It’s time to get off the fence and stand for social justice in America

By Stan Caldwell

stanmansportsfan.com

I did something Saturday that has been years coming. I went to a protest, right here in Hattiesburg.

I, along with my wife, my daughter, daughter-in-law and two grandsons, joined a group of about 100 persons on Forrest Street for a rally condemning police brutality and in support of social justice for all citizens.

Considering the short notice, the turnout was rather impressive. The crowd included blacks and whites, male and female, young and old. Some held signs in support of Black Lives Matter, others had signs demanding police accountability.

They came because they realize that America has a big problem with police killing innocent citizens due to excessive force. I went because it is time to get off the couch and put words into action.

I am done sitting on the sideline and looking past injustices against the black community. I am done looking the other way when racism rears its ugly head, either face-to-face or on social media.

And It is way past time for Americans to demand better from the men and women charged with maintaining order on the streets of my country.

Just since the first of this year there have been three very public incidents, two involving police and the other by a former cop who apparently didn’t get the message that he was no longer employed in law enforcement.

Say their names. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Abrey. And hundreds more before.

Saturday’s rally was organized by Kelsey John, a 23-year-old native of Hattiesburg who works as a freelance writer and pod-caster. She got the City of Hattiesburg to block off the street in front of City Hall, along with providing an ambulance, a microphone, speakers and few police officers.

One of those officers was Chad Young, a man I covered during his high school days as a fine running back for Jim Sizemore at Purvis High.

Young said he tries to promote a positive view of community policing in person and on social media. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. The good cops in America must take a stronger stance in rooting out the bad cops in their midst.

But it takes more than that. We must change the shoot-first mentality and escalation as a default tactic that police employ in too many towns and cities in the United States.

My daughter, who has become my social conscience, held a sign at Saturday’s rally that read, “Tamir Rice would have been 18 on June 25.”

You remember Tamir Rice, don’t you? Maybe not. To refresh your memory, Rice was the 12-year-old kid who was shot and killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio, while playing with a toy pistol in a public park.

Now, I will concede that it was not smart for a pre-teen to be out with a toy gun, and police officers operate on a narrow margin of split-second life-or-death situations.

But that still didn’t mean Rice deserved to die in what amounts to cold blood. Coming out of their patrol car with guns drawn would have probably been enough to defuse the situation.

Maybe then Tamir Rice would have lived to see his 18th birthday. But the police came out guns blazing and killed him. And nothing was done. A grand jury declined to indict the officer who fired his gun, saying the shooting was justified under the circumstances.

These incidents don’t just happen in cities such as Cleveland or Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor was killed in her own bed when police mistakenly broke down the door to her apartment for a putative drug bust.

They happen in Mississippi and they happen in the Pine Belt.

In 2017, right out on the Evelyn Gandy Parkway, 34-year-old Marc Davis of LaPlace, Louisiana, was shot and killed by a Petal police officer Aaron Jernigan.

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard about this incident until Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press wrote an extensive article about the shooting that was published May 29.

On June 2, 2017, Davis had a minor automobile accident on the Gandy and after Jernigan arrived, some sort of dispute arose between two. Supposedly, Davis took a threatening step toward Jernigan, who shot Davis – who was unarmed – three times.

An investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations cleared Jernigan, who claimed Davis was trying to take his gun, a claim not supported by eyewitnesses at the scene, according to Pittman’s article.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be video of the incident to determine what really happened, so the case was swept under the rug and four children lost their father.

Frankly, I’m surprised Petal PD conducted any investigation at all, considering what the country has come to learn about the mayor of Petal.

A day after the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis that precipitated the unrest that is sweeping the nation, Mayor Hal Marx tweeted that, “if you can speak, you can breathe,” a totally tone-deaf response that simply should not come from an elected official.

To their credit, the Petal Board of Aldermen unanimously censured Marx and called for his resignation, which Marx has thus far refused to do. He’s claiming victimhood in this controversy, which is like throwing good money after bad.

Currently, the Board of Aldermen is exploring ways of prying Marx out of the office, since there apparently isn’t a mechanism in Petal for forcibly removing or recalling the mayor. Marx has about a year left in his second term, and he is not seeking re-election.

If he stubbornly refuses to yield to the will of the good people of Petal and their Aldermen, then it’s going to be a long year in the Friendly City.

But police escalation doesn’t even have to be limited to fatal incidents.

On Wednesday, as my wife and I were driving on Oak Grove Road in the Lamar Park section of Hattiesburg, we came upon a motorcyclist who was seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident by a pick-up truck.

We stopped to render aid, because my wife is a retired nurse and there were no other medical personnel on the scene.

After the victim was loaded in the ambulance and driven off, the young man’s brother and the Lamar County Sheriff’s deputy investigating the case got into some sort of dispute, and the deputy tased the brother twice and had him arrested.

That, my friends, is needless escalation. A young man who was in a high emotional state after seeing his brother lying in a culvert seriously injured didn’t need to be treated as a criminal for asking excited questions of a police officer, who wasn’t being forthcoming with information.

