“I want to know why,” demanded Preston Thompson, Spence’s stepfather and Mosby’s uncle, who was a Boston police officer, during an impassioned press conference at the family home, according to coverage that ran in the Boston Globe, “every time a black boy is killed in Dorchester you have to mention drugs? My son was a good boy. He wasn’t involved in drugs or any crime. He was a good student and I’m very proud of my son.”
The slain boy’s father had been working his beat at the time of the shooting, and found out through the Boston PD radio dispatch that his son had been shot twice in the chest.
“It was such a tough, sad time in all of our lives,” said Linda Thompson.
Kevin Denis was immediately arrested and charged with the killing. Prosecutors alleged that he had demanded money from Spence, having mistaken him for a drug dealer. In 1996, Denis was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The media speculation that the slaying involved drugs prompted an aggressive campaign by Spence’s family and friends to redefine the narrative of his death, with many granting interviews to highlight the fact that he was an honor student and varsity basketball player just months from graduation.
According to the Globe, more than 450 people showed up for Spence’s funeral—including more than a dozen Boston police officers.
“It shouldn’t have happened to him,” then-seventeen-year-old Rob Legrow told the Globe on the day of Spence’s burial. “More people have got to see this. This shouldn’t happen to anyone.”
The incident helped solidify for the young Mosby what the rest of her life would bring. She would work in the legal system, and she would seek justice for people like her cousin.
“[Mosby] had always said she wanted to be an attorney, or a judge,” said Linda Thompson, “but her cousin’s murder made her determined to seek justice by doing what she could to be a part of the legal system.”
But the burst of hope that greeted Mosby’s audacious decision to charge the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death would eventually abate. Even more rare than an officer being charged, it turns out, is an officer being convicted.
The six officers involved each faced separate trials, and as of this writing, none of the four officers who had been tried so far had been convicted. It seems unlikely that any of them will be.
“What we see after four trials—including last year’s mistrial in the case against Officer William Porter—is that Freddie Gray’s death was tragic, senseless, and unnecessary, yet in key respects still somewhat mysterious. We know that if Gray had been standing on a street corner in another part of town he probably would not have been chased by police, would not have been handcuffed and frisked, would not have been placed facedown with feet shackled in the back of a police van, and would not ultimately have suffered a fatal spinal cord injury,” the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun wrote in mid-July 2016. “But we don’t know precisely when or how he was injured, and we know nothing about what was going through the heads of the officers who encountered him along the way—critical information to sustain the kinds of charges they faced. Gray was treated horribly and unjustly, but there’s a big gulf between ‘someone must have done something’ and ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.’”
Mosby, the newspaper wrote, should drop the remaining charges against the other officers. Days later, Mosby did just that.
CHAPTER FIVE
Charleston: Black Death Is Black Death
On election night 2008, as he took a Chicago stage to give his first address as president-elect, Obama credited the scores of young volunteers who were the backbone of his campaign, declaring that his efforts “grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.
“This is your victory,” said the man who two months later would be inaugurated as the nation’s first black president.
The 2008 campaign by then-senator Barack Obama inspired a generation of political activists and operatives on the left, mobilizing energetic and hungry young people who happily made “Change We Can Believe In” the first political rallying cry behind which they had ever aligned. That was especially true in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, and among the ranks of young black political operatives who saw in the Obama campaign an opportunity for a milestone in the nation’s civil rights history.
“The young black activists we now know, a lot of them began organizing through the Obama campaign,” Bree Newsome told me in early 2016. “You’re talking about an entire generation of political participants that started out very enthusiastic about the process, and then who by the time you get to Ferguson, had completely soured on the process.”
Born in Durham, Newsome was raised in North Carolina and Columbia, Maryland, where she was class president at Oakland Mills High School three of her four years there. Next she went off to film school at New York University. Of the most prominent Black Lives Matter activists, she is among those who most vocally proclaim their faith. Her father, Clarence Newsome, has for years served as dean of Howard University’s School of Divinity. And as with many of the other post–Joshua Generation activists who became the steady heartbeat of the Black Lives Matter movement, it wasn’t until after the election of Barack Obama that Newsome became truly politically active.
“To understand it, you have to go back to the election of Barack Obama in terms of what that symbolized in terms of the hope. We saw that as us turning a corner in the country,” Newsome told me. “And then what we saw through the Trayvon Martin case was that we haven’t actually turned that corner. Honestly, Trayvon was the turning point.
“Trayvon Martin just had so many echoes of Emmett Till. It felt like something out of 1955.”
By the time of the protests and riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, Newsome told me, the movement had matured beyond the stage at which activists believed they had the luxury of working within the system, of coloring inside the lines. Black America had peacefully made its demands for justice after Trayvon Martin. And those cries had gone unheard.
