The Parkland Massacre & The Pressing Need for Gun Control

16 of the 17 fatal victims of the
Parkland school shooting
(From NBC News)

Another day, and extremely saddening and confounding to have to say, another school shooting, this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland, Florida. Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, a 19-year-old expelled student, Nikolas Cruz, arrived on the school campus at 2:19 pm and, according to reports, began his terroristic assault  using a AR-15 assault rifle, ultimately killing 17 students and teachers, several of whom sacrificed their own lives to save others, and wounding over a dozen more. Cruz managed to escape with the fleeing students, walking to a nearby Walmart and then a Subway, but was later apprehended by police at 3:41 pm that same day as he strolled down a nearby residential street.

Reports suggest that despite Cruz's deeply troubled history at home and in school, the young man was able to purchase the AR-15 legally, in February of last year. Orphaned after the death of his adopted father, Roger Cruz, roughly ten years ago and his adoptive mother, Lynda, of pneumonia last November, he had been living at the home of a former schoolmate, whose parents apparently knew about the assault rifle and other weaponry he possessed. Cruz also had been working at a local dollar store at the time of the attack.

In addition to his expulsion, Cruz apparently was known for virulently racist and anti-Semitic postings online. Cruz has been pictured wearing a pro-Trump red cap, and a white supremacist leader also came forward to say that Cruz was linked to his group and had trained with them, though that assertion remains under scrutiny. One neighbor had videotaped Cruz firing off a BB pistol, and classmates stated that, before the murderous assault, they were concerned that Cruz might commit such an attack. Indeed, one teacher came forward to say that the school had been warned not to let Cruz bring a backpack onto campus. The FBI had received a warning about one of Cruz's disturbing social media posts on YouTube, in which he supposedly wrote that he wanted to "be a professional school shooter," but their followup produced no leads. The Bureau has since expressed regret for not being able to do more.

New York Times reporters Julie Turkiewicz, Patricia Mazzei and Audra D. S. Burch note in their roundup of news about the Parkland incident that "with this shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have come within the last three months." Since Adam Lanza's 2012 mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 438 people--children, adults--have been wounded in over 200 school shootings, and 138 have died. Moreover, there have been eight school shootings through the first seven weeks of the new year; to put it another way, as the Guardian points out, "guns have been fired on school property in the US at least 18 times so far this year."

School shootings since Sandy Hook, in 2012
Gunshot victims in school shootings:
Red dots = killed; pink dots = injured
(from New York Times)

Under any measure, this is a horrifying and unacceptable situation, though the persistence of such attacks, going back decades (remember Columbine?), and the continued inaction of the US Congress in tightening a range of gun laws--or even severely restricting access to firearms--underlines why these mass tragedies have become almost routine. Indeed, Congress and many stage legislatures, in thrall to the National Rifle Association and similar groups, have moved in the opposite direction, to loosen gun laws, allowing concealed carry provisions, guns in college classrooms, and so on.

At the time of the time of the Newtown massacre, then President Barack Obama vowed to address the crisis with legislation, and received support from many Democrats in Congress. But Republican leaders and legislators in the House and Senate refuse to enact new strictures, or even reauthorize lapsed ones, like the assault weapons ban. Early last year, Donald Trump even signed away the gun check regulation President Obama had put in place to make it harder for mentally ill people to acquire firearms. I should note that while violent crimes have plummeted in the US since the 1990s, other forms of violence, ranging from police killings of suspects to these mass murder events have not slowed. The US remains more armed than some entire foreign militaries, and guns, especially ones than can kill large numbers of people, are too easy to sell and purchase.  One parallel I noted on Twitter was the US's barely discussed but extensive wars across the globe, which continue under Trump's watch as they did under Obama, who inherited a number of them from George W. Bush; these external, almost shadow wars mirror the ones occurring inside our borders, where certain kinds of violence and, as we witnessed yesterday, slaughter have essentially become normalized.