And you have seen in countless cities across the country during these protests where police have needlessly escalated tensions, some of which have boiled over into violence.

More to the point, cities where the police have actually gotten out from behind the riot shields and talked to the people have seen almost no violence associated with the protests.

Another issue, one that undergirds the current problems, is the confrontational attitude of the police in many areas toward minorities. What most white Americans don’t get is that blacks and Latinos live every single day with the fear of being targeted by police simply because of their race.

At Saturday’s rally, one of those who walked up to the microphone and spoke to the crowd was former Southern Miss defensive back Picasso Nelson, who is now employed by the Indianapolis Colts.

Nelson is as Hattiesburg as they come. His father, Picasso Nelson Sr., was an outstanding football player in his own right and the younger Nelson starred at Oak Grove High before moving on to USM.

Nelson spoke of an incident that occurred while he was still in school. He said he drove out of the campus and was stopped by an HPD patrol car.

“The first question out of his mouth, ‘are you transporting any drugs?’” Nelson said. “I thought, ‘what? I’m an athlete and I don’t do that stuff.’”

The point was that Nelson was a young black man driving a nice car, so he was profiled as a drug dealer by the police. And that happens every day everywhere in America, where people of color are stopped for the crime of being dark-skinned.

And that’s how routine stops become fatal encounters. It is a rite of passage in black families, where Mom and-or Dad sit Junior down and explain the “rules” for being black, in hopes that their children don’t get caught up in such an encounter.

It’s not just other people’s families, either. It’s in mine, as well, my daughter-in-law’s sister’s child. This young man is absolutely the sweetest kid you’ll ever meet, and he adores his cousins, my two grandsons.

But he’s sprouted to well over six feet tall now, and while he’s biracial, for all intents and purposes, he is black. You better believe I pray for him every single day that he’ll stay safe and continue to grow to be the fine adult we expect.

That is why it’s not enough to just say All Lives Matter. Until black lives matter in America, then no lives matter.

And it’s also not enough to say, “oh, well, I don’t see skin color.” Of course, you do. We all do. In a sense, saying you don’t see a person’s color or ethnicity means denying a person’s identity.

Blacks and Latinos are Americans, and they deserve to be recognized and celebrated for who they are without prejudice or ignorance.

I have spent my entire career around young black kids, male and female, and the adults who teach them, many of them black, as well. I consider these players, former athletes like Chad Young, to be, “my kids.” I celebrate who they are and many of their coaches have become friends.

Saturday’s rally was entirely peaceful, but there were high feelings among the crowd. No justice, no peace was the rallying call, and it’s something all of us who were there have taken home with us.

I do not condone the violence and destruction that have surrounded many of the protests in American cities. But I am more concerned about the issues that have driven protesters to violence. Buildings can be rebuilt, but once a person is killed, they’re gone forever.

As Martin Luther King famously said, “riots are the actions of the unheard,” and White America has ignored black concerns over out-of-control cops for far too long.

In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem before games, in protest after a wave of police killings of innocents, and White America went ballistic.

Now, let me say this. I was a little disappointed that Kaepernick and the players who followed him chose the National Anthem as the forum for their protests.

The National Anthem is one of the few things that binds us together as Americans, and I didn’t want to see it used as a tool for division.

But I wasn’t outraged or even mildly angry. I understood then, and now, what Kap was saying. I’d been increasingly concerned about police violence – but said nothing – and there is no doubt Kaepernick got the attention he was seeking.

But America didn’t heed the message then, or in subsequent peaceful demonstrations, so here we are.

Americans – black, white, Latino, Asian and every ethnicity in between – need to choose which side they are on. The group on Forrest Street Saturday have collectively chosen to make their voices heard in support of justice for all Americans, not just white Americans.

The time for being silent, the time for sitting on the fence, in the face of the rampant racist injustices in this country has passed.

We must match our words with deeds, and that means working to ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote is properly registered and gets to the polls on Election Day. It means bugging our elected officials until real laws are passed that can bring real justice to all Americans.

And if they aren’t with us, then we need to vote them out of office at the earliest opportunity and replace them with people who will join us. As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

I grew up in the 1960s, and while it was a harrowing time for our country, it was also an exciting time, because people – citizens unafraid – were motivated to hit the streets and demand justice that had been lacking for too many for too long.

And things got done. Not enough in most cases, but it was a start. Sadly, many of those gains in social justice have been eroded by the creeping tide of authoritarianism in America.

I was a little too young and a little too far removed from where these people were marching in 1968, but their example has stayed with me all those years. Now, I am 65 and retired, and there is no reason, no excuse, for me to sit silent, safe in my own little world.

I want to try to leave a better world, a better America, for my children, but especially my grandchildren.

Hopefully, this isn’t the only time citizens in Hattiesburg gather to make their voices heard. John says she has been galvanized into action, and she says this is just the first step. Maybe next week there will be 10 times the 100 who showed up on Saturday.

Are you with us, Hattiesburg?

Stan Caldwell is a veteran sportswriter with more than 35 years of experience in the Hattiesburg area.