A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Sneers of distrust crept onto the faces of the women. The men placed their hands on their hips in a gesture of challenge. In the heat and humidity, a layer of mist rose toward the ceiling. Bodies in the crowd became soaked and glistened; the gym seemed more and more like an overcrowded boxing arena, gauzy and smoke-filled and ominously overcrowded, heat and suspicion and sadness and anger all vying for too little space.

  Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Seamon tried to explain that the two Hispanics questioned the night of Robbie Burns’s shooting had been falsely accused. “We were convinced they were not the right people,” said Seamon, the large pair of glasses affixed to his face seeming to get larger and larger every time he spoke. People jeered and booed, belittling this pasty-faced man with his Sad Sack jowls. He vowed that the department would make arrests in the case as quickly as possible, and he was greeted by more boos, more catcalls. Almost at once a dozen voices filled the gym—

  “Bullshit!!”

  “We’re just sick and tired.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Shut your mouth!”

  It became clear what the people of Kensington thought of the Philadelphia Police Department. The police were spic sympathizers, shameless panderers in the name of political correctness and ethnic diversity and all too willing to turn their backs on the blue-collar whites who had filled the factories and labored in the sweatshops and made this city what it was. The cardinal sat speechless at a long table on an elevated stage at the front of the gym, those impeccable vestments looking like a Halloween costume. Rendell sat there too, sweat dripping down his face like thick drops of summer rain, acutely aware that the floodgates of race and racism had opened and would not be closed. His finger tapped over and over at the top of a microphone, but for one of the few times in his political life his kinetic energy had no place to go.

  The meeting had disintegrated.

  There were claims that the police responded to calls from Hispanics and not to those from whites who lived in the area, claims that it was unsafe to have a cup of coffee on the front stoop. Whenever Seamon tried to speak and counter emotion with fact, he was shouted down. When it was announced that a Hispanic police officer would no longer serve within the district, there were loud cheers. Within the charged crowd someone passed around a pamphlet for the Ku Klux Klan that included a number to call in New Jersey. “Are you Fed up with: Murders, Rapes, Muggings, Disintegrating Neighborhoods, Illegal Aliens?” it asked. “Then join the Invisible Empire.” A fight almost broke out, and plainclothes police officers had to step in to fend it off.

  The meeting ended after about an hour. Rendell walked outside, where hundreds more angry residents had gathered. Despite the best efforts of the police surrounding him, he became engulfed by dozens of sweat-drenched teenagers glistening under the hard lights of the television cameras. The blaze of the lights was blinding; every bead of sweat and every grimace was intensified and made almost surreal. The teenagers verbally confronted the mayor, but he did not shy away.

  “This country is really fucked up,” he said out of earshot of the media, as if there weren’t anything else you really could say, and suddenly the tension of the situation melted away.

  “He’s human,” said someone in the crowd with admiration.

  Driving home that night back along Allegheny Avenue, Rendell admitted to a feeling of complete futility. There were no physical confrontations, but the sense of anger and rage had been visceral, not simply in Kensington, but in so many other swaths of the city. There had been eight murders over the weekend, and Rendell had grave concern that it was going to be a brutal summer. In his public speeches, he had talked with passion about the difficulties that cities all across the country were facing. He openly warned those who thought they were so safe and so secure in the suburbs that they had better start building towering walls to fend off those who would eventually, out of despair and desperation, besiege them.

  The obliteration of Allegheny passed by, but as usual he really didn’t pay attention to it, perhaps because he was tired of looking at it, tired of dwelling on something that seemed immune to the best intentions of anyone. He wasn’t a miracle man, he was just a mayor, although he wasn’t immune to praying for another miracle.

  “What we need in this town is on every fucking weekend between now and September for it to rain,” he said from the whirring quiet of the car. “I don’t mean sporadic rain. It has to pour.”

  V

  But it didn’t rain the next day. Instead, there were only more issues of race and the all too predictable byproduct of racial politics, the charge of favoring one ethnic group over another pointed at the bull’ s-eye of the mayor.

  Roughly twelve hours after meeting with angry whites at the McVeigh gym, Rendell found himself meeting with Latino leaders in the City Hall Reception Room. They claimed oppression. They claimed misunderstanding and underrepresentation in the mechanism of the city. Without even knowing it, they made the exact same claims the whites had made the night before, only with the targets of persecution reversed. “The problems are still there,” one of the leaders told the mayor. “The hatreds still exist. The white sheets are coming back out.”

  Rendell agreed that whites in Kensington, in venting their frustrations, had chosen Latinos as a scapegoat. “The reason we don’t have blacks involved is because they’re not readily available to be scapegoats.”

  But various black leaders in the city, watching white and Hispanics dominate the headlines and personally address their frustrations to the mayor, felt like scapegoats anyway. The mayor might be trying to heal a city and hold it together in the aftermath of a terrible series of shootings, but this was no time for understanding or commiseration. To the contrary, with the mayor’s belly exposed by the Kensington shootings, now was the time to launch the harpoons because in the world of city politics, no mayor was a better mayor than a mayor who was wounded and bleeding.

