by Dan Barry
Although the community’s anger and sorrow are always present, informing the nightly theater, and although the setting evokes military siege, this week has also had moments, often unreported, that approach the festive. Here, one night, is an ice cream truck. Here, another night, are people sitting in folding chairs.
And here comes a Thomas the Tank Engine-like train, owned by a St. Louis amusement company, doing a loop to the strains of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
“We do bouncy houses, kids’ parties,” said the train’s minder, Jermaine Hayes. “And this is the ‘peace train.’”
Even the police officers, standing in a row outside the closed but well-lit McDonald’s, become background photo ops for selfies, now that the news media have had their fill of such images.
But then something happens—another tossed water bottle, say—prompting a finger-snap change in the dynamic, summoning recent memories of tear gas, and attracting the high beam of a helicopter’s spotlight from somewhere above.
Late Tuesday, some clergy members held a prayer service to encourage a peaceful end to the day’s protests, but you could detect a tense tug of war for control of the night. Something happened, and suddenly, clutches of armed officers were rushing into an area reserved for the news media.
Reporters scattered, tweeting and tripping.
This occurred more than once, the police thrusts nudging the crowd, alternately anxious and defiant, south, and out, to end the night and to highlight the news media’s role in the story.
“Media, will you please get out of our way!” a police official demanded through a loudspeaker. “We’re trying to do our job!”
Brian Schellman, a police officer and spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department, said that a few agitators had been using the news media as shields. “You have a sea of media and a sea of protesters,” he said. “When you’re on street level—Who did that?—that’s a real challenge to determine who.”
But even jangled moments like this have become accepted into the rhythms of the night, as participants wait for a waning interest in protests; for the start of the delayed school year; for news on whether Officer Wilson is indicted.
As the days blur, the many participants continue to speculate about when the plywood might be removed from storefront windows to reveal a West Florissant not occupied by the police and the news media. But they know that periods of calm have come, and gone, before.
Wednesday night, at least, was less tense than Tuesday night. The ever-moving band of protesters was noticeably smaller, only a half-dozen people were arrested, and glorious lightning flashes caused most of the brightness from above.
Reporters walking back to their cars encountered several armed soldiers at checkpoints along the way. Good night, they said, and good night, we said, like people passing at the end of another long shift.
A Quiet Act of Decency Soars over Messages of Hate
COLUMBIA, S.C.—JULY 26, 2015
What the black state trooper saw was a civilian in distress. Yes, this was a white man, attending a white supremacist rally in front of the South Carolina State House. And yes, he was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika.
But the trooper concentrated only on this: an older civilian, spent on the granite steps. Overcome, it appeared, by an unforgiving July sun and the recent, permanent removal of a Confederate flag from state capitol display.
The trooper motioned for help from the Columbia fire chief, who is also black. Then, with a firm grip, he began walking the wilted white man up the steps toward the air-conditioned oasis of the State House. As they climbed, another state employee snapped a photograph to post on Twitter, where it continues to be shared around the world.
The meaning of this image—of a black officer helping a white supremacist, both in uniform—depends on the beholder. You might see a refreshing coda to the Confederate flag controversy; a typical day for a law enforcement professional; a simplification of racial tensions that continue. But what does the trooper see?
His name is Leroy Smith, and he happens to be the director of the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. He was at the rally, working crowd control, because he likes to signal to his 1,300 subordinates that he has their backs.
Mr. Smith said he was taken aback by the worldwide attention but hoped the image would help society move past the recent spasms of hate and violence, including last month’s massacre of nine black people in a church in Charleston. Asked why he thinks the photo has had such resonance, he gave a simple answer: Love.
“I think that’s the greatest thing in the world—love,” said the burly, soft-spoken trooper, who is just shy of 50. “And that’s why so many people were moved by it.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Smith donned a dark business suit to join Gov. Nikki R. Haley and thousands of others in witnessing an honor guard of seven of his troopers march stone-faced toward a flagpole on the State House grounds. There, a few feet from a soaring Confederate monument, the white-gloved troopers lowered the Confederate flag in 30 seconds and presented it to an official from a state-supported museum.
Just like that, a red-blue-and-white battle flag—representing Southern white pride to some, Southern black oppression to others—was removed from the whims of the South Carolina breeze.
A different sort of photograph had helped to end the flag’s official stature. After images surfaced of the suspect in the Charleston shootings, a white man named Dylann Roof, posing with the Confederate flag—and after families of the victims publicly forgave him—Governor Haley said: Enough. Legislation was swiftly drafted, a law was signed, and this flag of pride was demoted to relic.
As Mr. Smith watched the flag rolled up and history unfold, he felt chills running along his spine. “Very moving,” he nearly whispered.
Now, on a hot Saturday afternoon eight days after that emotional ceremony, Mr. Smith was back at the capitol, only this time in his gray uniform and broad-brimmed campaign hat. A group called the Black Educators for Justice would be rallying in the early afternoon on the north side of the State House. And on the south side, a couple of hours later, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would be demonstrating.