One difference this time may be the outspokenness of the young survivors, who have not been silence since this incident. From outraged parents to students calling out Congress, Florida's governor and legislators, and Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, the outcry looks like it may have some effect. The key word, of course, is "may"; again and again after these unspeakable tragedies, which do not occur anywhere else in the world outside of wartime conditions with the frequency they do here, we have heard calls for regulation gun access, but the NRA and Republicans--and even some Democrats--stall meaningful legislation. Let's hope that this time is different, and that those slain and injured in Parkland receive at least one tribute they merit, which is to spur those in positions of power to do something, beginning with reinstituting sane gun laws and eventually going much further, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire a human-killing machine, in order to prevent any more massacres of this kind.

Black Lives Matter, Summer 2016: Sterling/Castile/Robinson--

Union Square, July 7, 2016
Photo © by Jack Mirkinson 

UPDATE: Tragedy begets tragedy...last night in Dallas, Texas, during a peaceful protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, a gunman or gunmen ambushed and shot five police personnel dead, and wounded 7 others. Also injured were two civilians, including a mother who was trying to shield her son from the bullets. Police officials identified the gunman, a 25-year-old African American US Army reserve member and veteran, Micah Xavier Johnson. The shooter allegedly was angered by the killing of black people and wanted to target white police officers in retribution.

After a standoff with police, they sent in a bomb squad robot, armed with an explosive device, and killed him. Police and social media had initially misidentified the gunman as an African American man who had who was openly carrying his registered weapon. (This begs the question of whether open-carry and concealed weapon laws do not apply to or for African Americans, Latinxs, and others, and only for white people.)

I mourn the deaths of these officers, and continue to grieve for the people I list below who were killed by the police or in police custody. The answer is not more violence, but an end to it all, and if that means that we have to rethink and then rebuild the very foundations of this society, built on domination, violence and oppression, then we must do it. But peacefully. And that means we have to begin by addressing one of the root problems in all of these deaths: guns, and their easy availability in the US.

On and on and on it goes. State-sanctioned police murders of black people. Veterans, lunch room workers, fathers, daughters, loved ones, people seeking medical help. Supply the category and someone searching through the roster of those slain can find a name to fit. This has occurred my entire life, in various forms, usually leading to marches and protests, calls for accountability and legal and technological changes, prosecutions of the police (which rarely happens), and occasionally, as happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, as in Miami and other cities in the past, uprisings. It is no less painful to witness, to live through today than it was when I was a child or teenager.

These last few weeks, these last few days, have filled with the names of the newly dead: Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Philando Castile in Minnesota. Angelo Brown and Stephanie Hicks in Illinois. Darius Robinson in Oklahoma. As the Guardian's statistics show, over 566 people have been killed by cops or while in police custody this year. The Huffington Post points out that 136 black people have died at the hands of cops. The highest rate in 2016, 3.4 per 1 million people, is among Native Americans, with African Americans dying at only slightly lower frequency at 3.23 per 1 million people. As horrifying as last year's numbers were, this year's should give us pause to reflect, and a charge to act.

I've written on here before about how these deaths represent a slow genocide playing out before our eyes--or some of our eyes--and how what these state-sanctioned killings, which mirror the state's brutality elsewhere in the world, underline again and again, as the Black Lives Matter movement has pointed out, is how dehumanized and disposable black people--and brown people--remain in this society, a fact that not only the Donald Trump campaign's imagery, rhetoric and surrounding discourse testify to on a regular basis, but also the toothless responses from Democrats and Republicans alike. (As BREXIT, the rise of the nationalist right in Europe, the Brazilian coup and state-sanctioned police killings there of black youth and teenagers, the fanatics in the Middle East, and so on make clear, the same could be said for the globe as a whole.)

While technology has allowed witnesses to these state killings to record and broadcast via social media imagery of what occurred, offering proof to what has too long been viewed by people not directly affected as mere anecdote or exaggeration and creating documentation, as well as a space for witness, memorialization and mourning, I also think that the subsequent hyper-circulation and replaying, as the news media often do, of the deaths can habituate and inure us to the deaths of these victims and magnify the suffering their loved ones feel, while only increasing the centuries long trauma at the core of this society. We have to look directly at what is happening, but to the extent possible, avoid turning these tragedies into spectacle. Moreover, they attest that our melancholia and fear are not groundless; it arises from the danger and blood that saturates the very ground we walk on every day. Many of us rightly fear that we are a cop's bullet or baton away from becoming a meme and statistic.

