12
street roots
Aug. 5, 2011
Black, professional, well-educated. And stopped by the cops
BY JOE MARTIN
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R ITER
n 1959, a white Texan by the name of
John Howard Griffin undertook a most
unusual experiment: by ingesting an oral
medication and exposing himself to
ultraviolet rays his skin went from white to
black. He did not gaze into a mirror until
the process was complete. When he finally
did so he was thunderstruck: “The
transformation was total and shocking. I had
expected to see myself disguised but this
was something e lse .... I looked into the
mirror and saw nothing of the white John
Griffin’s p a s t ... The Griffin that was had
become invisible.” And in that moment he
stepped into another universe where
nothing had changed, and yet everything
had changed for him as a person. Suddenly
he was perceived as a black man in America.
Griffin’s six weeks as a man with darkened
skin in the American South were chronicled
famously in his book “Black Like Me.”
How different would Griffin’s experience
be today? The essays that comprise “Twelve
Angry Men” give urgent testimony to the
ongoing emotional and social currency of
race in our time and of blackness in
particular. Of the 12 authors assembled,
most are professionals who have achieved
considerable status in academia, journalism,
the arts and the legal profession. All have
Stories of encounters with police for simply
being black.
While the notable Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is not one , of the
contributors to this volume, his infamous
run-in with Cambridge Pplice Sergeant
James Crowley made the headlines and is
recounted in the book’s introduction by
another black Harvard professor, Lani
Guinier. Gates was trying to get into his
home when a neighbor reported that a
prowler might be trying to break iiitb the
house. Gates would be arrested on his
porch for disorderly conduct when he
protested Crowley’s interrogation. Crowley
is white. Eventually President Obama
brought Gates and Crowley together for a
beer and a discussion at the White House.
Writes Guinier: “Hollywood could not have
I
Twelve Angry
Men: True
Stories of Being
a Black Man in
America Today.
Edited by Gregory
S. Parks and
Matthew W.
Hughey.
m ug shot after being arrested as a prowler at
his own home.
asked for a more cinematic display of the
many ways we each “read” race against the
backdrop of history, culture, and our
individual capacity to exercise power or
wield authority.”
Veteran journalist Solomon Moore details
his experience with racial profiling when he
wasresearching a story on gang life for the
New York Times. Over the years he states
that he has been stopped by police, for no
ostensible reason, on numerous occasions.
One paitietilar njght in 2007, he was in the *
initial stage of a conversation with about a
dozen black men on a sidewalk in Salisbury,
North Carolina. These men didn’t know
Moore and they were wary of him. “I’m a
reporter. I’m trying to talk to you about
your neighborhood.” He was in the process
of showing them his reporter’s identification
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it
July-November 2011
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The most important 104 pages you’ll fin d under one cover!
when three police cars suddenly showed up.
One officer was black, another female. The
third cop, a tall white man, ordered Moore
to approach him and Moore was summarily
“shoved face down on the sheet metal and
cuffed,”
He was let go but angrily said to the
officers: “This is America. I have a right to
talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”
Unmoved by this assertion, the cops drove
off leaving him to resume his conversation
with the locals who had observed the
drama. Moore’s credibility was not
enhanced much in their eyes. One young
man told him, “Man, you know what would
have happened to us if we had talked to
them that way? We’d be in jail right now.”
Even a respected Major League ball
player like Joe Morgan, now a TV and radio
commentator, can get seriously hassled and
even roughed up for doing nothing remotely
illegal. He writes of the day in 1988 when at
the L.A. airport he went to a phone booth
to make a, call. Morgan had just been
chatting pleasantly with some friendly fans
who recognized him and were thrilled to be
speaking with this well-known athlete and
celebrity. “As I was dialing my number, a
guy put his hand on my shoulder and
forcefully whirled me around.” When one of
the fans protested what was happening — ,
“That’s Joe Morgan, the broadcaster, the
baseball star. I was on the plane with him
from Oakland.” — the fan was told to get lost
or face arrest too. “Over the next hours, the
nightmare deepened, and it was,all because.
I was just another black man.” Morgan
would file a lawsuit against the LAPD. A
jury awarded him more than $500,000 in
damages.
A perusal of this readable collection
reveals starkly that the dream of a genuinely
post-racial society is yet a distant vision.
However, it will enlighten many—— -— —----
conscientious citizens who never have to
worry if the hue of their skin might alone
cause frustrating, frightening, and
sometimes violent encounters with forces of
the law.
Reprinted courtesy o f Real Change News,
Seattle, Wash.
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