What a Tennessee Speed Trap Tells Us About America

I’m going to talk about Tennessee in a story that involves race, but maybe isn’t racist. Racism isn’t always documentable because the standard now is to prove intent while ignoring the results. It will be a minute before I get to the Tennessee speed trap; I wasn’t even the one who got stopped. Hopefully, you’ll be patient.

A lifetime ago, I went to college in Tennessee. After growing up in Minneapolis, MN, I attended Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville. In Minneapolis, we had several Black churches and a couple of Black high schools. Still, white people controlled everything that mattered—my high school existence involved taking the city bus across town to Marshall University High and transferring once downtown.

The public bus system is a great place to observe people. I generally caught my first bus, the 9B on 42nd Street and 4th Avenue, at 6:30 am. Most of the same people rode every day. My white classmate, Julian, had usually gotten on two blocks earlier. We’d attended school together since first grade. Terri Lewis got on at 39th Street; when they didn’t get a ride from their Uncle Vern, brothers Robert and Lee Johnson got on at 36th Street. But it was the strangers from whom I learned the most without speaking. Those who dragged themselves to work each day were the ones worth watching. Mostly white people, a third of the year trudging through snow and ice, doing what they had to do to survive and take care of their families.

In those days, a two-car family was unusual. Parents dropped off their kids, and families decided where to go together. Every decision on where to go required a choice. I’m not saying that was bad; it’s just how it was.

Race in my family wasn’t discussed much, and I went back and forth between my primarily white school and all-black church without considering it. We got delivered the Minneapolis Star Tribune every morning, and I typically read the sports section and the comics, gradually expanding my base to include national and local news. At my Black barbershop (Crown Barber on 38th and 4th), there were always multiple issues of Ebony and Jet, where I scanned the headlines (along with the Jet centerfold).

High school was where most of the discussions took place. The Black Panthers were emerging; Aretha’s version of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was playing on the radio, along with James Brown’s “Say It Loud; I’m Black, And I’m Proud.” It felt like a good time to be Black, at an age where many of us had the most fun and the least responsibility we’d ever know again. Play was a scheduled part of the day. I was barely aware of Fred Hampton being killed by the FBI and the targeting of every Black organization and leader. I knew nothing of high Black unemployment and economic disparities. I was vaguely aware of the civil rights movement without knowing why the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Fair Housing Acts were needed. I was aware of the Vietnam War and the draft I was rapidly becoming old enough for. Like Cassius Clay, I didn’t have anything against the Viet Cong.

Before I got to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the Vietnam War had ended, so the draft went away. The Civil Rights Acts were passed in 1964, 1965, and 1968, respectively. You could make the case that every progressive civil rights law was implemented just like Brown v Board of Education, with all deliberate speed. Except for a brief visit to LaGrange, GA, to visit relatives, I’d never spent time in the South. Nashville was an awakening. My mother escorted me to Fisk, and we spent the night before registration at a Holiday Inn about twenty miles outside of town. We went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and the middle-aged white waitress quickly attended to us after we were seated, saying, “Can I help, y’all?”

I could spend hours thinking about how she said, “Can I help, y’all?” There was nothing evil about it; she seemed pretty nice. It was an instant recognition that I wasn’t in either Kansas or Minneapolis anymore, and I’d spend the next four years in a caricature. I had dropped into an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard that wouldn’t end anytime soon. My fears were for naught because Fisk was nothing like my introduction to the state. Fisk was a melting pot of Black people, some with equally southern accents and others more proper than myself.

My time at Fisk was one part immersion into Blackness and another part seclusion from the race issues of the day. I learned the good, bad, and ugly of Black history. I studied the Harlem Renaissance, listened to the Jubilee Singers, and came to understand the atrocities of enslavement. On the basketball team, I traveled to dozens of other HBCUs throughout the South. My first trip to Fort Valley, GA, led us past cotton fields. I still can’t explain my feeling of imagining the ancestors in the exact location.

During those same years, except for several instructors and two students (hey, Sean and Snow), I had little regular interaction with white people. I went to stores, the Rivergate Mall, and the movies, dealing with an occasional cashier. During the summers, I played basketball everywhere, including pick-up games at white colleges Belmont and David Lipscomb. I got to know sportswriters and some businesspeople. The focus was always on sports, and race had yet to come up.