These deaths also underpin the ironic force and truth at the core of the statement that cannot be proclaimed enough, "Black Lives Matter." That this statement of affirmation has been turned inside out points to the perverse social and political logic in which we live. Like the deaths, the iconic phrase, and the movement that has arisen around it, demands that we realize and act upon the truth in the statements STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE & STOP KILLING US!

Here is a powerful poem by Jericho Brown that captures the horror and tragedy of these state-sanctioned killings and deaths in a way that only poetry can. The poem is called "Bullet Points," and I have borrowed it from Buzzfeed, where I first saw it. The copyright is Jericho's and Buzzfeed's.

Racism, American Culture and the Massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston

No sanctuary in this society, it seems, none. Not in our homes, not in the streets, not behind the wheel, not in a store, not in public swimming pools, not even in our churches. Nowhere in this country, it seems, can black people not live and breathe and simply be without fear of being hunted down, beaten, brutalized, killed.

Emanuel A.M.E. Church

On Wednesday the nation and world witnessed another example of this fact when a 21-year-old white terrorist massacred nine black people in the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, a South Carolina state senator, who had welcomed the murderer into the church to participate in a Bible study session, was among the slain, as were Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a mother of three and a high school track coach; Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian at St. Andrews Regional Library of the Charleston County Public Library; Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent graduate of Allen University and barber, who had attempted to shield his 87-year old aunt, Susie Jackson; Myra Thompson, 59, the wife of the vicar of the Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, a cousin of Susie Jackson and a longtime member of the church; Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, 74, a ministerial staff member at the church; and Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, a minister, member of the church choir, and mother of four. Tywanza Sanders' mother and a 5-year-old child played dead to survive. 

The terrorist, Dylann Storm Roof, of Columbia, South Carolina, fled the scene and was on the loose before being taken into custody in Shelby, North Carolina, after a florist spotted his car and called authorities.

While it is unknown why Roof chose the Emanuel AME Church, the oldest AME congregation in the South, founded in 1816, the church does have a long and visible civil rights history dating back to the 19th century, and Roof specifically asked for Rev. Pinckney and sat next to him. Among its early members, who included enslaved and free blacks, was Denmark Vesey, who attempted a slave revolt in 1822 before being betrayed, after which the church was burnt to the ground, its rites thereafter being conducted in secret until after the US Civil War. Over the years the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had visited the church, which played an important role in civil rights organizing the city and state, to champion black South Carolinians' right to vote, and his widow, Coretta Scott King, addressed and then led participants in a march for hospital workers' rights. Its leader, Rev. Pinckney, had pushed for body cameras for police officers in the wake of the shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston earlier this year. Before the shooting, Rev. Pinckney and the other Bible study participates openly welcomed Roof into their session, where he allegedly sat for an hour, disagreeing with the readings of Scripture, before opening fire and killing nearly everyone there in cold blood. According to a survivor, he also reportedly told those he massacred that, "I have to do it. You're raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go." Once apprehended, he confessed to the murders. 

Historical marker
(National Park Service)

After his arrest, journalists and online commentators pieced together clues showing the terrorist clearly had expressed anti-black racist, white supremacist sympathies and behavior. Roof's Facebook profile, which suggests he had a number of black "friends," shows him in one photo wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, both of which are considered racist symbols, while in another he perches over an ornamental license plate featuring the Confederate flag. Friends of Roof, including former classmates, a childhood friend, and his roommate, have since told authorities that he was known to make racist comments in high school, was ranting about Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, believed black people "were taking over the world" and sought racial segregation, was involved with "racist groups," wanted to launch a "race war," and yelled a racial epithet at and threatened to kill a black woman on the street. Despite all of this, no one felt the need to alert authorities. His friend Joseph Meek Jr. even removed Roof's gun, but returned it at his girlfriend's suggestion because he, Meek, was on probation.

