Riot Reflections, 50 years later

Had the riots at Dixie M. Hollins High School in St. Petersburg, Florida happened today, I would probably be writing about a body count, who the shooter was, and what weapons he used.

But it was 1971, and what happened at Dixie M. Hollins High School resulted in fighting, injuries, multiple arrests, and at least one stabbing.

I was seven years old in September of 1971, the first school year when court-ordered busing went into effect in an effort to achieve racial integration. One of the school districting lines went down my street. Had I lived on the other side of the street, I would have gone to Northwest Elementary. Instead, I was able to walk four blocks to Westgate Elementary. 

I didn't understand the controversy about busing.  That first year, I mainly remember the "bus students" listed on the roll in my third grade class.  They were Tonetta, Rita, Lolita, and Valarie, they were placed at the end of the roll and called out separately. 

But during September and October of 1971, Dixie M. Hollins High School was embroiled in controversy, a controversy that would end up making national news.  

In December, 2015, Tampa Bay Times reporter John Romano looked back on those days. He described the students who lived through them as "kids who fought with fists and wounded with words . . . who saw cops on the school's rooftop with rifles and saw adults inciting violence from across the street . . . who saw football games and school days canceled for fear of race riots."

It started a week after the school year began, when Dixie Hollins' principal got on the intercom and announced that the Confederate battle flag, the "Stars and Bars", would no longer be permitted on campus.  

For a school whose fight song was "Dixie" and whose athletic teams were called the "Rebels," this spelled trouble. 

The next day, angry adults, Confederate battle flags in hand, stood across the street, protesting.

For the next couple of weeks, they drove up and down the street, the Stars and Bars protruding from the backs of their cars, flapping in the breeze, as Black students arrived on campus. 

Tension built.  Fights broke out.  Students were sent home early due to fears of violence. 

The week of October 11, 1971, all hell broke loose. 

On October 12, 1971, the school had to be closed after what the St. Petersburg Times described as a "fist-swinging, rock-throwing, slogan-shouting melee." Afterwards, the school superintendent was quoted as saying, "God, I'm tired. They didn't have any courses like this in school administration." 

The next day, a 16-year-old girl brought a steak knife to school and stabbed a deputy in the chest.  Fortunately, the wound was minor.

Eventually, things settled down, though not without simmering unrest under the surface.

In 2020, although the official name of the school remains Dixie M. Hollins High School, the school decided to brand themselves as "Hollins High", and gave themselves a new nickname, the "Royals."

The irony here is that Dixie Martin Hollins, the first superintendent of schools for Pinellas County, supported education for all students, no matter what race, and he often hired people from Black colleges and universities. 

But with the first name "Dixie", the nickname "Rebels", and a mascot resembling a Confederate colonel, "we'd still be tied to a past that we needed to break free from," according to principal Bob Florio.  

This school year marks 50 years since those days of tension and rioting. I remember little about it except reading bits about it in the paper and seeing bits of it on the news. Two of the people arrested during that October week of violence were the father and sister of a girl in my sister's Girl Scout troop.

That Friday, I went with my mother and sister to drop my sister off at weekend camp. The father was there, and he and my mother had a long discussion. I heard none of it. Instead, as a seven-year-old going on eight, all I wondered were two things:  1. Why was he here and not in jail, since he'd been arrested (he was probably out on bail), and 2. Where were the marks of the handcuffs on his wrists? 

Such is the innocence of a little girl. 

I'd love to say that we've progressed in 50 years. 

But school violence? Confederate flag controversies? Racial tensions? 

Little, if anything, has changed.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Breaking the Third Commandment

Last night the President of the United States broke the Third Commandment.

He walked over to a church, after protesters in front of it had been tear-gassed, held up a Bible, and had his picture taken, after threatening to send out “thousands and thousands of troops” to stop the violence currently taking over America if the governors did not do it themselves.

If you look up a list of the Ten Commandments in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, the Third Commandment reads, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” (King James Version).  The New International Version reads, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

Last night, in using the Bible and a church for a photo op, the President of the United States took two symbols of Christian America and misused them for his own purposes.  

There are people who have called him “brave” and said “well done”.  

No.  This is not well done.  

Trump used St. John’s Episcopal Church as a backdrop for his photo op.  The Right Reve. Mariann Buddy, who is the bishop of Washington, D.C.’s Episcopal Diocese, said she was “not given even a courtesy call that they would be clearing with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop, holding a Bible, one that declares that God is love and when everything he has said and done is to enslave violence.”

Earlier, Trump told governors on a conference call that they had to “dominate”, and take back the streets, and called them “weak”.

We have a man who died at the hands of police a week ago.  We have another man who died at the hands of two white men three months ago, and it took two months for video of that murder to emerge.    We have a woman who died at the hands of police who “went to the wrong house.” (Oops.). In case you have forgotten, their names are George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.  

