Arthur McDuffie was unarmed. The police cuffed his hands behind his back. A dozen police officers stood around him and beat him to a pulp with heavy Kel-Lites and nightsticks, spraying blood and cracking his skull open so badly that the medical examiner would later say his skull looked like a “cracked egg.” As one officer later described it, during the beating “they looked like a bunch of animals fighting for meat.”3
They were going to teach this nigger a lesson, goddammit, but they got scared. McDuffie’s injuries looked severe. The hospital said he was in a coma and would probably die (which he did, days later). According to an eyewitness who testified against the officers on trial, former Metro police officer Charles Veverka, the defendants tried to make it look accidental by smashing up the motorcycle. They killed a man and then conspired to lie about it.4 Three former police officers who were eyewitnesses—the most prized kind of witness in any courtroom—testified against their fellow officers. One officer in particular, they said, had straddled McDuffie while he hit him with the Kel-Lite.5
Yet an all-white jury, with the speed and conclusion of its verdict, had in effect shrugged its collective shoulders and said, Okay, we got no problem with that. Why did you waste almost three whole hours of our valuable time?
McDuffie doesn’t matter, I remember thinking. White people don’t think he matters. My mind could barely comprehend it.
Dorothy McDuffie, Arthur McDuffie’s sister, described her feelings to reporters in a way that captured what I believe most of black Miami felt: “It’s like something unbelievable.… I feel like I’m nobody. I feel like my family’s nobody. I feel like my people are nobody.”6
Yes, my parents were civil rights activists, and I’d been brought up on a steady diet of black history lessons. I’d known all too well that there was a time, long ago, when such trials were commonplace. Lynchings didn’t matter. Beatings didn’t matter. Rapes didn’t matter. I knew blacks had been considered nobodies in the old days of song singing and fire hoses. I knew my mother had been jailed for sitting at a lunch counter, and that her eyes had been injured when she was teargassed for marching down a public street. I knew my aunt had been kicked in the stomach by a police officer and that nobody had been willing to hear her grievance. That had been in the 1960s. Black people didn’t matter in the 1960s.
But in 1980? In the world I lived in?
That moment of realization, that awakening, was when my childhood ended.
Immediately after the verdict was announced, the phone at our house began to ring. Shock. Disbelief. Rage. My parents learned there was going to be a protest at the Metro Justice Building in downtown Miami at 6:00 that night. The troops were gathering, yet again.
I couldn’t muster any excitement over the prospect of carrying another sign, or yelling another chant. Not that day. My parents had been protesting and working for change all of their adult lives, and their work had still come to nothing more than this. A protest at the Justice Building? There was no justice. There never had been, and there wasn’t now. No placards or megaphones or marches or complaints were going to change it. Maybe it would never change.
I had a terrible headache, at the edge of a migraine. When my feelings tried to surface, I locked them down tight. What good were feelings? What would tears do for me? What could anger bring me? I’d made plans with a friend of mine, a tall white girl who lived nearby, Michelle Ricciardi, to see a movie that had just opened, The Nude Bomb. It was a comedy about a bomb that made people lose their clothes when it exploded, and it looked very stupid in the commercials, so it was the perfect refuge from my feelings. Michelle was one of my most constant playmates while I skirted that line between childhood and young adulthood; like me, she loved the TV show Emergency! and indulged me in fantasies about meeting my favorite actor from the show, Randolph Mantooth. Without complaining, she read piles of Emergency! stories I wrote about dramatic rescues and fire-station drama. Michelle was a safe haven.
I had asked Mom if I could go to a movie with Michelle instead of to the protest, and although she was surprised I wanted to remain behind, she had said yes. Dad was already out in the field in his capacity as a county employee, so my sisters went with my mother, and I walked to my friend’s house in the calm quiet of untroubled streets, where the McDuffie verdict was no more than an interesting topic of conversation in the living rooms I passed. I don’t remember even bringing up the Arthur McDuffie verdict while I was with Michelle. I didn’t care that she was white, or if she could understand how I felt. I didn’t need her to understand. I wasn’t looking for commiseration. I wanted an escape, if only for a few treasured hours.
Escape isn’t that simple. I couldn’t laugh at the movie the way I wanted. When Michelle and I got back to her house and began to eat dinner with her family, the local news was showing footage from a battle front. Burning cars. People running. A smoke-filled street. Like a scene from Beirut. The protest, which had begun peacefully, had turned into a riot.
“My family is there,” I said to Michelle’s family, disbelief wrapping around me. My friend and I were sitting in the white suburbs of Cutler Ridge, and my family was in the middle of a riot downtown. For a moment, my senses blurred.
Where were my parents? My sisters? Were they safe? My eyes searched the chaotic video footage of flames and running people, looking for familiar faces. A newscaster, speaking in that rushed, confused outburst that TV reporters use when they’ve stumbled onto an unexpected story, said that people had reportedly died. People had died?
“Oh, my God,” Michelle’s mother said.
That night, I was the most frightened I had ever been for my family’s safety. For the hour or so between the time when I first saw the footage of the riot and I finally got a call from my mother, my separation from my family felt unbridgeable.