Fisk (1866)was older than Vanderbilt (1873), Belmont (1890), David Lipscomb (1891), and every other private and public college/university in Nashville. By any metric you measure, Fisk has received far less in state and federal support than any of its white cousins. But I didn’t know that at the time. At Fisk, I met several lifelong friends, including one Freddie Munnings Jr, who was recently stopped while driving through Gibson, TN, and is the subject of that part of the story.

There is a narrative that America is progressing in terms of race relations. There’s a constant drumbeat that things are always getting better. My early indoctrination was full of firsts, the first African-American to do this or that, to reach a new position in government or corporate life. I was too young to experience Jackie Robinson in baseball, but I saw Hank Aaron in his prime and watched him eventually break Babe Ruth’s home run record. There was talk of a moral arc bending towards justice. I think it’s more of a winding road going from side to side and sometimes circling back.

Gibson, Tennessee, is a little more than a two-hour drive from Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan. Gibson is over 90% white, which I thought was unusual with a population of around 400. I don’t draw any conclusions from that, but everywhere I’d been in Tennessee, I was used to seeing more Black people; I didn’t think it would look like when I went with a church group on a bike trip through Iowa.

My friend recently relocated from South Florida to Humboldt, Tennessee, and was on his last leg when he passed through Gibson on US Route 45W in West Tennessee. As he approached a hill, the speed limit was 70 mph; coming down the hill, it dropped for no apparent reason to 55 mph. At that exact point, a Gibson County Sheriff was waiting with his radar gun and clocked my good friend, allegedly going 76 mph in a 55 mph zone.

I’ve gotten a few tickets in my day, and my experience has been that law enforcement officers will generally try to work with you a little. They might still give you a ticket, but take a little off the speed you were going to lessen the impact. This officer was familiar with the location and knew the speed limit dropped severely. He wasn’t there by coincidence; it was by design.

Now, if you knew Freddie Munnings Jr, as I do, you know he tried to talk his way out of that ticket. He explained the sudden change in the speed limit, pointed to his out-of-town plates, and mentioned that he would soon be a neighbor living in nearby Humboldt, Tennessee. The officer smiled and told my friend:

“Youse just the ones we’re looking for!”

I admit there are a few assumptions on my part, but it’s clear that there were at least a couple of types of people the officer would have given a break to. Maybe a blonde in a convertible or a resident of the town? A fellow law enforcement officer, perhaps. But not a Black man driving in an almost all-white town. I shouldn’t extrapolate anything from this single incident, but extrapolate I will because it’s kinda what I do.

This speed limit wasn’t set to entrap Black people, nor was the law written to target them. But when we find ourselves in violation of the law. We’re treated differently; we’re the ones they’re looking for. There were once special laws covering Black people, which have mostly been erased from the books. There were the slave codes, Black codes, Jim Crow, and more that kept Black people down while giving whites an advantage. That doesn’t mean we don’t have disparate sentencing, over-policing, and shield laws allowing unarmed Black people to get shot with no repercussions. It just means the law is written the same.

When Freddie told me about the incident, there was no amazement or shock; it wasn’t necessarily about race, but it kinda was. At no point, to my knowledge, was my friend in fear for his life, but that shouldn’t be the standard. He had an interaction with the police that was polite, even friendly, but he was still treated differently than someone else would have been in the same situation.

In a question I don’t have a perfect answer for, is America improving in race? We had a first Black President, but the whitelash gave us his polar opposite, who brought a team of white supremacists into the White House. I regularly engage on a site belonging to a highly respected constitutional lawyer. The regulars there are educated, intelligent, up on current events, and in many cases racist as fuck. It’s as permissible today to be openly racist as it was in any period in my lifetime, and that’s a concern. The Klan had the shame to wear hoods over their faces. Today’s equivalents have podcasts and shows on Fox News.

I learned from my friend’s traffic stop that there are still different rules for different people. That only seems to matter when you are the one they’re looking for. Suppose you aren’t in a subset of people constantly being persecuted and receiving unequal treatment or justice. It isn’t worth the effort to try to make a change. Women sat back and watched abortion rights removed or diminished. Voter suppression is now the law in more and more states, while those not being suppressed turn a blind eye. Black authors are being banned from libraries and schools, while the Black history I learned can no longer be taught in many places.

In many ways, race relations have improved since my days in Minneapolis and Nashville; in others, they’ve worsened. I hope everyone learns that the struggle isn’t over, and if you think you’re not the one they’re looking for, the time will come when they’re looking for you. The moral arc is bending backward; let’s point it back toward justice.

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

—

This post was previously published on Momentum.

***

Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.

All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.

A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.