Most appallingly from the standpoint of lack of prevention, Roof's white roommate Dalton Tyler said that Roof had been planning a slaughter for "six months," and Christon Scriven, who is black and the resident of a trailer park that Roof regularly visited, said that Roof outlined his murderous plot last week. "He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff...he was looking to kill a bunch of people." Scriven thought Roof was just being "weird" and joking, a miscalculation with mortal consequences. Roof apparently had never finished high school and was unemployed. Reports also say that his parents gave him the money for a gun as a birthday gift, and he has said that he bought it. His prior run-ins with the law include an arrest at a Columbia mall for possession of an unprescribed controlled substance, the drug pain drug Suboxone, and a month later for trespassing at that same mall. According to several news articles, he had been partially raised and recently living with his sister in Lexington, South Carolina.

As church members and people across the country were mourning the slain churchgoers, leading Republicans, including South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, unsurprisingly sought to deflect the discussion away from the obvious causes of the slaughter, as did some conservative news sites, making a mockery of the horror, the facts, and of Christianity itself. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had just come from Charleston on a fundraising trip, stated that the country needed to face "hard truths about race, violence, guns, and division," though the issue in this case, as with the relentless state violence against black and brown Americans, the expanding carceral state, government-enabled inequality, US imperial action against nonwhite people all over the globe, and so much more, has been the system and structures of racism and white supremacy that pervade every aspect of American life. 

It is not "race" or "racial issues," but RACISM, particularly anti-black racism, black disposability, and white supremacy, that are the problem. It is exhausting to have to keep experiencing and witnessing the effects of racism much as it is to have to keep pointing this out, but it seems that far too many people would rather not deal with this reality and connect the dots, since doing so may implicate them and expose their own  privilege. President Barack Obama was, for his part, somewhat better, calling out American gun culture and our distinctive contemporary problem with mass murders, and historicizing attacks on black churches and people, though he also danced around invoking outright the beast of racism and racial domination, whose visible symbol, the Confederate flag, is still flying at full staff at the state capitol while the US and South Carolina flags were lowered in tribute to the dead. (And its continued presence at the capitol is, I should note, the result of a compromise with its promoters.) 

Rev. Sen. Clemente Carlos Pinckney
(1973-2015, Emanuel
A.M.E. Church)

Yet it is not just the South's blood-drenched standard, but the silences that stand in for the act of naming, decrying and dismantling this poison that has continued to course through the nation's veins since before the country's founding, and which renders the statements with which I started this blog post, of no sanctuary, anywhere, reality for millions. The Justice Department, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, has announced a hate crime investigation into the attack. Yet the reality of living under the regime of racism and white supremacy in this country will not change, no matter how many federal hate crime investigations occur, unless we make a conscious effort to change things. Nor will we reduce the plague of gun-related murder, including mass murders, until we reform our gun laws and make it harder to get our hands on guns than than to acquire tickets to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. We have an immense standing military, funded to the tune of billions of dollars; we no longer need a "well regulated Militia" to maintain "the security of a free State." We must change this society for the better. We must. 

Despite their devastation and in the depths of their grief, many of the family members of the slain churchgoers have already expressed love and forgiveness. One tangible way you show your sympathies is to sign ColorofChange's sympathy card. You also can help out Emanuel AME Church is by going to its website and offering a donation here.

Justice Carlton Reeves on the Death of James Craig Anderson

James Craig Anderson
(Justice for James Craig
Anderson via Facebook)

At her Hullabaloo blogsite, Digby posted the remarks Justice Carlton Reeves, the second African American to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi when he was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010, delivered when he passed down sentences against three young white men who were part of a larger group that brutally beat and ran over a black man, James Craig Anderson, in Jackson, Misssissippi, in 2011. Justice Reeves gives an excellent overview of the racially motivated hatred that still plagues the US, so following Digby's lead, I am reproducing a sizable chunk of his commentary from the bench. I recommend reading the whole thing.

