by Joy-Ann Reid
On the same day Holder spoke out, Hillary Clinton did, too, telling the fourteen thousand women assembled at the fifty-first annual convention of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta in Washington that “no mother, no father, should ever have to fear for their child walking down a street in the United States of America.”
Perhaps the fiercest pressure for Obama to speak more forcefully on the Trayvon Martin case came from within his personal circle. The people closest to him and Michelle were asking: If he, the nation’s first black president, couldn’t speak about the death of a young African American man with profundity, with depth, then what was the point?
Friends said Obama had indeed been profoundly shaken by Trayvon Martin’s death, which one longtime mentor called “one of the most upsetting things in his lifetime.” But he was always mindful of his delicate walk as president, as well as the minefields that constantly awaited him when he wandered into the arena of race. But ultimately he decided the people calling on him to say more were right. He would make a public statement, and he would not preview his remarks for his communications team.
On July 19, the president offered the most personal comments he’d made on the realities of race in America since his “Philadelphia speech” in March 2008 in the wake of the Rev. Wright controversy. That speech had been called “A More Perfect Union.” Now, as president, Obama stood in the briefing room to lay out, with greater specificity, some of those imperfections.
He spoke for eighteen minutes, remarking on the grace and dignity of Martin’s parents, and reiterating his sorrow for their loss. He said the Sanford jury had spoken. And then he began to talk about the context of the anguish reverberating across black America.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” Obama said.
Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws—everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case. . . .
I think the African American community is also not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied. And that all contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
The president sought to moderate expectations about the Justice Department investigation, emphasizing the need to make something “positive” out of the tragedy rather than engaging in an endless pursuit of redress. He referenced racial profiling legislation he’d worked on in Springfield, and even posed a question on Stand Your Ground.
“For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘stand your ground’ laws,” he said, “I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”
The president characteristically ended his remarks on a hopeful note by saying that things were yet getting better. He said he believed the country was “becoming a more perfect union. Not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.” He called on Americans to engage in more honest discussions about racial disparity in churches and workplaces and homes.
Charles Ogletree summed up the president’s speech: “His point was, ‘if Trayvon had the successes that I had and the mentors that I had and was able to break out of his youthful problems, look at what he could have done.’ I think the Trayvon Martin moment was transformative for him.”
Many had been calling for the president to launch a “national conversation” or a national commission on race, as Bill Clinton had done during the 1990s, but Obama declined. “ ‘I’m not going to lead it,” he told friends. “I want people to meet [for] themselves, to decide what the priorities are and tell me what I need to do as president.”
Obama’s comments failed to mollify some of his more vociferous African American critics. Tavis Smiley called them “too little, too late.” Cornel West went further, denouncing the president as a “Global George Zimmerman,” with no moral authority, given the administration’s continued use of drones to go after terrorist targets in places like Pakistan and Yemen. On Salon.com, writer Rich Benjamin contrasted Obama’s remarks with Holder’s more furtive address to the NAACP, wondering provocatively whether Holder was “Obama’s ‘inner nigger,’ ” and touching off a torrent of outrage, including from fellow critics of the president’s approach.
Not surprisingly, the president’s comments did nothing to assuage his detractors on the right, who immediately let loose on social media, radio, and Fox News, denouncing the speech as racially divisive. On his radio program, Rush Limbaugh harrumphed: “He represents the same damn stuff as Jesse Jackson. . . . I’m convinced of it now: There’s no difference in Obama and Al Sharpton; there’s no difference in Obama and Jesse Jackson. It’s just Obama had a much better mask than those guys. Those guys were argumentative and challenging, and Obama was pleasing and contrite.”
Polls, meanwhile, showed the repeat of a familiar pattern, with 49 percent of white voters satisfied with the Zimmerman verdict as of July 22, and 86 percent of black voters (along with 58 percent of Hispanics) opposed. In the same Pew poll, white respondents said the issue of race was “getting more attention than it deserved,” by a margin of 60 to 28 percent, while by 78 versus 13 percent, black respondents said the case raised “important issues about race that need to be discussed.”