Lydia was ten years old, and Johnita had just turned twelve. They had been leaning against a police car in front of the Justice Building with Mom, watching the crowd and listening to speeches at the rally, when more and more people from the surrounding inner-city neighborhood began arriving, yelling their outrage. “The emotions were on the surface. You felt the mood shift,” Lydia recalls. “You knew something was about to happen.”
Johnita and Lydia remember that the car they were leaning against suddenly began to shake, then rock violently. People on the other side of the car were trying to overturn it, so they quickly moved away from it. The car was successfully turned over, and the crowd cheered. Another car was set afire. As soon as the violence erupted, my sisters were ushered to a nearby hotel by NAACP Regional Director Earl Shinhoster, who had come to Miami because of the tension in the black community. “That was our first exposure to anarchy, really,” Johnita says. “I could understand the rage, but the part of me that had been raised to follow the rules and be a good citizen couldn’t understand. There was a fear because I couldn’t relate to what they were doing, and I knew that people could get hurt. They were burning and destroying their own community, even, and I felt so sad.”
Even though she was the youngest, Lydia insists she was not frightened by the upheaval around her. Instead, she felt awed by it. “I don’t recall being afraid. Instead, I was sort of shocked and excited—not excited in the sense of being happy, but because I knew something significant was happening I didn’t have the words and emotional maturity to completely understand,” Lydia says.
Paralyzed by conflicting emotions—despair and elation—I watched the three days of rioting unfold on television. I felt despair because my city was burning, and the seething ugliness Miami usually kept tucked beneath its paradisial image was thick and acrid in the air. Innocent blacks and whites were dying unnecessarily, just as Arthur McDuffie had. That first night, passing white motorists had been pulled from their cars and killed. In the following days, most of the two dozen people who died were black; my family had heard stories of pickup trucks full of shotgun-wielding whites out looking for blacks to shoot. Isolated as we were in a mostly white neighborhood
sprinkled with Confederate-flag bumper stickers, I was almost afraid to go outside. Because Dad was working for the Community Relations Board, he was out in the inner-city streets with a walkie-talkie trying to urge calm during a time when calm was scorned. My sisters and I never knew from night to night if my father would make it home. Miami was living a nightmare, a chaos of hate and fear.
I also felt elation—yes, elation—because of one thought soothing my young psyche: Well, someone’s going to listen. Someone’s going to listen now.
In some ways, I was right. For a time, anyway.
President Jimmy Carter came. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission came. Janet Reno, upon hearing the verdict, had said she was “bitterly disappointed.”7 My parents testified, submitted documents, went to meetings. Meanwhile, more and more Cubans were welcomed when they came to make Miami their home—thousands upon thousands in the Mariel boatlift—while Haitians were still sent away. Arthur McDuffie was still dead. His killers were still free.
While administrators piped in saccharine-sounding Muzak to help ease tensions at my racially mixed school, I wished myself somewhere else by writing an essay about the society I wanted to live in, one that would be gentler to my heart.
I want to live in a society where “Jew” is no longer a dirty word.… And no one remembers what “nigger” used to mean.… A society where the executives never say, “You can’t have this job because you’re underqualified” and they really mean, “You can’t have this job because you’re Black … or a woman … or a Jew … or a Latin … or a homosexual.… In my society, when they say, “Some of my best friends are …,” they really are. But nobody cares because they’re really all the same. Prejudice is something that the children read about in their history books and they shake their heads saying, “How foolish they were back then!”
I wrote and wrote. I wrote about an end to pain, an end to hate, an end to discrimination. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, Jews; all of us could live in peace, side by side.
That’s where I want to live … maybe that sounds like Heaven, but if I lived there right now, I’d call this society Hell. You know why? MAYBE IT IS.
My mother told me how lucky I was to be able to express my feelings in writing, that so many people had to resort to other means, or were strangled by the emotions gathered inside of them. Yes, I realized, writing would be my saving grace. Writing would keep me sane. I later wrote a ten-minute speech based on that essay and won county honors at school speech competitions telling the story of how I’d felt. Again, I had an outlet.
Later, as an adult and a reporter for the Miami Herald, I would have the added buffer of a journalist’s objectivity to keep my heart safe from pain. Journalists are trained to be life’s observers, never participants. Even involvement in community protests and advocacy organizations flew against my job regulations, so I contented myself to write about people I believed might never otherwise be heard—blacks, as often as possible—and I wore that as my shield.
But at the time, my discomfort with individual confrontation quickly steered me away from the kind of journalism that would put me in constant conflict with my sources. I would not be like Miami Herald Pulitzer prize–winning writers Edna Buchanan, who had uncovered the Arthur McDuffie story, or Gene Miller, who had first brought the plight of former death row prisoners Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee to public consciousness. Likewise, I would not be a fiery columnist, pointing fingers and ruffling feathers as a mouthpiece for my people. (By the time I would leave the Herald, I was probably best known for the column I wrote about dating and relationships.)