One of my former history professors, Dennis Mitchell, recently released a history book entitled, A New History of Mississippi. “Mississippi,” he says, “is a place and a state of mind. The name evokes strong reactions from those who live here and from those who do not, but who think they know something about its people and their past.” Because of its past, as described by Anthony Walton in his book, Mississippi: An American Journey, Mississippi “can be considered one of the most prominent scars on the map” of these United States. Walton goes on to explain that “there is something different about Mississippi; something almost unspeakably primal and vicious; something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest.” To prove his point, he notes that, “[o]f the 40 martyrs whose names are inscribed in the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, 19 were killed in Mississippi.” “How was it,” Walton asks, “that half who died did so in one state?” — My Mississippi, Your Mississippi and Our Mississippi.
Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history — slavery being the cruelest example, but a close second being Mississippi’s infatuation with lynchings. Lynchings were prevalent, prominent and participatory. A lynching was a public ritual — even carnival-like — within many states in our great nation. While other States engaged in these atrocities, those in the deep south took a leadership role, especially that scar on the map of America — those 82 counties between the Tennessee line and the Gulf of Mexico and bordered by Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama.
Vivid accounts of brutal and terrifying lynchings in Mississippi are chronicled in various sources: Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynching and Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, just to name two. But I note that today, the Equal Justice Initiative released Lynching in America: Confronting the Terror of of Racial Terror; apparently, it too is a must-read. 

In Without Sanctuary, historian Leon Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 Blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.1 The impact this campaign of terror had on black families is impossible to explain so many years later. That number contrasts with the 1,401 prisoners who have been executed legally in the United States since 1976.2 In modern terms, that number represents more than those killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom3 and more than twice the number of American casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom4 — the Afghanistan conflict. Turning to home, this number also represents 1,700 more than who were killed on 9/11.5 Those who died at the hands of mobs, Litwack notes, some were the victims of “legal” lynchings — having been accused of a crime, subjected to a “speedy” trial and even speedier execution. Some were victims of private white violence and some were merely the victims of “Nigger hunts” — murdered by a variety of means in isolated rural sections and dumped into rivers and creeks. “Back in those days,” according to black Mississippians describing the violence of the 1930’s, “to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway — so jest go an’ kill ’em.’ . . . They had to have a license to kill anything but a Nigger. We was always in season.”6 Said one white Mississippian, “A white man ain’t a-going to be able to live in this country if we let niggers start getting biggity.”7 And, even when lynchings had decreased in and around Oxford, one white resident told a visitor of the reaffirming quality of lynchings: “It’s about time to have another [one],” he explained, “[w]hen the niggers get so that they are afraid of being lynched, it is time to put the fear in them.”8 

How could hate, fear or whatever it was that transformed genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers? I ask that same question about the events which bring us together on this day. Those crimes of the past as well as these have so damaged the psyche and reputation of this great State.

Mississippi soil has been stained with the blood of folk whose names have become synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement like Emmett Till, Willie McGee, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Vernon Dahmer, George W. Lee, Medgar Evers and Mack Charles Parker. But the blood of the lesser-known people like Luther Holbert and his wife,9 Elmo Curl,10 Lloyd Clay,11 John Hartfield,12 Nelse Patton,13 Lamar Smith,14 Clinton Melton,15 Ben Chester White, Wharlest Jackson and countless others, saturates these 48,434 square miles of Mississippi soil. On June 26, 2011, four days short of his 49th birthday, the blood of James Anderson was added to Mississippi’s soil. 

The common denominator of the deaths of these individuals was not their race. It was not that they all were engaged in freedom fighting. It was not that they had been engaged in criminal activity, trumped up or otherwise. No, the common denominator was that the last thing that each of these individuals saw was the inhumanity of racism. The last thing that each felt was the audacity and agony of hate; senseless hate: crippling, maiming them and finally taking away their lives. 

Mississippi has a tortured past, and it has struggled mightily to reinvent itself and become a New Mississippi. New generations have attempted to pull Mississippi from the abyss of moral depravity in which it once so proudly floundered in. Despite much progress and the efforts of the new generations, these three defendants are before me today: Deryl Paul Dedmon, Dylan Wade Butler and John Aaron Rice. They and their coconspirators ripped off the scab of the healing scars of Mississippi . . . causing her (our Mississippi) to bleed again. 

