» America was founded on the idea that injustice can demand a revolution.
America was founded on the idea that injustice can demand a revolution
Born in rebellion, nurtured by political debate and baptized under the banner of “We, the people,” the United States has protest and dissent in its DNA.
We cherish the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of religion, of speech, of the press and the right “of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
No other country in the world allows more freedom to criticize elected officials, wave signs, shout slogans or march in the streets to demand reform and change.
Yet, these days, the conventional wisdom is that these rights are to be respected only in their peaceful forms: nonviolent demonstrations, boycotts, public crusades and mild civil disobedience. Crossing the line to riots and lawlessness leads to anarchy and chaos.
That has been the issue hanging over the protests following the police killing of George Floyd. The looting and violence that has broken out in some cases, critics say, discredits or cheapens the legitimate moral outrage of the demonstrations and will cripple efforts at reform.
That view, however, ignores the very impulse that conceived a nation dedicated to such freedoms. It dismisses the founding idea that
injustice can become so great that it warrants a violent response.
It’s naive to interpret “Give me liberty or give me death” in any other context.
No one should condone or encourage violence. The tragic deaths of black Americans at the hands of their government are no license for senseless destruction or lawless free-for-all. That indeed cheapens the dignity of the cause, as does the cynical opportunism of anarchists and white supremacists who stir the pot to further their own corrosive agendas.
But to treat violence truly borne of anguish and desperation as a wholly irresponsible and unproductive exercise perpetrated solely by hoodlums and “thugs,” is to turn a blind eye to history. The founders made it clear that it remains the last option for citizens seeking to redress their grievances. The possibility of insurrection is a sort of emergency lever than can be used to force governments to listen to those who would never be heard otherwise.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” President John F. Kennedy said, “will make violent revolution inevitable.”
It’s an oversimplification to say that violence never solves anything. Violence has been a factor in many of the nation’s crucial turning points, not just in our independence and foreign wars but in the preservation of the Union, the end of slavery and even in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Even the architect and apostle of nonviolent protest in America, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., understood the need for violence — from the other side — to make his vision work. That meant strategic confrontation that challenged the status quo and almost always provoked a brutal response.
The scenes of college students being beaten for the offense of eating at public lunch counters, of the Freedom Riders being battered in Southern bus stations, of police dogs tearing at the flesh of children fleeing fire hoses and the sight of unresistant men and women being bludgeoned on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge finally persuaded Americans that the laws our government was enforcing were unjust and immoral.
The incredible bravery and sacrifice of those civil rights warriors absorbing the violent blows changed the hearts of those who had missed the protesters’ humanity.
On occasion, even when violence isn’t part of a strategy, its sudden outbreak can tip the scales to bring change in matters of prolonged injustice. That’s what happened in Houston’s Moody Park riots.
It began with the 1977 arrest of 23-year-old Vietnam War veteran Joe Campos Torres for disorderly conduct. Instead of booking Campos Torres, police took him to an isolated area behind a warehouse along Buffalo Bayou, where six officers beat him for hours. His body was eventually dumped in the bayou where it was found three days later.
Two officers were charged in the death but an all-white jury found them guilty of negligent homicide, a misdemeanor. They were sentenced to a year’s probation and a $1 fine, a sentence that was later changed to nine months in prison.
The horrific details of Campos Torres’ murder, the long history of police brutality in minority communities and the light punishment for the offenders provided the tinder for a public explosion.
A year after Campos Torres’ death, a confrontation erupted when police attempted to make arrests during the Cinco de Mayo celebrations at Moody Park.
“People rose up and started throwing rocks and bottles at the police, overturning police cars and shouting ‘Justice for Joe Torres’ and ‘Viva Joe Torres,’” one officer on the scene told the Houston Chronicle.
More than 40 people were arrested in an event that became national news. It also is credited with prompting the creation of HPD’s internal affairs department. The combination of the crime, the failure of the criminal justice system, the national attention to the riots and the years of abuse all came together.
In a similar fashion, six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992 after six Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the brutal beating of Rodney King caught on video ended with 53 people dead, more than 2,000 people injured and property damages of more than $1 billion. It also resulted in the exposure of infamously brutal LAPD and more scrutiny of systemic racism, abusive arrest techniques and more issues in police departments across the country.
No one would celebrate the death and destruction the riots caused, but they did raise public awareness to chronic societal problems that were being ignored by the power structure.
It is crucial, then, to see the current protests not just as a reaction to the death of George Floyd but to 400 years of oppression of black people in America. More than 200 years of slavery followed by the period that, unfortunately, few middleaged Americans got to in their history text books: 100 years of lynchings, Jim Crow laws, segregation and disenfranchisement and more than 50 years of mass incarceration, police brutality and de facto segregation.
The video of Floyd being choked to death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has mostly sparked the kind of peaceful protests that most citizens embrace — and that Floyd’s own family has pleaded for. Organizers have condemned the looting, arson and vandalism as wrong and counterproductive. They want change by peaceful means.
Violence, or the threat of it, may bring urgency to the cause but it also brings great risks, not to mention the harm it causes to unintended targets such as destruction of minority-owned businesses and livelihoods.
Then there’s the long-term backlash. America’s historically white majority has often rushed to “law and order” politics in the face of public unrest. The 1960s riots in Chicago, Washington,
D.C., Detroit and Watts in Los Angeles boosted conservative policies for a generation and helped elect Richard Nixon president in 1968.
The predominantly poor, segregated neighborhoods damaged in the uprisings have yet to fully recover.
Violence can also bring heavy government intervention that can stifle even the peaceful demonstrations, by intimidating protesters with the threat of being gassed or beaten by police or getting swept up in the mass arrests intended to “remove the bad actors.”
The issue came into stark relief last week when President Donald Trump suggested he was considering using the Insurrection Act to deploy armed forces to end some rioting and looting related to the Floyd protests. This is part of a disingenuous narrative to portray the mostly peaceful protests as acts of full rebellion.
The prospect frightened many Americans across the political spectrum and received push back from influential military figures such as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Marine general and Trump secretary of defense James Mattis as a dangerous overreach in executive powers, especially as civil unrest was already dissipating under local police and National Guard control.
The idea of U.S. combat troops moving against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights to assemble would test the social fabric of our nation. Fifty years later, we don’t want another Kent State.
Public demonstrations and government response remind us that society is based on a balance of order and justice. Can we be content with an order that subjugates justice? How far can we go in disrupting order to end injustice? How much violence will we tolerate from our government?
There are no simple answers — and suggesting otherwise is short-sighted, unproductive and harmful to progress. Democracy, as they say, was never intended to be efficient and orderly. A free society is by design complicated and messy. And so, it appears, is peace.