On August 28, the nation paused to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, the civil rights era’s transcendent moment, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enunciated his “dream” in an address that a half century later had been rendered beautifully inert. It was now the stuff of greeting cards and slogans, devoid of its radical meaning, and, as expressed by King, its indictment of a nation that had, in the hundred years since emancipation, returned a check marked “insufficient funds” to its black citizens. The organizers of the event, keeping the Trayvon Martin tragedy in mind, made clear their desire not to blandly recite King’s words, but to restart a movement.
The commemoration brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sister, Christine King Farris, and two of his children, Martin III and Rev. Bernice King, to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, along with Rev. Sharpton, Rev. Jackson, Andrew Young, Rev. Joseph Lowery, and Julian Bond, in a ki
nd of civil rights class reunion. They were joined by activists old and young, and by speakers black and white, famous and not. The quarter million people who gathered on the National Mall heard from Caroline Kennedy and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, the elder daughter of LBJ; from actor Jamie Foxx and Oprah Winfrey; from John Lewis and the Dream Defenders’ Phillip Agnew. They were addressed by labor leaders and by members of Congress (who in an irony that pointed to the complete reversal of the parties’ histories, included no Republicans). The families of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till traveled to Washington to be a part of the events, along with the parents of Jordan Davis, shot dead at age seventeen the previous November in Jacksonville, Florida, as he rode in a car with friends, angering a white man with a gun who thought their rap music was too loud, and who a year later would be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
As a light rain descended over the Lincoln Memorial, there were three presidents onstage: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—the sum of the Democratic Party’s White House legacy since Lyndon Johnson declared that he would not seek a second term as president.
The civil rights movement celebrated its jubilee, and its inheritors marked the many miles ahead.
CHAPTER 11
Fracture
When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
—Bayard Rustin
BARACK OBAMA WAS ON MARTHA’S VINEYARD WHEN THE ST. Louis suburb of Ferguson went up in smoke.
The protests—punctuated by clouds of tear gas and police dogs trained on demonstrators with their arms raised, chanting “hands up, don’t shoot”—began after eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead on Saturday, August 9, 2014, as he and a friend walked the short distance from a convenience store to Brown’s grandmother’s apartment, carrying two boxes of miniature cigars. A brief confrontation with a local police officer ended in a shooting that witnesses, the Brown family, and their attorneys called an execution.
For nearly four hours, Brown’s body lay on the ground, his head oozing pools of congealed blood onto the pavement in front of the Canfield Green Apartments, as residents gathered behind yellow police tape near the scene. Bystanders were posting the grisly images to social media before the body was finally taken away in the back of a police SUV. As the images went viral that weekend, along with witness accounts posted on Facebook and Twitter, Michael Brown’s death became an instant online cause in the growing “Black Lives Matter” movement, born during the Trayvon Martin saga.
Ferguson, a small city of twenty-two thousand residents, had gone from almost entirely white to two-thirds black during the white flight of the 1980s. The police force had only three African Americans on a force of fifty-three. The white mayor and a city council with only one African American among its six members presided over a city funded largely by the fees and fines disproportionately levied on black residents by law enforcement and the municipal court, for traffic and other violations large and small.
Protesters and black elected officials representing Ferguson and nearby communities in the Missouri statehouse immediately blamed the city’s police chief, Thomas Jackson; the St. Louis County Police; Ferguson’s seemingly hapless Republican mayor, James Knowles; and Missouri’s Democratic governor, Jeremiah “Jay” Nixon, who’d been estranged from his state’s black leaders since his days as attorney general. A year after being swept into that office in 1992 as Bill Clinton carried the state with 44 percent of the vote in the three-way presidential race, Nixon filed a brief proposing to end St. Louis’s twelve-year-old school desegregation plan, by which black students in the city of St. Louis were being bused to the nearly all-white schools in the St. Louis County suburbs.
At the time, Nixon argued that the busing program was too expensive, but his opposition mirrored a shift in the Democratic Party away from support for busing as a remedy to segregated public schools, following decades of backlash from white suburban voters. Nixon’s move created a lingering breach with African Amerericans, who comprised a fifth of the state’s Democratic voters, largely concentrated in St. Louis and Kansas City. Five years later, in 1998, when Nixon ran for the U.S. Senate, members of the NAACP picketed his campaign events, with one chapter head deriding him as the reincarnation of George Wallace. Prominent black Democratic leaders like then Kansas City mayor and future congressman Emanuel Cleaver and Representative William “Lacy” Clay, whose district included Ferguson, sent campaign contributions to Nixon’s Republican opponent, Christopher “Kit” Bond.
