abandoning blacks to their fate when the going gets tough. The most graphic is a story called “The Space Traders,” about extraterrestrial visitors that appear in huge ships and demand all the country’s blacks in return for desperately needed gold. The political leadership initially resists because blacks are citizens just like whites. After listening to public opinion, however, they agree to the space traders’ terms. Derrick’s fable makes me think about Germans who died opposing the Holocaust, and about others who remained silent. How does a person make such decisions? I asked myself, and what would I do in similar circumstances? Is life so precious that I would become a passive bystander? I had no answer.
I finally did speak to my friend about his review. The conversation was difficult. He told me that for him it was all about the music, and that he often reviewed black performers in a very positive light. When the call ended, I felt that familiar ache of having caused pain to someone I cared about deeply, and who was no more a racist than I was.
But I also worried about what Bob might feel when I told him that I respected my friend and believed him to be a sensitive, highly intelligent person who was deeply distressed that anything he had written might have been taken to demean African Americans. I trusted, however, that the love Bob and I felt for each other would enable us to bridge the divide of the separate racial worlds that have shaped our lives. I also hoped that my relationship with my friend had not been damaged. No matter what Bob thought, I believed my friend to be caring and egalitarian. If I could not maintain a meaningful relationship with him, I might find myself adrift, uncomprehending as to what it is that I should be asking myself, and isolated in a sea of equally uncomprehending humanity.
23
Black Lives Matter
Curbing police brutality has always been a top priority of the Movement. Back when I first became an NAACP lawyer, the sheriffs and cops in the South were often linked to the Klan. In the North the police were a constant danger faced by African Americans. Whenever blacks ventured out of their ghetto neighborhoods, cops were quick to question their presence. If they talked back, beatings and arrests usually followed. Parents like Bob Carter constantly warned their sons to watch out, be respectful, and never talk back. In the 1960s black anger boiled over, often leading to deaths at the hands of the police as well as mass incarcerations.
In New York City the NAACP advocated a civilian review board that could discipline brutal cops. To that end Bob Carter, with me assisting him, met with then–police commissioner Vincent Broderick in the 1960s to see if they could agree on an appropriate program. Broderick, however, was all talk and no give. Years later the city experimented with a civilian review board, but it had no teeth, as it does not to this day. The police department also had an internal affairs division that could recommend departmental hearings, but police abuse of citizens hardly ever led to discipline.
Over my years in private practice I have handled a few relatively low-level police abuse cases and settled them all without going to trial. On a few occasions I unsuccessfully tried to impress on the attorneys who defended the city and paid my clients out of the municipal budget that their office should work out a protocol with the police department for disciplinary follow-up. Then, in the year 2000, a serious police brutality case came my way.
On February 4, 1999, police officers in a so-called street crimes unit shot down an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, as he was about to enter his apartment building in the Bronx. The cops claimed that they thought Diallo was about to draw a gun. Robert Johnson, New York’s first black district attorney, indicted the cops for second-degree murder, but the case was transferred to Albany for trial, and the cops were acquitted. That led to angry protests much like those that have recently rocked America in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Baltimore. While the wording on the placards the demonstrators carried then may have been different from the current “Black Lives Matter” banners, they expressed similar sentiments. A day of many disparaging remarks about the police and demonstrations that ranged up and down Manhattan, blocking traffic but causing little or no property damage, ended up at nightfall in a