  Rendell had been actively involved in politics in the city for nearly twenty years. He was no neophyte to the unseemly wars that had to be fought, to the compromises of racial appeasement, particularly in a city that was almost evenly split between whites and minorities. But when he became mayor, even he seemed taken aback by the power plays of racial politics between white politicians and black politicians and by how little of what they seemed interested in had to do with the common good of the city or with matters of racial injustice but, instead, had to do with amassing their own bases of power.

  Rendell may have been taken aback by the power plays of racial politics, but he was also powerfully swayed by them. He had a deep commitment to the black community in the city, and while much of the criticism he sustained as mayor barely seemed to bother him, the one charge that set his temper afire was the charge of racism. But beyond commitment, Rendell also had a political need to keep black elected officials happy and contented. He did not want to raise their ire, as doing so might in turn galvanize the black community, which might in turn encourage a black candidate to run against him in 1995. He knew he was potentially vulnerable.

  There was not a major decision or a major personnel move that Rendell contemplated without first screening it for racial acceptability, whether it was the selection of a new police commissioner, a new head of the housing authority, a new appointee to the school board, or a new school superintendent. He even got involved in the race of those picked up by the police in racially sensitive cases. Like ordering from a Chinese menu, if you had one from column A (the black column), you’d better be sure to have one from column B (the white column) as well.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the mayor met with leaders in the Hispanic community and less than thirty-six hours after he met with angry whites, he met privately with a gathering of African American leaders in the Cabinet Room at 7:30 A.M. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss the fatal police shooting of a man named Charlie Matthews in West Philadelphia the previous month. Matthews had been hit twent
y-two times by eight different officers. The police originally alleged that Matthews had shot an officer, but later investigation showed that the officer had been wounded by fire from another officer’s gun. Matthews did have a gun, but investigation showed that it was not loaded.

  “Does anybody care what happens to the African American community in this city?” asked Reverend Jerome Cooper, who was the first to speak. “Does anyone care when an African American is cut down? I want you, Mr. Mayor, to tell us what your moral leadership is in this case. I want you, Mr. Mayor, to tell us what we can expect.”

  There was the clear implication that Rendell, for what could be interpreted only as reasons of racial insensitivity, hadn’t been nearly as concerned about the fatal shooting of Charlie Matthews as he had been about the fatal shooting of Robbie Burns. But the raw assertion did not take into account the radically different circumstances of the two cases. Robbie Burns was a bystander on a street corner who had been shot from a car. Matthews, apparently inebriated, had threatened a little girl in the neighborhood with a gun. When police arrived to respond to a complaint, Matthews answered the door with a gun in his hand and refused to drop it. Far from being buried, the case was in the hands of the district attorney, whose office was evaluating the charges of misconduct against the officers involved. When Rendell tried to explain the city’s handling of the Matthews case to those present, discussion of it was dropped since the harpoon had already been fired anyway. Instead, the mayor was roundly criticized for his handling of another incident, one in which a black family, after moving into an all-white neighborhood, had reportedly been harassed and attacked by white residents over the July Fourth weekend. State Senator Hardy Williams accused the mayor of not reaching out to the family.

  Rendell worked feverishly to remain calm, pointing out that Williams’s assertions were not true. He had reached out to the family through intermediaries, and the family members themselves had decided that they did not want to become transparent symbols for the fodder of politicians. Instead, they just wanted to leave the neighborhood. In addition, when two blacks had been arrested for their involvement in the incident, the mayor, after personally reviewing the case, had ordered that a white participant be arrested as well. “We didn’t try to make them into political statements,” said Rendell of the family in question. “They wanted to low-key it. They wanted to leave.”

  But Williams didn’t appear to be listening. Rather, he had a loud and distinct message: “Many people in Philadelphia think the mayor really don’t care.”

  Another minister stepped in and said that the city was actually pressuring the family into leaving its home. She also claimed that the family had tried to contact the mayor’s office and had been rebuffed.

  Rendell leaped out of his chair at the head of the table, words tunneling out from between his teeth with venom, the pallid grayness of his face from pressure and lack of sleep bursting into a menacing red. He could no longer listen to falsehoods and badgering with a sweet smile of conciliation on his face. “That is baloney! That is baloney! I answer every phone call and every letter twenty-four hours a day! I am not going to let untruths be spoken here!”

  Those gathered in the room seemed almost to enjoy the image of a virginal mayor responding to charges of racial insensitivity by screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “He’s psychotic!” said Williams in a loud whisper to another member of the group.

  With the mayor more exposed and weaker than ever, the harpoons continued.

  “We need something clear and stated through your office that you do have a concern for all the people in Philadelphia, not just West Kensington. Not just white Catholics,” said the Reverend Paul Anderson. “A white man is shot in the head and the mayor and the archbishop are out there immediately. The perception is that these four individuals are of more value to you, possibly because the complexion of the man killed was lighter than mine.”

