It’s been observed that “In the Hall of Justice, the only justice is in the hall.” But the parents of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin can take cold comfort that the confusing tapes of screams, gunfire and what sounds to many like his shooter’s racist cursing will be “acoustically enhanced.”
And they’ll enhance police video of the calm shooter’s “injuries.” It took 15 years for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations to report, “Scientific acoustical evidence [taped from a jammed-open radio in JFK’s police escort] establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.”
So on this, the 44th anniversary of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s shooting, we can reflect that some things take time to be “set right”.
For example, in 1954, Ron Dellums volunteered for the Marines. After a few weeks, his boot camp sergeant ordered him to report to Officer Candidate School. Dellums had scored the highest on the intelligence tests out of the hundreds of recruits in his battalion.
When Dellums showed up at the O.C.S. front desk, though, the two sergeants looked surprised. They looked down at Ron’s papers. They looked back up at Dellums, shook their heads and ordered him back to his barrack.
It turned out the boot camp intake clerk who first typed Ron’s papers had barely glanced up from his typewriter at Ron’s freshly-shaved head. Dellums was a light-skinned African-American. With Ron’s head shaved, the typist had mistakenly typed his race as “white.”
His grown-out, curly black hair barred him from becoming an officer in our armed services. But Congressman Ron Dellums “worked his way up through the ranks” to become the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee.
One morning in 1970, during Ron’s first campaign for Congress, reporters suddenly stormed his little campaign office. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, had just denounced Dellums to the national press as a violent black extremist who would “tear down the walls”.
True, Ron’s speeches urged people of all races and religions in his East Bay district to figuratively “tear
down the walls.” The “walls” were divisive barricades unscrupulous politicians threw up to psychologically segregate Americans and “divide and conquer” us. So, Dellums urged, “tear down the walls” and build truly united states.
But Agnew took Ron’s words out of context. Agnew kept painting Dellums as a black extremist who incited voters to violently vandalize walls – until the U.S. Attorney formally charged Spiro with taking bribes – unrelated to Nixon’s Watergaters’ felonies – and Agnew resigned (before Nixon did). Those voters elected Ron to Congress. They reelected him 13 times.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy spoke in West Berlin. He defiantly declared Americans’ solidarity with West Germans walled-off from the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (“I am a Berliner!”) In 1987, at the Berlin Wall, President Reagan seconded Kennedy’s defiance of Soviet aggression. And Reagan echoed Congressman Dellums, demanding, “…tear down this wall!” (Nixon and Agnew didn’t accuse Reagan of inciting people to vandalize walls. But politics is such a rough business, we were glad for President Kennedy’s sake he didn’t voice Americans’ solidarity with West Germany’s people in Frankfurt: “I am a Frankfurter!” Or in Hamburg: “I am a Hamburger!”)
Reverend King’s shooting on April 4, 1968 was the second of three disheartening 1960s assassinations of iconic civil rights leaders: President John F. Kennedy, Reverend King, and Senator Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy.
The night of King’s assassination, Senator Kennedy climbed onto the back of a truck and broke the news to a peaceful, largely-black crowd, saying: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
Senator Kennedy was himself shot and killed two months later – the night he’d won California’s crucial presidential primary. (Nixon’s advisers revealed that Kennedy, whose brother, “Jack”, beat Nixon in 1960, was the opponent Nixon feared most.) As Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers stood behind him, Bobby’s last gesture to a Vietnam War-torn nation came seconds before he was shot: after thanking his volunteers, Bobby smiled at the crowd and flashed the two-fingered “peace” sign.
More evidence of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s tragic shooting should have been collected and preserved. And “Dead men tell no tales.” But at least now, what’s left of the evidence will be weighed again more carefully.
Meanwhile, why not “tear down the walls” that psychologically segregate us – and that help cause senseless shootings of children and adults?