I know of two African-Americans — people I am personally acquainted with — who are afraid to go jogging in their neighborhoods, who are afraid to wear masks when they go out.  Another African-American whom I know personally has said, I don’t want to die.  I just want to go home to my wife.

And our President has the chutzpah to go to a church and hold up a Bible, after demanding that governors “take back the streets” and threatening to send out “thousands and thousands of troops”.  

President Trump, do you want a second Civil War?

Do you?

We Christians get very touchy at the use of certain language.  We should.  I find certain words offensive and I don’t like my ears and my brain being assaulted with them.  

But something is terribly wrong when Christians are quick to scream about a particular word which takes the name of the Lord in vain, quick to demand prayer back in schools and the Ten Commandments posted on the walls, quick to demand that abortion be outlawed . . . and yet see nothing wrong when a President of the United States misuses the name of the Lord by using a church and a Bible to make himself look strong, tough, and Presidential.

We, indeed, have lost our compass.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Rawness, passion, and terror

(This is a somewhat rewritten version of a post I originally wrote back in January.  I'm revisiting this subject because today is the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's shooting.)

This man is your man

This man is our man
From California
To the New York island
From the redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This man is Robert Kennedy.

You can hear the raw passion in their voices on this audio, recorded on the night of  June 5, 1968.  (The audio is from the Pacifica Radio Archives and is posted on David Von Pein's YouTube channel.  DVP has hundreds of hours of JFK and RFK-era video and audio posted; I recommend him highly.)

They are exuberant and idealistic.

Their man, Robert Kennedy, is ahead in the California primary, a "winner-take-all" state as far as delegates are concerned.  Later, ABC newscaster Frank Reynolds would comment, there's nothing like an election night when everything is going your way.

The audio goes from singing to the chant of, "Sock it to 'em, Bobby!"

Eight minutes and thirty-one seconds into the audio, their hero enters to an ovation of shouting and the rousing cheers of, "We want Kennedy!  We want Kennedy!"

The first person he mentions is Don Drysdale, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who'd pitched his sixth straight shutout that evening; Kennedy hoped they'd have as good fortune in their campaign.

He ran through a list of people he wanted to thank, including his dog, Freckles . . . and right afterwards -- after explaining that it wasn't in order of important -- his wife, Ethel.

At one point, while thanking the people who worked on the campaign, a young woman's voice yells back, "It was worth it!"

Tapping into the frustration people felt over rising violence and the war in Vietnam, he stressed that people wanted a change.  (Forty years later, another candidate would tap into similar frustration within the United States.)  

He finished his speech declaring that yes, Americans could work together; that we were a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country.

The speech ends with the triumphant words, "and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there."  Then, with a thumbs-up to the crowd and a flash of the two-fingered peace sign, he turns away from the podium while the crowd chants, "We want Bobby!"

Less than five minutes later, the screaming starts.

It's not the ovation the crowd gave a victorious candidate.  Rather, it's the screams of terror, panic, and confusion.

A second audio recording, of Andrew West from the Mutual Broadcasting System, also captures the moment:  "Senator Kennedy has been shot, is that possible?" "He still has the gun, the gun is pointed at me right at this moment," "Get the gun, Rafer . . . get his thumb, break it if you have to!"

And of the video coverage from the three major networks, perhaps two clips best illustrate the raw confusion:  1.  A bewildered Terry Drinkwater, CBS reporter, trying to figure out what had just happened (around 15:31 on the clip), and 2. the NBC coverage, about 40 seconds into the tape, showing one of Sirhan Sirhan's shooting victims being carried out of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen.  The NBC reporter speaking insists -- incorrectly -- that Stephen Smith, Robert Kennedy's brother-in-law, had also been shot.

In the first 24 minutes of the CBS video, there were no fewer than 28 pleas for a doctor and no fewer than 36 pleas, requests, and orders to "please clear the room", leave the room, or variations thereof.

These were the moments when panic took over, when terror took over and the raw jubilation of only a few minutes ago turned with fierce suddenness to raw fear.

John Kennedy's assassination also showed how quickly events can turn.  He'd received a warm welcome in Dallas, Texas only to be gunned down by an assassin who took six seconds to fire three shots.  (Oswald acted alone.  Deal with it.)  We saw the panic and terror of the crowds only after the film was developed; we heard the confusion as technicians in master control frantically flipped switches and yelled instructions into headsets offstage.

Five years later, broadcast technology developed to the point where we could see the raw panic, terror and confusion the moment it started happening.

This is life, at it rawest, unedited and unscripted, but captured on film and on audio.