Nixon sailed into the governor’s mansion after sixteen years as attorney general, despite Barack Obama becoming the first Democrat to win the White House without carrying Missouri (he lost the state by just over 3,900 votes), on a platform of “Independent. Experienced. The Change We Need.” Nixon won the big cities, but he also outperformed his Republican opponent in the suburbs, which increasingly were where Missouri’s power lay. He got more votes than John McCain did in the state and defeated his opponent 58.4 to 39.5 percent. And in a sign of the state’s reddening, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure making English the official language of Missouri and left the state’s legislature firmly in Republican hands. As a Democrat who endorsed Barack Obama, Nixon had carried the black districts in the big cities, but that didn’t translate into a significant thawing of relations with black leaders.
Six years later, Maria Chappelle-Nadal, the fiery state senator whose district included Ferguson, harshly criticized Nixon for taking days to cancel a trip to the Missouri State Fair so he could come within miles of Ferguson, and publicly called him a coward.
Pressure built as the police refused to release the name of the officer who fired multiple shots into Brown’s body, including the fatal shot to the head. It was confirmed, however, that the officer was white. The already tense situation exploded when the large but peaceful early demonstrations were met with a mechanized and hyperkinetic response from police in riot gear, bomb-resistant assault vehicles, and military fatigues. By Monday night the city had degenerated into violence and sporadic looting, under the glare of an international media spotlight that likened the scenes out of Ferguson to the streets of war-torn Gaza.
On Tuesday, as protests continued and complaints that the president had failed to respond grew, the White House issued a written statement calling Brown’s death “heartbreaking” and expressing sympathy for his family. The statement said the Justice Department would conduct its own investigation and called on Americans to “remember this young man through reflection and understanding,” adding, “we should comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. Along with our prayers, that’s what Michael and his family, and our broader American community, deserve.”
The statement satisfied almost no one, and instead triggered complaints that the president had not been more personal; in contrast, earlier that day the White House had issued an emotional tribute to comedian Robin Williams, whose suicide that week shocked the nation.
The White House released photos of briefings that Eric Holder and Valerie Jarrett were giving the president, but Obama continued his schedule on Martha’s Vineyard, which included golfing and even a party thrown by Vernon Jordan for his wife Ann’s birthday. The party was also attended by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jordan’s dear, longtime friends.
Obama hadn’t planned on going to the party but changed his mind after a phone call from Hillary Clinton, who was traveling to the island also to promote her sixth book, detailing her time as secretary of state. She wanted to clarify remarks in an Atlantic interview in which she appeared to take the president to task for not arming rebels fighting to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; the rebels were not only losing momentum against Assad, but were losing ground to a lethal Islamist insurgency calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIS, which was spreading like a cancer from Syria to Iraq.
Now the media was buzzing o
ver the Clintons and the Obamas on the Vineyard together and the prospect, floated by Secretary Clinton’s staff, that she and Obama planned to “hug out” their differences at Jordan’s party. In the end, the Obamas and the Clintons did more than hug at the party: They danced.
As the week went on, Holder was clamoring to leave Martha’s Vineyard and fly to Ferguson himself, but the president and his senior advisers objected. They worried that sending in an administration official would only add to the drama on the ground and create a needless distraction, which in the country’s hypercharged racial climate would likely make things worse. Obama instead called a press conference, going before the cameras and first providing an update on the military’s progress against ISIS fighters before speaking about the unrest in Ferguson.
The president had been down this road before. Friends insisted that despite his outward cool, he was deeply disturbed, and particularly as a father, by yet another young black man being cut down before he’d had the chance to taste adulthood. But he had seen his political opponents use his seemingly innocuous words about the Trayvon Martin case to cast him as a racial demagogue, conspiring to side with black suffering and to indict white Americans. Some former Obama aides felt that his customary caution failed him in Ferguson, as it had with Trayvon Martin. He should have sent Holder, they’d say. He should have spoken out earlier and more forcefully. And “he shouldn’t have gone golfing, either.”