To understand Ferguson and all that word has come to mean, it’s important to see the tragic killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown as a spark. And a spark is not a fire.
A spark can fall on bare or damp ground and nothing more will come of it. But if that same spark falls on dry tinder, tinder that has baked in the hot sun and accumulated unnoticed for decades, what you get is fire. What we’ve gotten is Ferguson.
On Monday night, the fire that is Ferguson came to Atlanta, peacefully and constructively. More than a thousand Atlanta-area residents, most of them black Americans, flocked to a quickly called community meeting at Ebenezer Baptist Church. They came to hear U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others talk about police and community relations, about the militarization of police force, about the hazards faced by those in law enforcement and about the hazards faced by those who are confronted by law enforcement.
In his opening prayer, the Rev. Frank Brown, head of Concerned Black Clergy, read off a long list of names of young black men, from Amadou Diallo through Michael Brown, who had died at the hands of white law enforcement, and he urged those in attendance to work to “save our children rather than bury our children.”
He also called upon the black community to look within itself, insisting that “we must also be angry when we experience black-on-black violence.”
“What are we doing, or not doing, in our homes and in our churches, so that our young men are not ending up on the wrong end of a gun?” he asked the crowd.
When Holder rose to speak — introduced as the nation’s first black attorney general — he was greeted with an emotional standing ovation. He told the crowd that he had come to the home church of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to launch a nationwide effort to improve the relationship between law enforcement and those they are sworn to protect. Although he did not use those words, he had come to begin sweeping away the dry tinder.
“Without mutual understanding between citizens – whose rights must be respected – and law enforcement officers – who make tremendous and often-unheralded personal sacrifices every day to preserve public safety – there can be no meaningful progress,” he said.
Faith in government is proportional to the sense of control that people have over it. White conservatives look at Washington and see a government headed by Barack Obama, with Holder running the Justice Department, and they see a government that they fear they do not control, and thus cannot trust.
Speaker after speaker at Ebenezer Baptist Monday night described a similar dynamic of distrust between black America and local law enforcement. However, the distrust that they described is even more visceral, in part because of the long, not-forgotten history of law enforcement in the political repression of black America, and in part because the interaction between government and citizen at that level is much more personal and the power differential much more stark.
In Holder’s words, “Our police officers cannot be seen as an occupying force disconnected from the communities they serve.” That antagonistic relationship creates fear and resentment on all sides, and fear and resentment get people killed for no good reason.
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