It promised to be a busy day.
Mr. Smith watched from the north side’s top granite step as black demonstrators vented their frustrations. Then he walked through the blessed cool of the State House to the south side, which faces the back of a statue of Strom Thurmond, the longtime senator and segregationist.
Bike-rack barricades had been arrayed to separate the white-supremacist demonstrators from a swelling crowd of people, some fresh from the black-empowerment rally on the north side. “You could kind of feel the tension in the air,” Mr. Smith recalled.
Soon the demonstrators, a few dozen, came marching from the west, flanked by Mr. Smith’s “advance civil emergency response team.” Many wore the black shirts of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization that, according to its website, believes: “Only those of pure White blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Noncitizens may live in America only as guests and must be subject to laws for aliens. Accordingly, no Jew or homosexual may be a member of the nation.”
These people entered their State House pen and waved their Confederate flags. The public-address system they were said to have ordered never arrived, so all they could do was exchange taunts with hecklers and issue occasional bleats of “White power!” and “Wooo!”
The heat turned up a notch: a bottle thrown, some jostling at the barricades. Mr. Smith called his commanders down to a lower level because, he said, “we were getting ready to work a little.”
Then a demonstrator directed his attention to an older man all but melting on a bottom step. “He looked fatigued, lethargic—weak,” Mr. Smith said. “I knew there was something very wrong with him.”
He called up the steps to the Columbia fire chief, Aubrey Jenkins, for assistance. Then, with his left arm around the man’s back and
his right hand on the man’s right arm, he walked the swastika-adorned demonstrator up the steps, as many as 40. Slowly, steadily, all the while giving encouragement:
We’re going to make it. Just keep on going.
A female demonstrator shadowed the climb. On the back of her black shirt appeared a familiar white-supremacist slogan (“Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth”). She kept asking Mr. Smith whether the man was going to be all right—as if his safety, as well as his health, might be in some jeopardy.
Up the steps the two men went. They didn’t talk much, although the older demonstrator allowed that he wasn’t from around here. A spokesman for the National Socialist Movement declined to identify him, other than to say he is a senior citizen who doesn’t need people knocking at his door.
Mr. Smith isn’t from around here, either. Born in Haines City, Fla., the fifth and last child of transplants from Alabama. Mom worked at home while Dad worked in the citrus groves. Went to an all-black elementary school and then to an integrated high school, where those with Confederate flags on their pickups never bothered him.
Four years in the Navy. Then, after a brief spell in retail—“I sold cars, and I was pretty good at it”—a long career with the Florida Highway Patrol, where he rose through the ranks. After that, his appointment in 2011 as the first African-American director of South Carolina’s Department of Public Safety.
At this moment, though, Leroy Smith was a state trooper, helping a civilian suffering from the heat of the day.
As they approached the top step, someone nudged Rob Godfrey, 34, a deputy chief of staff to Governor Haley, who is known for his diligent chronicling of everyday history. He snapped a shot with his iPhone, sensing a distillation of the grace with which South Carolina has responded to these days of tragedy and strife.
“In that moment, Leroy Smith was the embodiment of all that,” Mr. Godfrey said. He quickly shared the moment with the world—to the benefit, it must be said, of his boss, Governor Haley, as she tries to lead her state beyond its racially troubled past.
Mr. Smith did not know about the photograph. He knew only what was before him. He walked the man into the air-conditioned State House, led him to a green-upholstered couch, and left him there to cool down.
Realizing It’s a Small, Terrifying World After All
ORLANDO, FLA.—JUNE 20, 2016
The corner of Kaley Street and South Orange Avenue offers a tableau of American déjà vu, a sprawl of Subways and 7-Elevens so common in communities across the continent. This one just happens to include a gay nightclub popular with Latinos called Pulse, where gaping holes in the gray-painted exterior now reflect the infliction of a national traumatic injury.
It’s easy to see Orlando as a place apart, our sanctuary of fantasy and escape, where fun trumps work and mouse ears are an accepted fashion accessory. But when a deeply aggrieved, heavily armed man burst into this unremarkable nightclub planted beside a carwash, the ensuing mayhem did not seem to occur in some distant, disconnected place. Instead, it became a sobering mash-up of so much that is contentious in American life.
Guns. Gay rights. Islamic extremism. Immigration. Latinos. Guns. Playing out just 20 miles from where George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, in a state slowly receding into the rising seas, it felt like Disney Dystopia—just in time for Election 2016. Orlando is more than our preferred family vacation destination. Orlando is these fractured United States. Orlando is us.
Past tragedies tended to unify Americans, said Gary R. Mormino, a retired historian at the University of South Florida with a particular expertise in his state’s experience. Here in Florida—“where roots are as shallow as Australian pines,” he wrote in an email—some people will recall how, after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s calm but assertive radio talks bonded the country, elevating hopes. Many more will remember the feeling of shared grief as the television broadcaster Walter Cronkite wiped a tear while reporting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“But 2016 brings together the toxic elements of an election year, presidential candidates who polarize the electorate, voters who are afraid and angry, and a press eager to exploit the spectacle of division and disaster,” Mr. Mormino wrote. “Alas,” he added, “we live in a balkanized state and nation.”
