The Devil Finds Work: A Killing in Mississippi
02 August 15
hey came to celebrate his life and to condemn the way he died. In a case that has paralyzed tiny Stonewall, Miss., a deeply impoverished town that was named after Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, in early July a black man was choked to death by a white police officer. Just over a week ago, the victim’s family gathered to eulogize 39-year-old Jonathan Sanders and to issue a clarion call for justice.
Sanders was not a suspect fleeing custody. He was unarmed and had committed no crime. His senseless death, at the hands of a police officer, has made few national headlines. Notably, there are no cable news anchors here, no talking-point-ready pundits sweating under studio Klieg lights. But for a smattering of brief and hastily written stories, Sanders joined a chorus of the quietly dead.
However, the people of Stonewall—many of whom have lived here since the slave-era—are having their say.
“When you put heat to the kettle, the pressure begins,” said Dennis Evans from the pulpit. “When you turn up the heat, the water starts to boil. And finally when the pressure gets too high, the kettle whistles. That’s us whistling, now, calling for justice for Jonathan.”
The congregation leapt to its feet.
It is easy to get distracted by the racist ramblings of a washed up professional “wrestler.” It is all too convenient to recall out-of-context quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King in a press for grace and forgiveness. It is too comforting to lull ourselves into believing that we are now living tidily in a post-racial society. After all, for the first time, there is a black man in the White House and an African American woman leads the Justice Department—facts that have made little difference in reforming our criminal justice system in any substantial way.
For all of our progress, people are still living and dying under the strictures of race and class. There is no purely economic solution, as some presidential hopefuls would like to suggest. There are no cultural questions driven by the so-called immorality inherent among black and poor people to be posited, as conservatives might have you believe.
While we bask in the delusion that racial animus is a product of days gone by, and that people only need obey the law and pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps, mourners stuffed themselves into the pews deep in the heart of Mississippi to say goodbye to Sanders.
Local authorities, as is their wont, appealed for calm. It must be said that there is a federal investigation but, given their track record, few can find comfort in that.
The uneasy social contract, erected in so many sections of the American South, lays frayed and tattered in Stonewall. But bigotry is not geographically neutral, as the family of Eric Garner—also choked to death by police in New York—will attest. It is, it seems, a part of who we are and who we have always been.
Human equality remains, as Dr. King called it, a bad check.
If I sound angry, cynical and afraid, it is because I am. If I harbor any hope at all, it is because I have witnessed and been among the throngs of people flooding streets across this country, shouting, “Black Lives Matter.” That hope does not last long.
Each morning, as I rise, I dutifully check social networks to be sure there isn’t a new hashtag bearing the name of another brutalized black body—whether it is a suspect killed in police custody in Los Angeles or a child murdered in a random drive-by in Chicago.
Every life matters to me.
But when extrajudicial killings happen at the hands of a police officer, agents of the state, people sworn to serve and protect, we are all culpable. We are responsible for giving Officer Kevin Herrington a badge and the authority to police our communities. “I can’t breathe,” Sanders said repeatedly as Herrington gripped his neck for more than 20 minutes.
According to witnesses, around 10 p.m., Sanders took his horse out for a ride to avoid the southern summer sun. Herrington was reportedly accosting another man at a filling station when Sanders called out to him and asked that he leave the man alone.
“I’m going to get that nigger!” Herrington announced, as he began following the horse drawn carriage in his squad car. His wife was in the passenger seat. The blaring blue lights startled Diva, the horse, who reared up and tossed Sanders to the ground before trotting away. Sanders gave chase, but it wasn’t long before Herrington caught him by the headlamp strap he was wearing around his neck.
The victim’s final words were: I can’t breathe.
There’s no word on any disciplinary action against Herrington, who said he suspected Sanders had drugs on him and that the victim tried to grab his weapon. The Clarion-Ledger released the victim’s criminal history, “dating back to 2001 for disturbance of the family peace, sale of a counterfeit substance, domestic violence, and some traffic violations.” The newspaper also pointed out that Herrington has never had complaints of excessive of force. He was placed on administrative leave with pay, pending the outcome of an investigation.
In the aftermath of Sanders’ death, people are afraid. It is not that they have not always been. Stonewall is not unlike other pockets of the South, where black people live on one side of track—commonly known as the “quarter” or the “bottoms”—and white people live on the other. Where you can go, where you can live and work, and what you can say is no longer a fact of law, as Jim Crow laws have been erased from the books, but a matter of cultural practice. Defying those racial edicts can sometimes be a deadly proposition.
“The slaves waited 246 years, but God delivered them,” said one woman. “I don’t mind waiting.”
Sanders likely believed that too. Bending our knees humbling and waiting for an unseen power, as poet Margaret Mitchell wrote in For My People, affords a measure of hope to the hopeless when they can depend on nothing else. There is no Dr. King among us, who can ride into tiny Stonewall and demand that the world take notice. That work, fueled by social networks and cell phone video, is left to a cavalcade of new Freedom Riders who place themselves in harm’s way to endure near constant challenges to their civil liberties, tear gas, police batons, K-9 units, and rubber bullets.
They are among the hopeful, pressing urgently for change, a change that may never be fully realized. But, the devil will find his work– to borrow a title from James Baldwin–and we must meet him toe-to-toe.
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