Hate comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and from this case, we know it comes in different sexes and ages. A toxic mix of alcohol, foolishness and unadulterated hatred caused these young people to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs from the Mississippi we long to forget. Like the marauders of ages past, these young folk conspired, planned, and coordinated a plan of attack on certain neighborhoods in the City of Jackson for the sole purpose of harassing, terrorizing, physically assaulting and causing bodily injury to black folk. They punched and kicked them about their bodies — their heads, their faces. They prowled. They came ready to hurt. They used dangerous weapons; they targeted the weak; they recruited and encouraged others to join in the coordinated chaos; and they boasted about their shameful activity. This was a 2011 version of the Nigger hunts. 

Though the media and the public attention of these crimes have been focused almost exclusively on the early morning hours of June 26, 2011, the defendants’ terror campaign is not limited to this one incident. There were many scenes and many actors in this sordid tale which played out over days, weeks, and months. There are unknown victims like the John Doe at the golf course who begged for his life and the John Doe at the service station. Like a lynching, for these young folk going out to “Jafrica” was like a carnival outing. It was funny to them – – an excursion which culminated in the death of innocent, African-American James Craig Anderson. On June 26, 2011, the fun ended.
But even after Anderson’s murder, the conspiracy continued . . . And, only because of a video, which told a different story from that which had been concocted by these defendants, and the investigation of law enforcement — state and federal law enforcement working together — was the truth uncovered. 

What is so disturbing . . . so shocking . . . so numbing . . . is that these Nigger hunts were perpetrated by our children . . . students who live among us . . . educated in our public schools . . . in our private academies . . . students who played football lined up on the same side of scrimmage line with black teammates . . . average students and honor students. Kids who worked during school and in the summers; kids who now had full-time jobs and some of whom were even unemployed. Some were pursuing higher education and the Court believes they each had dreams to pursue. These children were from two-parent homes and some of whom were the children of divorced parents, and yes some even raised by a single parent. No doubt, they all had loving parents and loving families. 

In letters received on his behalf, Dylan Butler, whose outing on the night of June 26 was not his first, has been described as “a fine young man,” “a caring person,” “a well mannered man” who is truly remorseful and wants to move on with his life . . . a very respectful . . . a good man . . . a good person . . . a loveable, kind-hearted teddy bear who stands in front of bullies . . . and who is now ashamed of what he did. Butler’s family is a mixed-race family: for the last 15 years, it has consisted of an African-American step-father and step-sister plus his mother and two sisters. The family, according to the step-father, understandably is “saddened and heart broken.” 

These were everyday students like John Aaron Rice, who got out of his truck, struck James Anderson in the face and kept him occupied until others arrived . . . . Rice was involved in multiple excursions to so-called “Jafrica”, but he, for some time, according to him and his mother, and an African-American friend shared his home address.
And, sadly, Deryl Dedmon, who straddled James Anderson and struck him repeatedly in the face and head with his closed fists. He too was a “normal” young man indistinguishable in so many ways from his peers. Not completely satisfied with the punishment to which he subjected James Anderson, he “deliberately used his vehicle to run over James Anderson – – killing him.” Dedmon now acknowledges he was filled with anger. 

I asked the question earlier, but what could transform these young adults into the violent creatures their victims saw? It was nothing the victims did . . . they were not championing any cause . . . political . . . social . . . economic . . . nothing they did . . . not a wolf whistle . . . not a supposed crime . . . nothing they did. There is absolutely no doubt that in the view of the Court the victims were targeted because of their race.
The simple fact is that what turned these children into criminal defendants was their joint decision to act on racial hatred. In the eyes of these defendants (and their coconspirators) the victims were doomed at birth . . . their genetic make-up made them targets.
In the name of White Power, these young folk went to “Jafrica” to “fuck with some niggers!” – – Echos of Mississippi’s past. White Power! Nigger! According to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that word Nigger is the “universally recognized opprobrium, stigmatizing African-Americans because of their race.”16 It’s the nuclear bomb of racial epithets – – as Farai Chideya has described the term. With their words, with their actions – – “I just ran that Nigger over” – – there is no doubt that these crimes were motivated by the race of the victims. And from his own pen, Dedmon, sadly and regretfully wrote that he did it out of “hatred and bigotry.” 