“Now we talk about indicting the whole system. But back with Trayvon, a lot of people truly believed in the process,” Newsome recalled. “A lot of the protests back in 2012 were just about getting George Zimmerman arrested and tried. In 2012 it was about ‘let the system work.’ The demand was for him to be arrested and tried. Well, he was arrested and tried—and then he was acquitted.”
Zimmerman’s acquittal further fanned the fires of protest. The Dream Defenders led a thirty-one-day sit-in at Florida governor Rick Scott’s office, and Newsome was one of the dozens who traveled to Florida to join them. Million Hoodies began a national campaign aimed at media representation of black men. And a new group, #BlackLivesMatter, began holding discussions about what coalition-based, intersectional activism around the unique, systemic threat to black bodies could look like.
The year 2012 represented a turning point for Newsome, and for her faith. She’d been raised in the church, but her personal commitment as an adult began manifesting itself through activism, which she saw as part of her Christian charge to work on behalf of others.
In 2013, the year after George Zimmerman was acquitted, Newsome moved back to North Carolina to help take care of her grandmother in Charlotte. What she found brewing in her home state was a historic voting rights battle that would consume her. She had no intention of becoming an activist, but to hear her tell it, she had little choice.
In the wake of President Obama’s reelection and the Tea Party movement that his presidency had sparked, North Carolina was in the midst of one of the most intense battles over voting restrictions that had played out in any state since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Republican legislators, under the leadership of State House Speaker Thom Tillis, passed legislation requiring photo ID to vote, ending same-day voter registration, and limiting the number of days allotted for early voting. In response, local activist grou
ps led by the NAACP and Reverend William Barber II held massive protests throughout the state and at the statehouse, declaring the new North Carolina law “the worst voter suppression law in the country and the worst one since Jim Crow.”
“It was surreal,” Newsome recalled. “What struck me was that we were having this massive debate about the Voting Rights Act, something that I thought was written in stone, that I thought was settled history.
“Maybe I had taken my rights too much for granted,” she went on. “If there is one thing I’ve always felt passionate about, it is access to voting. America—for all of its problems, I’ve always believed in our ability to vote and change our problems that way.”
Newsome joined the Moral Monday protests, which convened each week for rallies, sit-ins, and marches in opposition to recent state legislation that, the activists argued, was meant to do little other than make it harder for the state’s black residents to vote. The battle, in a state with a Republican governor and a GOP-run statehouse, was always uphill. When it became clear that, at least for now, they were going to lose, many of the activists who had joined the coalition were forced to grapple with a brutal truth: generations of voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts made little difference if access to the ballot box could be restricted or restructured so easily and in such a politically partisan manner. It’s a long way from electing the first black president to having your very right to vote placed in jeopardy by Tea Party–inspired legislative bodies.
And then, the following year, came Eric Garner, Michael Brown, John Crawford, and Tamir Rice.
“It was not just the killing of Michael Brown, it was the reaction from the police. It was seeing the police dogs, and knowing the history there,” Newsome said.
Newsome knew of Rodney King, and of the long-ago allegations of brutality by the New York Police Department. But Ferguson opened a new possibility in her mind—that the American problem of policing could in fact be as pervasive as the nation is broad and diverse. That if the police in Ferguson, Missouri, were gunning down unarmed black men, this must also be happening everywhere else.
That possibility was only reinforced in Newsome’s mind as she watched incident after incident play out on the national stage—the death of Freddie Gray and the riots in Baltimore, the traffic stop of Sandra Bland and her death in a Texas jail cell, the viral video of an aggressive officer in McKinney, Texas, manhandling a black girl in a bikini and then pulling his gun on two boys who attempted to intervene.
While these were almost always presented in the media as isolated, unrelated incidents, Newsome couldn’t help but link each to the other, and connect them to her knowledge of the black struggle for justice and liberation that in America dates back to 1619.
“It’s a modern iteration of a struggle that has existed for hundreds of years,” Newsome said.
Around Easter 2015, Newsome and her family traveled to South Carolina, where generations before, her family had been enslaved. They visited Rafting Creek Baptist Church, the congregation in Rembert, South Carolina, that her great-great-great-grandfather Theodore Diggs, a former slave who could read and write, founded in 1864, near the end of the Civil War, along with twenty-five original members, primarily former slaves.
“It was a deeply spiritual experience for me,” Newsome said, recalling the pain and perspective she found by tracing the lives of her ancestors. “It was almost like I was being pulled there in anticipation of what was coming.”
Three months later, on June 17, 2015, Newsome was at home, watching the local news, when she saw a breaking news alert flash across the bottom of the television screen. An active shooter was being reported at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Later, an update: several people who had been attending a prayer meeting were dead, and the shooter was still at large.
“I was devastated, not just from the standpoint of my work as an activist or an organizer, but as a Christian,” Newsome later told me. “This was a prayer meeting, someone had knocked on the door and they had let him in. He prayed with them, and then massacred them.”
