Derek Chauvin’s conviction for a slow and public murder in broad daylight should have been no surprise, but it was.
The Attorney General of Minnesota, overseeing the government’s case, started out two strikes behind for segments of the public.
Keith Ellison (D-Minneapolis) is black, and everyone knows whites can be fair to blacks but not the reverse; Ellison follows Islam, and everyone knows he must therefore intend physical harm to non-Muslims — -like his wife, who is not Muslim. Ellison told CBS:
“I was never convinced we were going to win this case until we heard the verdict of guilty.”
I am in no position to criticize Ellison because I share some of the same feelings that gave him pause. My professional commitment to the law mirrored Ellison’s from the time I came to the Bar and became an elected judge in Texas. I had wanted to be Thurgood Marshall when I grew up, but when I came to the Bar, that gig was taken, and I owed Sam sums of money borrowed for my education that took my breath away along with some career options.
The killing of George Floyd was a hard video to watch — all the George Floyd videos were. It happened in front of a cluster of onlookers that were black and white, old and young. They pleaded with Chauvin to remove his knee before Floyd died. Chauvin continued to choke off Floyd’s air with a smirk toward his sidewalk advisors that shouted his awareness that he acted with the security that came from generations of impunity.
He killed like a James Bond villain. Torture a man in front of an audience as an educational experience for them. Torture him until he finally begs for his life.
Then kill him anyway
The extremity of the torture brought to mind Emmett Till, as the trial of Till’s killer probably affected Ellison’s attitude toward his case even more than it did me. I kept hearing in my mind the lyric penned by Jimmy Collier and spread like warm butter by the co-creator of their album, Everybody’s Got a Right to Live, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick:
Now Medgar Evers and Emmett Till
were true examples of courage and will
and they had everything when they had freedom on their minds.
But when segregation is broken down
you will see every Tom in town
sittin’ at lunch counters, smokin’ big cigars, and sayin’
“Look what we have done!”
“You’re Just a Laughin’ Fool” ©1968 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Emmett Till, we geezers can recall, was all of 14 years old, and had had even less chance to make a name for himself than George Floyd had before his fatal encounter with Derek Chauvin’s knee and Derek Chauvin’s attitude (not necessarily in that order). Now there are streets named after Floyd and some of us hope reforms in the practice of policing gathered in Congress under his name will become law.
The boy of 14 from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, either did or did not whistle at a 21-year-old store clerk. And, oh yes, she was half owner of the store. And, oh yes, she was white. In 2021, young men are supposed to be taught not to flirt with women who are not receptive to being flirted with or, if you must, don’t expect to run for public office when you are old enough to internalize how rude you were. The evidence is now and was in the fifties unclear whether Emmett Till did the act that cost him his life when merely accused.
I am skeptical because the whole contretemps is attributed to his ignorance of the gap between what was acceptable conduct in Chicago and what was acceptable in Mississippi. I expect the boy would have gotten his butt kicked in Illinois, but the punishment would probably have stopped short of stringing him up naked and beating his back and his butt with harness leather.
In Mississippi, that was a fair punishment for the offense, and even one of the prosecutors who faded the heat for indicting two white men in Till’s kidnapping and homicide was quoted as saying in his final argument that what Till did was wrong, but it warranted a spanking, not a murder.
The support of the white community appeared to be connected to a major defense argument that Till was not in fact dead and the remains pulled from the Tallahatchie River could not have been identified beyond a reasonable doubt even by his mother. The New York Times Magazine quoted two of the Till jurors in 2005, still buying the defense theory that the government failed to prove the boy was dead.
That was the same year Emmett Till’s remains were exhumed under a court order sought by the Department of Justice cold case task force. The body in Emmett Till’s grave was Emmett Till, according to DNA comparisons with his living relatives.
The “Emmett Till is alive” claim began to crumble right after the verdict came back and witnesses started contradicting each other and themselves. When the flim-flam became obvious, even people who had raised money for the defense jumped ship.
The killers could not hire black workers or find black customers….but neither could they find white customers or float bank loans to put in crops. The prosecution team publicly admitted a tactical error when they struck everybody from the jury panel who knew the defendants, because it appeared that everybody who knew them hated them.