The Court must respond to one letter it received from one identified as a youth leader in Dylan Butler’s church, a mentor, he says and who describes Dylan as “a good person.” The point that “[t]here are plenty of criminals that deserve to be incarcerated,” is well taken. Your point that Dylan is not one of them — not a criminal . . . is belied by the facts and the law. Dylan was an active participant in this activity, and he deserves to be incarcerated under the law. What these defendants did was ugly . . . it was painful . . . it is sad . . . and it is indeed criminal. 

In the Mississippi we have tried to bury, when there was a jury verdict for those who perpetrated crimes and committed lynchings in the name of WHITE POWER . . . that verdict typically said that the victim died at the hands of persons unknown. The legal and criminal justice system operated with ruthless efficiency in upholding what these defendants would call WHITE POWER. 

Today, though, the criminal justice system (state and federal) has proceeded methodically, patiently and deliberately seeking justice. Today we learned the identities of the persons unknown . . . they stand here publicly today. The sadness of this day also has an element of irony to it: each defendant was escorted into court by agents of an African-American United States Marshal; having been prosecuted by a team of lawyers which includes an African-American AUSA from an office headed by an African-American U.S. Attorney — all under the direction of an African-American Attorney General, for sentencing before a judge who is African-American, whose final act will be to turn over the care and custody of these individuals to the BOP — an agency headed by an African-American. 

Today we take another step away from Mississippi’s tortured past . . . we move farther away from the abyss. Indeed, Mississippi is a place and a state of mind. And those who think they know about her people and her past will also understand that her story has not been completely written. Mississippi has a present and a future. That present and future has promise. As demonstrated by the work of the officers within these state and federal agencies — black and white; male and female, in this Mississippi, they work together to advance the rule of law. Having learned from Mississippi’s inglorious past, these officials know that in advancing the rule of law, the criminal justice system must operate without regard to race, creed or color. This is the strongest way Mississippi can reject those notions — those ideas which brought us here today. 

At their guilty plea hearings, Deryl Paul Dedmon, Dylan Wade Butler and John Aaron Rice told the world exactly what their roles were . . . it is ugly . . . it is painful . . . it is sad . . . it is criminal. 

The Court now sentences the defendants as follows: [The specific sentences are not part of the judge’s prepared remarks.] 

The Court has considered the advisory guidelines computations and the sentencing factors under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). The Court has considered the defendants’ history and characteristics. The Court has also considered unusual circumstances — the extraordinary circumstances — and the peculiar seriousness and gravity of those offenses. I have paid special attention to the plea agreements and the recommendations of the United States. I have read the letters received on behalf of the defendants. I believe these sentences provide just punishment to each of these defendants and equally important, I believe they serve as adequate deterrence to others and I hope that these sentences will discourage others from heading down a similar life-altering path. I have considered the Sentencing Guidelines and the policy statements and the law. These sentences are the result of much thought and deliberation. 

These sentences will not bring back James Craig Anderson nor will they restore the lives they enjoyed prior to 2011. The Court knows that James Anderson’s mother, who is now 89 years old, lived through the horrors of the Old Mississippi, and the Court hopes that she and her family can find peace in knowing that with these sentences, in the New Mississippi, Justice is truly blind. Justice, however, will not be complete unless these defendants use the remainder of their lives to learn from this experience and fully commit to making a positive difference in the New Mississippi. And, finally, the Court wishes that the defendants also can find peace.