On some level, there’s a chaotic, only-in-Florida quality to the calamity at Pulse. On the previous Friday night, a young singer named Christina Grimmie—famous for having appeared on “The Voice”—was shot dead by a stalker as she signed autographs. And on the following Tuesday, an alligator killed a toddler at a Disney resort.
But when Omar Seddique Mateen, 29, a security guard with thwarted law enforcement ambitions, entered the nightclub with a handgun and a military-style rifle—both legally and swiftly purchased—he was not coming from some foreign land. He was a first-generation American, born to Afghan Muslim parents in Queens and educated in the public schools of Florida.
And the community he was about to devastate was not some foreign place—not some stereotypical city of rednecks, snowbirds and Disney-besotted hordes. It was Tomorrowland today, a booming and diverse city of 250,000, in which the Hispanic share of the population has grown to 25 percent.
“I don’t even know that I’d characterize it as a Southern city anymore,” said State Senator Darren M. Soto, a Democrat who was born to Italian-American and Puerto Rican parents in New Jersey. “It’s much more of a transplant, Hispanic kind of vibe in the city. We’re an all-American town, but we’re the new America,” he said. “We have people from all backgrounds and walks of life.”
That diversity includes gay men like Eric Rollings, 47, the chairman of the Orange County Soil and Water Conservation District. He recalled moving to Orlando from Michigan in 1989 and finding a small, sleepy-town L.G.B.T. community still reeling from the AIDS epidemic.
At the city’s first gay pride parade, a quarter-century ago, he said, Ku Klux Klan members gathered at the corner of Magnolia and Pine to “greet” the marchers.
Now, he said, the gay pride festival is a popular signature event in the city. And on the January day that same-sex marriage became legal in Florida last year, he noted, Mayor Buddy Dyer of Orlando officiated the marriages of dozens of same-sex couples on the steps of City Hall.
Mr. Rollings recalled much of this while decompressing in a local restaurant called Santiago’s Bodega. He wore a T-shirt adorned with slogans of determination—#OneOrlando, #OneHeart, #OnePulse—and an expression that changed by the minute. Now grief, now exhaustion, now disbelief, now hope, now grief again.
The nightmare unleashed by Mr. Mateen is a continuation of the shared nightmare we keep reliving—from Virginia Tech to Newtown to Aurora to Charleston. The names of the victims may change, but the Greek Chorus reaction is all too familiar. Shock and grief, candlelight vigils and calls for unity, vows for change and legislative paralysis, finger-pointing and vitriol, and, in the end, nothing much different—other than, say, South Carolina’s vote to remove the Confederate flag from State House grounds after the Charleston shooting.
It took a 15-hour filibuster by Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut with searing memories of the slaughter of 26 schoolchildren and educators in Newtown, to get modest gun-control measures to the Senate floor. Yet it had no more success Monday than similar proposals did after Newtown, with the Senate, largely along party lines, failing to advance measures that called for an expansion of background checks for all gun sales and a delay in selling guns to suspected terrorists (consider that phrase, by the way).
Add to that the profound displays of support for the grieving L.G.B.T. community here, offset by flashes of intolerance—a pastor in Sacramento lamenting that more hadn’t died—and statements by more than a few politicians that somehow managed not to mention that many of the victims were gay, or Latino, or both.
Finally, the Pulse massacre provided more rhetorical fodder for Donald J. Trump. He suggested that Pr
esident Obama was to blame. He trumpeted the positive aspects of racial profiling and reiterated his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.
Mr. Trump also said the massacre highlighted the need for more guns, not fewer, and imagined a scene in which some in the nightclub had been armed. “And this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it, and goes boom, boom—you know what, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks,” said Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency.
It was too much, all this death and grief and discord, as if the horrors unleashed at the club were just another excuse to display our grievances and divisions. So respite was sought at one of the many Orlando-area theme parks: Epcot. The $121.41 cost of admission was paid, as well as the $20 for parking.
Then began a slog in 90-degree heat through this permanent world’s fair. Past the margarita stands of fake Mexico, the pastries of fake Norway, the orange chicken with rice of fake China, the bratwurst of fake Germany, the tiramisù of fake Italy. On to the air-conditioned comfort of a colonial building featuring the “American Adventure” attraction.
An a cappella group called the Voices of Liberty serenaded visitors with a song that gave a shout-out to every American state. Then guests were directed to some closed white doors and instructed to remain on the blue carpeting and off the gold—at least until these doors opened to the auditorium.
Soon, an animatronic Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain were leading a half-hour tour of American history, beginning with the Mayflower and ending with a montage of famous American faces and moments: Marilyn Monroe and Magic Johnson, Elvis Presley and Albert Einstein, Walt Disney and Sally Ride, the “I Have a Dream” speech of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the image of firefighters raising the American flag at ground zero.