Still, Emmett Till’s murder was a particularly gruesome example of the “justice” offered the families of black murder victims in Mississippi. It remains to be seen whether the stench of the Till case will be dissipated by the Chauvin conviction.
Derek Chauvin’s case is far from over. There has been no sentencing yet, and some politicians have gifted Chauvin’s defense with public statements that could cause trouble for upholding the conviction if jurors admit hearing them. However, the indelible image of the slow-motion killing is already offset somewhat by Derek Chauvin handcuffed and perp walked out of the courtroom when the judge revoked his bond after the verdict.
Lots of white people stood with George Floyd’s family when it counted — before the verdict. The black and white of justice has been muddled, I hope — because the issue is merely color.
All H. sapiens are the same species and “race” no longer computes as meaningful to most anthropologists, cultural and physical. All populations can interbreed and if left to their own devices, they will. The KKK told us so, right?
If people are going to be abused for membership in this bogus classification of humans, the law must speak to it. As I’ve tried to tell other mixed-blood Indians who are not enrolled, the fact that I chose to enroll gets me no more civil rights protection than they have. If somebody discriminates against you because they claim you are Indian, it does not matter whether you really are.
Indians complicated the racial hierarchy in Oklahoma. Most of Eastern Oklahoma was the reservations of the Five Tribes, called “civilized” by barbarians who claim authority to award that status. All five came to what became Oklahoma under cover of treaties that varied in the dishonesty of their negotiation but had one thing in common: they all contained a promise by the United States that the reservations would never become part of any state without permission of tribal governments.
What became Western Oklahoma was the reservations of mostly Plains Tribes who put up fights for their land rather than getting taken in a negotiation. The survivors of the Indian wars got put on reservations more or less at gunpoint. I call them prisoner of war camps — you may, of course, suit yourself when grasping for excuses.
My first book, Sequoyah Rising (Carolina Academic Press, 2010), is not about the man who invented the Cherokee syllabary. The Five Tribes met in a constitutional convention and wrote a constitution for a proposed state of Sequoyah, in an effort to preserve the degree of self-determination in all five treaties. Congress declared the state of Sequoyah a non-starter and the plan for the state of Oklahoma came to fruition in 1907.
This story is not a digression; it’s the meat of why Jim Crow laws in Oklahoma did not apply to Indians. When the Constitution of Sequoyah was not approved, another election followed immediately for the constitutional convention charged to write a constitution for the state of Oklahoma. There was substantial overlap between the Sequoyah delegates and the Oklahoma delegates, and their work products were similar.
Discrimination against ex-slaves persisted in Oklahoma law because all five tribes were somehow connected to chattel slavery. Those with plantation economies owned slaves; others worked as slave catchers. There is plenty of ignominy to go around.
Oklahoma law would recognize the social distinction between the former owners of human beings and the formerly owned. Then, of course, when all the Indians got their allotment of the commons and the rest of the reservations were declared to be “surplus lands,” white people poured in and built more racism on the foundations already laid.
It was a cut above the Confederate States of America, where the Civil War and Reconstruction left blacks and whites in separate and hostile armed camps. When the first Reconstruction failed, most of the ex-slaves became sharecroppers, rented instead of owned but with little property or access to public education. The second Reconstruction was more successful in terms of tracks left in the law books.
The Commonwealth of Virginia took a third path. You might call Virginia law an early adoption of the phrase coming back into fashion, “people of color.” Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker was the author and chief enforcer of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. That law recognized only two “races” in the Commonwealth of Virginia, “white” and “colored,” effectively legislating American Indians out of existence. From his post as Registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, he enforced the “one-drop rule” against African-Americans and Indians alike, and no “colored” person like my father could lawfully marry a white person like my mother until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1967.
Plecker’s idea is either a handy reminder of the absurdity of making up racial distinctions or a law slightly before its time. The fault lines defined by color but called “race” around which the killings of Emmett Till and George Floyd tiptoed or stomped began to get challenged in the Till case and appear to be on the ropes taking a beating in the Floyd case.
Those fault lines will determine the outcomes of homicide cases in the future as they have in the past if we don’t shake off the nonsense that has so far convinced too many people that color is merit and therefore color is destiny.
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Previously Published on Medium
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Leslie Barlow, Taylan DeJohnette, Maiya Lea Hartman
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