HUMAN MICROPOEM @ Protest NATO Rally, Chicago

The 2012 NATO Summit is currently taking place in Chicago, and as I need not tell anyone, the city's and state response to dissent of any sort, by groups and people affiliated with the Occupy movement, longstanding peace and anti-war activists, veterans, union members, and others on the left and left-of-center who expressed a desire to assemble and march without confrontation, has been really over the top. From the militarization of the police forces surrounding the site of the summit, the McCormick Place Convention Center, near Soldier's Field, including restrictions on access to major roadways and north-south routes; to an early-morning raid on Zoe Sigman's home in Chicago's Bridgeport section, which resulted in the arrest of 3 people, with 2 others arrested on different charges today, though alternative reports suggest that the arrestees have been framed or the charges have been trumped up as a deterrence; to violent responses to marchers over the last few days, including a brutal showdown at McCormick Place this evening, the state reaction to Constitutionally-guaranteed dissent has been reactionary and violent.  I demurred for a moment, I must admit, but only for a moment, before deciding to participate in today's HUMAN MICROPOEM, performed by a loosely-affiliated group of poets and performers sponsored by and affiliated with the experimental Red Rover Series, who have supported the Occupy Chicago movement in its earlier Federal Reserve of Chicago encampment mode, commemorated Veterans Day with a march to the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, and staged guerrilla readings at this year's Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago. More generally, "The Human Micropoem is a call and response choral form utilizing the human microphone at the occupy movements to amplify the speaker's words by those listening. The speaker says a line and then everyone who can hear repeats it."

I turned out to be the fourth of a quartet who convened as the HUMAN MICROPOEM from 11 am to a little after 12 pm, on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of Jackson & Columbus, just catercorner to the major March and Rally to Protest NATO in Grant Park (and directly across the street from the rump side of the Art Institute of Chicago), a legal, permitted rally at Petrillo Bandshell, in the park, to be followed by a march toward McCormick Place, with the Iraq Veteran's Against the War (IVAW) marching  in solidarity and culminating in IVAW members of IVAW conducting a closing ceremony in which they planned to return their medals to NATO.  We Human Micropoets performed original works, including declaiming from a collaborative poem by one of the poets, reading dictionary entries (cf. "revolution," "peace," "action," "silence," etc.), offering impromptu chants, and reciting poems by other, well-known writers (June Jordan, Czeslaw Milosz, Thomas Transtromer, Lorine Niedecker, and Siegfried Sassoon) writing anti-war, pro-peace poems.  We drew a decent number of onlookers and participants, who arrived on their way to the main rally in waves, leading poet and organizer Jen Karmin to astutely time the readings by the lights. Cagean, as she put it. (For longer poems, of course, this presents a little problem.) Well-wishers included a tyke heading towards the lake with his parents, and numerous ralliers who stopped to take pictures and record us, as well as others who wrote up the event. A reporter from AP Radio even took audio, while a young onlooker assured me he would post the video of us on his YouTube channel. (It's not there but when it is I'll add the link.)  After the event, several of us went and sat on the lawn under a cooling bower, and chatted and listened to the speakers at the rally, whose crowds grew larger by the hour.  I had schoolwork to attend to, so I couldn't attend any of the several marches that were to take place. I headed back north, and it wasn't until a few hours later, as I was walking to the train and passed flat screens in the open windows of bars on Clark Street in Wrigleyville, that I learned that there'd been a violent standoff between police and the marchers south of the rally ground, and that the medal-returning event had also ended with brutal state response. The ironies are too numerous to list.

I do hope to continue the Human Micropoeming over the summer in the New York/New Jersey area. Among the many things it has clarified for me are how important public, social performances of poetry can be; that any sort of text, not just a poem, can work under the correct conditions; and that certain poems, particular ones that can easily be broken down prosodically and syntactically, that have a looser rhythm and shorter lines, often work best.  June Jordan's poems were perfect in this regard, and their severity felt in perfect keeping with the gravity of what protesters have faced over the last few years. Nevertheless, performing Milosz's "Declaration," I had to catch myself several times not stopping at the sheer power of his language, which, even somewhat atomized, still bore so much beauty and force.  As always, a few photos:

A rally participant photographing Jen (article here)

Peace activists who joined the performance

Marchers heading toward the rally site

Grant Park, near the Petrillo Bandshell (Chiscrapers in the background)

Rally participants relaxing near us

Peace activists

People distributing newspapers and leaflets

Rally participants

As the rally site began to fill up