremacists are not fighting for their equality, they are fighting for their right to have an advantage over everybody else. Their rights aren’t being infringed upon. Their advantage is being challenged because nobody has the RIGHT to have a leg up over anybody else.
What you have the right to, is EQUAL protection under the law. Laws that challenge that right need to be fought. Even if it means breaking the law. This country was founded on that principal. That’s why we fought the American Revolution.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
Since then, we have fought to expand upon our founding fathers’ initial impulse to include women. We have fought to expand upon that initial impulse to include members of the LGBTQ community. We have fought to expand upon that initial impulse to include people of color. We aren’t done yet.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Black lives matter. That simple idea. Not that their lives should be better than anybody else’s, but simply that they should MATTER. That’s what we are fighting for NOW because under our current way of living, they don’t.
The racism inherent in countless laws in both state and federal governments throughout the United States needs to be weeded out and destroyed. The laws that give me, as a white man, an advantage over my neighbors, need to be stricken down. As white people, I think we have come to accept our advantages as being part of our basic rights. They aren’t.
By giving up those advantages, we aren’t giving up any of our actual rights, we are just making it possible for everybody else to have the same basic rights we have. We have our rights AND we have an advantage. That advantage comes at the cost of somebody else’s basic right to equality.
Giving up this advantage is not an easy ask. But what is being asked is that we give back something we have that was stolen. It was never ours in the first place, we’ve just gotten used to having it. We have to fix this. Now.
We have some marching to do and some people to elect.
Let’s get on it.