By Malcolm Shore
On New Year’s Eve, this nation may well have witnessed its most horrific police murder ever.
That is obviously quite a statement, given the long, blood-soaked history of police brutality and murder in this country—the vast majority directed against persons of color. Furthermore, the execution I am about to discuss involved a single bullet, not the 41 sprayed at Amadou Diallo or the 50 spewed at Sean Bell. And the victim was not 13 years old, like Devin Brown was when the LAPD killed him in 2005, or 12 years old, as DeAunta Farrow was when West Memphis police gunned him down in 2007.
However, as absolutely shocking to the conscience as each of those instances of police murder were, none were committed in plain view of hundreds of people, with the perpetrators presumably fully aware that they were being videotaped. And in each of the above-mentioned cases, police at least invented a pretext for their actions, as absurd, fraudulent, and morally reprehensible as that pretext might have been: “We thought Amadou Diallo was reaching for a gun”; “We thought someone in Sean Bell’s car had a gun”; “Devin Brown tried to ram us with his car;” “We thought DeAunta Farrow’s toy gun was a real gun.”
But in the early morning of January 1, 2009—the first hours of America’s “post-racial society”—a transit officer in Oakland, California drew his gun and shot in the back a young Black man who was handcuffed, lying face down on a subway car. It was, plain and simply, a public lynching, conducted in front of hundreds of onlookers and captured on passengers’ cell phone cameras. There is not even the pretense of pretext: Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer Johannes Mehserle saw 22-year-old Oscar Grant III lying helpless in front of him, wanted to shoot him, and saw no reason he wouldn’t get away with it.
Three facts here seem particularly important to point out:
1) Even though video footage of the execution has circulated all over the world for the past week, the worst thing that has happened to Mehserle so far is that he resigned from the police force. He has not even been interviewed by police yet.
Can you imagine any scenario in which a civilian commits murder on videotape and is still at large one week later?
2) The next words that Barack Obama—America’s first Black president—says about the Oscar Grant lynching will be his first.
3) On Wednesday January 7, the day Grant was buried, San Francisco erupted in both peaceful demonstrations and riots. The mainstream media, predictably, has by and large portrayed the riots as “senseless,” and the rioters as a “mob.” Undoubtedly, given the spontaneous fury generated by Oscar Grant’s killing, there have been acts that should not have happened; justifiable anger has, in some instances, spilled over into unjustifiable acts. But it speaks volumes that the major media will classify the riots as “senseless” acts, yet will not use this language to refer to the murder—or murderers—of Oscar Grant.
That fact, along with the two others listed above it, is more than sufficient to demonstrate: A) America has become an overt police state. B) Any notion of Obama’s presidency representing a post-racial society is laughably out of touch with reality. C) No one other than the people of this country is going to do a damn thing about this blatant murder. It is entirely up to us.
In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was dragged from his home, viciously beaten, and shot to death by two White men in Mississippi. Pictures of Till’s mutilated body soon appeared in Jet Magazine, and the images became synonymous with the epidemic of lynching that killed thousands of African-Americans and terrorized all who remained alive.
Even more than that, the Emmett Till lynching shone a light that could not be extinguished on the reality of what the United States truly was, what it did, and what it represented, and people all across the world took note. The result was a national and international outcry that today is viewed as a watershed moment in the development of the civil rights movement, which later fueled the more radical Black power movement as well as more broad resistance to the crimes of our government—most notably the Vietnam War.
While the future is, of course, impossible to predict precisely, the lynching of Oscar Grant III may prove to be our generation’s Emmett Till moment.
Oscar Grant, you will not be forgotten. In your name, as well as the names of the millions of Oscar Grants in Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we pledge our resistance to the crimes of U.S. empire.