Newsome couldn’t stop thinking of the uncountable number of times her own family had gathered in a church sanctuary or meeting room for a Bible study led by her father, of the refuge they had found in the confines of their church. She imagined the abiding feeling of safety that must have filled these worshippers, and how in an instant it would have been overcome with unthinkable terror. In tears, she called her older sister.
“I was up until midnight, reading every update I could find,” Newsome recalled. “I was just caught in this period of time, since I was awake at that late hour, where I was aware that everyone was going to wake up the next morning, and everything was going to be different.”
Ron Davis walked into the Washington Post’s building carrying three folded newspapers under his arm.
For three years, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath had traveled the country telling the story of their slain son, Jordan Davis, the black teen who was killed by a white man in a 2012 shooting in Jacksonville, Florida. Jordan’s parents joined what became a traveling tour of families mourning young black men and women killed by police or by white vigilantes.
They were in DC that day promoting a documentary about their son’s death. Their next stop would be Charleston.
“Can you believe it?” Davis asked me as he laid the newspapers on a conference room table and pointed at the images and headlines of horror and grief from Charleston. “I’m headed down there later today,” he said. “It’s just so heartbreaking.”
I couldn’t believe it. Even though it had been several days since the massacre—nine black Americans gunned down as they sat around a Bible study table at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—the gravity and consequence of the shooting were evident, yet at the same time not yet fully revealed.
Unlike Bree Newsome, I’d had my phone turned to silent that night so hadn’t seen the news of the massacre until the following day. When I finally looked at social media that morning, I learned that the lives of nine black Americans had been extinguished by a troubled traveler they had lovingly invited into their midst.
There was Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, forty-five, whose son teased her that she went to church too much. DePayne Middleton Doctor, forty-nine, whose powerful voice was known to fill the church rafters during hymns. And Cynthia Hurd, the local librarian who at fifty-four years old was described as being a stylish lady with a “fierce shoe game.” The oldest of the slain was Susie Jackson, eighty-seven, who just two weeks earlier had visited her grandkids in Euclid, Ohio, near Cleveland. The youngest was Tywanza Sanders, a twenty-six-year-old barber who had posted photos from the prayer meeting to Snapchat just moments before the terror began. Ethel Lance, seventy, was one of those church ladies who were a constant presence at Emanuel AME. She showed up on weekdays to clean the church grounds. She was among several of those killed who were Emanuel’s most faithful members—Daniel Simmons, seventy-four, was a retired pastor himself, and Myra Thompson, fifty-nine, was a church trustee and the wife of the minister of another nearby congregation.
Then there was Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, the forty-one-year-old minister, the shepherd who died doing what he did every Wednesday night: leading his flock.
“He was a preacher, he was a teacher. He was about service, peace and taking action,” his grieving wife, Jennifer Pinckney, recalled during a speech memorializing her slain husband. “He was a voice for the voiceless.”
Equally shattering was how familiar each of these names, faces, and stories was.
On my last night there, a reporter friend from the local newspaper convinced me to head out for a walk into historic Charleston. As we made our way down uneven brick streets, I couldn’t pull my eyes from stone statues and other relics that dot White Point Garden, a park near the southernmost tip of the city. We passed a monument to Lucius Mendel Rivers, a congressman and ardent segregationist who routinely vot
ed against civil rights and voting rights legislation. Next came the Daughters of the Confederacy hall, which appeared to be a public meeting space that, according to the paper signs posted, still hosted farmers’ markets and other public gatherings. As we walked deeper into the park, there were the cannons, placed near the water’s edge, whose plaques declared they were used by the Confederates to defend Fort Sumter. And off in one corner stood a massive monument, which seemed to depict a Greek soldier whose shield featured the South Carolina state seal. Behind the soldier stood a guardian angel. At the monument’s base, an inscription: TO THE CONFEDERATE DEFENDERS OF CHARLESTON—FORT SUMTER 1861–1865.
As a young man who had grown up almost entirely in the North, the pride with which the Confederacy still seemed to be so publicly celebrated gave me pause. “How do you stand in front of a statue,” I had written to a group of writer friends that night, “and reconcile that it stands in honor of a man who died fighting to keep you considered less than human?”
On the first Sunday after the shooting, Emanuel was filled to capacity. In one row sat Rick Santorum, a staunch conservative who at the time was hoping to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. Next to him sat DeRay Mckesson, one of dozens of activists who had flooded this city in solidarity with those slain. Ron Davis was there, too.
While there are stark differences—the Charleston killings were a premeditated massacre, while Jordan Davis’s death was a sudden violent act—Davis’s parents were struck by the underlying theme of white supremacy that ran through both incidents, as well as many of the other racial incidents that had made headlines in the years between. Michael Dunn, then a forty-five-year-old software developer in town for a wedding, told jurors he was scared of Jordan Davis because he listened to “rap crap,” and his fiancée testified that when the two pulled into the gas station the first words Dunn said were “I hate that thug music.” (At one point during a jailhouse phone call, Dunn declared that he had to kill Davis before the teen killed someone himself.)
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