  Rendell, groping to regain control, said that maybe Anderson was right: he had not been as vocal in voicing concern about the Matthews shooting as he had been in showing concern about the Burns shooting, but it was not because of any purposeful agenda. Instead, he noted that he had been in the hospital for minor surgery on his elbow when the Matthews shooting had taken place. He then turned the discussion back to the city’s handling of the family that had been harassed and asked the Reverend James Allen, the chairman of the city’s Commission on Human Relations, to reiterate that the city had never pressured the family to move.

  “What’s the point of this?” snapped Hardy Williams.

  Rendell said that it was important to make everyone understand that the city had not tried to force the family to leave.

  “This is not what we’re meeting about!” snapped Williams, although it was utterly unclear what the meeting was about, other than to see how the mayor would respond with three or four racial harpoons in his side.

  “Come on, let’s go!” Williams suddenly said to those who were gathered.

  Rendell, still at the head of the table, calmly beseeched the leaders to stay, all too aware of how it would look if the press reported that a group of black leaders seeking the mayor’s humane response to their concerns had marched out of a meeting with him in a huff.

  But with the exception of one minister, they all left.

  “Goddamn it!” yelled Williams as he left the Cabinet Room, slamming the door with such theatricality that the room reverberated.

  “I was here ready to discuss,” said Rendell to the lone remaining minister. “I am embarrassed for the people who got up and left. If they are men of the cloth, I am embarrassed.”

  He also felt that in the game of racial politics he had been set up. Although he could not prove it, the departure by Williams and the ministers seemed staged, designed to send him the unsubtle message that these kinds of contentious skirmishes would become routine unless he started paying a little bit more attention to their agenda. He knew the media would seize upon what had happened, particularly since a notice of the meeting had been placed on the public relations news wire, which went to all the major newsrooms. With the departure of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Willie Williams for Los Angeles, the mayor was also involved in the crucial process of finding a new commissioner, and he felt that the real purpose of the walkout, much like a warning shot through a picture window, was to let him know what would happen if he picked a white rather than a black replacement.

  If nothing else, Rendell could take some solace in hitting the racial trifecta. On Monday, working-class whites had accused him of being callous and insensitive to their needs. On Tuesday, Hispanic leaders had accused him of being callous and insensitive to their needs. On Wednesday, black leaders had accused him of being callous and insensitive to their needs. The only elements missing were the fringe groups—Asian Americans, Italian Americans, gays and lesbians, the disabled, advocates for the homeless. But Rendell knew from past experience that their lack of participation was not a matter of restraint but was a matter of the groups’ own difficulty in figuring out a way to inject themselves into this particular situation. Robbie Burns wasn’t gay. He wasn’t Asian. He wasn’t homeless. He hadn’t died in a wheelchair trying to negotiate a sidewalk that didn’t have a federally mandated curb cut. But the mayor also knew that at some point during his administration all these special interest groups would be paying him visits, claiming woe and oppression and misunderstanding with such heartfelt poignancy that even the members of the press they leaked the contents of the meetings to would be reduced to tears if they weren’t on deadline. Several months later Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, would tell the mayor with all the profound outrage he could muster, “Do you know you don’t have a single lesbian in the administration?” Several months later State Senator Hardy Williams would be back in the Cabinet Room, this time claiming a conspiracy in the failure of a black police officer to get a promotion. Well trained by this point, the mayor would muster every ounce of goodwil
l and personally order a police review of the officer’s file. The review would reveal that dismissal proceedings had been started after traces of cocaine were found on the officer’s person. Several weeks later a group of Italian Americans, refusing to believe that a slip of the tongue was all that lay behind the dyslexic head of the city’s art commission referring to a color as “dago red” instead of “Day-Glo red,” would stomp into the Cabinet Room and tell the mayor they would march in protest unless the man was fired.

  It was in the middle of the white-hot heat of that meeting at the McVeigh gym in Kensington, with those layers of mist rising toward the ceiling, that a woman in sandals and shorts had come to the front of the stage. Her name was Mary Jane Burns, the mother of Robbie Burns, and although she had lost more than anyone else in that gym, she was the least angry. “My son Robbie was a peacemaker who did not believe in vengeance or rowdiness,” she said. “Everyone is doing what they can do. Take one step at a time.”

  The decency of those words struck a momentary chord. Rendell, on the way back home that night, seemed dazzled by such dignity in the face of such loss. “I mean if it was my son, Jesse, I’d be the loudest fucking one. I could never do what she did.” But in the aftermath, the jockeying for position and the probing of the mayor’s underside for weakness, the message of those words—peace, forgiveness, healing—had been forgotten in less than forty-eight hours. In the political world of the city, a city of fiefdoms and feudal lords and warring bands of self-interest, the death of Robbie Burns wasn’t much of a tragedy to anyone beyond his friends and family.

  It was the perfect opportunity.

  5