And while the men in the anchor chairs -- Walter Cronkite, Frank Reynolds, Howard K. Smith, Frank McGee, and others -- may have been more polished in their delivery, you can catch their controlled, barely suppressed anger over the event; specifically, the failure of the Congress to pass gun control.

Twenty-six hours later, at 1:44 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time, Robert F. Kennedy died.  About 15 minutes later, his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, stepped up to a microphone and made the terse announcement of Kennedy's death.

Perhaps this was the moment that hope in our political system really began to fray, wither, and die. 

Jack Newfield, in his 1969 book Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, ends his book with these words:

Now I realized what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968.  We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome.  We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated.  And from this time forward, things would get worse:  our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.  

The stone was at the bottom of the hill and we were alone.

Fifty years later, how much has really changed?  Has the raw passion and terror heard and seen that night in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles morphed into a fatalistic depression about the future?

When Henry Jackson, U.S. Senator from Washington (who later ran for President in 1976), learned of Kennedy's shooting, stated, "The world has gone mad."

The world went mad in the early morning of June 5, 1968, there in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, and fifty years later -- fifty years of violence, of mass shootings, of the murder of school children, fifty years of anger and hate later -- we have yet to regain any semblance of sanity.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Are we ripe for another Arthur Bremer?

He took a gun to a campaign rally, and when the time was right, he pointed it at his intended victim and fired.  As a result, the victim, presidential candidate George Wallace, spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

The date was May 15, 1972; the place was Laurel, Maryland; and the shooter's name was Arthur Bremer.  Bremer was 21 years old when he shot George Wallace.  He spent over 35 years in prison before being paroled in 2007.

Bremer began a diary in 1972 in which he wrote about his plans to assassinate either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.  Why?  He wanted "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see."  Later, he would write, "I'm as important as the start of WWI.  I just need the little opening and a second of time."

In other words, he wanted to be important, not unlike Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold nearly 30 years later, or not unlike John Hinkley, the man who shot President Reagan.

I was eight years old in May of 1972, and I remember when this happened.  Since then, I've seen many times the video clip of George Wallace being shot, falling to the ground, with blood staining his shirt; his wife Cornelia throwing herself on him.

After last's night disturbance in Chicago which resulted in the cancellation of a Donald Trump campaign rally, I think we are ripe for another Arthur Bremer.

Who remembers 1972?  We were still in Vietnam, although we were beginning the process of leaving.  One month after George Wallace's shooting, five men would re-tape a door at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. and begin the downfall of a President.

Just four years earlier, 1968, Chicago's Democratic convention had been convulsed in violence that spilled out into the streets, with demonstrators chanting, "The whole world is watching!"  (The next year, Robert Lamm of the rock group Chicago would borrow that audio clip and use it on their debut album.)

Sound familiar?

I've previously referred to the Republican race as a food fight worthy of "Animal House".  These days, I watch the Republican debates for the entertainment value and the chance to throw virtual rotten food at the TV set.

But last night, in Chicago, things ceased being funny.

If, indeed, the whole world was watching in 1968 when demonstrators marched in the streets of Chicago, that's even more true now in 2016.  In 1968, there was no CNN, and Fox referred to the name of a movie-making company, not a news channel.  And people used the word "net" to refer to catching fish or butterflies, not as shorthand for "Internet".

Last night, in Chicago, I saw conditions that were ripe for the making of another Arthur Bremer.

When you have a dissatisfied electorate that has been battered by fears of terrorist attack and nearly eight years of economic malaise and uncertainty, combined with clashes between police and civilians, with the addition of mass shootings that are so common that people are numb to them . . . you have the makings of a situation that appeals to an Arthur Bremer.

Bremer was obviously mentally ill when he shot George Wallace.  But he also wanted to do something "bold and dynamic", and somewhere in that deranged mind of his, he decided that the way to do it was to shoot a presidential candidate.

In this age of YouTube and selfies and 24-hour news coverage which is fueled by violence and which magnifies every injustice, both real and perceived, what's to stop someone from pointing a gun at a presidential candidate for those very same reasons--to do something "bold and dynamic"?  Or, to think that THEY are the only ones that can put a stop to Donald Trump's increasingly shrill appeals to an angry electorate?  Or, to put a stop to the campaigns of Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich for similar reasons?

Donald Trump is right about one thing:  people are angry.

Just as I was writing this, I saw a news blurb quoting President Obama as saying that the GOP provided the conditions for Donald Trump's success.  Opinions are going to vary as to who is ultimately responsible for the angry American electorate.  I will say, that although Donald Trump isn't personally responsible for this current wave of anger in the country, he's not doing very much to keep it in check.  In fact, he's doing everything he can to fuel the fire!

I fear that this angry American electorate is just the right soil to grow up another Arthur Bremer, who one day will point a gun at a candidate and fire.  I pray to God that that does not happen.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.