During the ten years I worked at the Miami Herald, I covered two civil disturbances, the recovery of bodies, car accident fatalities, and government scandals, and every minute I spent gathering news wore on me. I knew I had reached the point when I could no longer be a news reporter when I was sent out in a downpour to get a comment from the family of a well-respected school principal who had been shot to death by her husband. As I stood in the rain on this family’s lawn, a young Hispanic man escorted his father out beneath an umbrella to talk to me. The old man had dry lips and hollow eyes, and he said something beseeching to me in Spanish.
“What did he say?” I asked the son.
“He said, ‘Please don’t bring our family any more pain.’ ”
I walked away with tears streaming down my face, filled with self-loathing. What business did I have intruding on the worst moment of this man’s life, after the violent loss of his daughter? I didn’t want my writing to bring anyone pain.
Instead I was drawn to the features section and human interest stories. I still take pleasure in the memory of the stories I wrote that I believe helped readers learn about people who might have otherwise been voiceless: Like Sharmanita Grays, the teenaged victim of a serial killer, who had been making a rag doll in class before she died, and the teacher who saw to it that her unfinished doll lived on as a cautionary tale to other troubled young students. Or the late Liberty City muralist Oscar Thomas, who labored in the community he loved to bring colors, beauty, and images of heroes—Dr. Martin Luther King, chained Haitian refugees, Alex Haley—to an otherwise dismal cityscape. Or how an elementary school in South Dade County braved its way through the disaster of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. I wanted to write about quiet triumphs, not adversity.
And I tried to forget about Arthur McDuffie.
In 1991, soon after Los Angeles riots incited by a videotaped police beating of a black man named Rodney King, Miami was the only city in the United States to snub Nelson Mandela when he made his tour after being released from a South African prison. While Mr. Mandela was being honored with parades in the streets of Atlanta, and addressing Yankee Stadium in New York, Cuban-American leadership in Miami signed a document denouncing Mr. Mandela because he had refused to distance himself from Fidel Castro, who had been supportive of the anti-apartheid movement. That leadership included Xavier Suarez, the mayor of the city of Miami.
Nelson Mandela was an international symbol of hope in the face of overwhelming racism, and suddenly the city I lived in felt like an island. My sister Lydia and I accompanied my mother and Aunt Priscilla to Miami Beach, where blacks were gathering to support Mr. Mandela to counter scheduled protests outside of the building where he was making an address. That day, I heard the hateful words Go back to Africa! lobbed at us. That same night, Johnita returned from Europe after spending a year at the University of Sussex while studying race relations in England for her master’s degree in psychology. At Sussex, she had joined with her international student friends from England, Italy, South Africa, Zambia, and Costa Rica in celebrating Mr. Mandela’s release and embracing humankind’s progress—delayed though it was. When she saw our exhausted faces after our pro-Mandela demonstration, she told us sadly, “Yes, I’m definitely back in Miami again.”
Still, I was more upset by the actions of Miami’s leaders than by the careless words of a few emotional Cuban protestors who could not see beyond their own pain. Leaders are supposed to represent everyone. Weren’t we anyone?
That nagging thought came to me again: Blacks don’t matter.
I had a very strange dream on May 20, 1991, the date blacks in Florida celebrate as Emancipation Day because it was in May that the news of slavery’s end trickled southward to our peninsula. Ironically, almost to the day of Miami’s riots eleven years before, I described my dream in a wire-bound notebook I kept as a journal.
In the dream, I was shooting a film documentary. My father, or someone very much like my father, was pointing out the exact spot of the McDuffie beating.
The final phase of the dream was to be there, to see it.… I saw the slow-moving procession of police cars, sirens flashing—I knew it was time. I felt a surge of adrenaline, excitement.… I felt like a removed, detached journalist about to witness the one story blacks in Miami have never recovered from.
I couldn’t see what was happening for the crowd of officers.… Then, I had a view. A singl
e officer stood over a dazed, bleeding McDuffie, who was on his hands and knees. The officer grabbed a handful of his hair to lift his face up, then he smashed his flashlight down on McDuffie’s skull. A scream, a howl, rose from my throat. Simultaneously, I knew my anguished cry had become a part of the history of the event.… I had not seen the beating, I thought; but in reality I had been there all along, helplessly mortified and outraged like the woman on her knees at Kent State, captured by a photographer. My cry in my dream woke me up.
I had not forgotten. Eleven years after the fact, as a twenty-five-year-old woman, I woke up sobbing like a child. It hurt. It still hurt. I had never cried about Arthur McDuffie’s unpunished death as I did that day, even on the day of the verdict, when my childish illusions about the world I lived in had been shattered and Miami began to burn.
In a dream, there is no place to hide.
For all the pain I felt as an adolescent thrust into the social and political fabric of Miami, my parents’ activism also brought me unparalleled joy—because we were an NAACP family, through and through. With one of my book advances, I bought NAACP life memberships for both of my parents and my grandmother. And the NAACP gave me a wonderful gift.
The summer after the Miami riots, when I was fourteen and a high school sophomore, I entered the essay I’d written about former school superintendent Dr. Johnny L. Jones into a high school contest sponsored by the national NAACP called ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics). My essay was defiantly entitled “Dr. Johnny L. Jones: Come What May, We’re Here to Stay,” and I opened it with my favorite Frederick Douglass quote: This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, but it must be a struggle.
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