Terry Pulliam was flummoxed. This Jacksonville reporter and card-carrying member of the National Association of Black Journalists was on the scene of a riot: 750 black people were fighting, destroying property, stealing, assaulting, rampaging, jumping on cars, laughing, taunting, creating chaos and attacking police at a Jacksonville movie theater and mall.
All on Christmas Day 2013. Terry just could not figure it out.
The large-scale mayhem began when hundreds of “teenagers” tried to rush -- without paying -- into local showings of Tyler Perry’s A Medea Christmas and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. When security put an end to that, the mob took their mayhem outside. After lots of pepper spraying, police brought the crowd under control in 90 minutes and arrested five.
If Pulliam thought it was significant that everyone involved in the mayhem was black, he did not say. Instead, he said he just could not figure out what these “teenagers” were up to. Neither could the anchor of the Channel 4 news: It looked as if there were “dozens of people” there,” she said, missing the real number by 700 or so.496
“I am baffled,” Pulliam said. “I have never seen anything like this before.” Had Pulliam read WND or American Thinker or used Google, he would have found out right away how easy it is to find stories about recent large scale black mob violence at malls and movie theaters all around the country. Including places like Rochester, Kansas City, Norfolk, Austin, Des Moines, Chicago, Brooklyn, San Antonio, Schenectady, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Bradenton, Atlanta and yes, Jacksonville.
And one year later it happened again during a two-week period surrounding Christmas in 2014. Here’s a whole flock of them collected in one place on YouTube.497
And that does not count the large-scale black mob violence in the streets, stores, roller rinks, bowling alleys, boardwalks, college campuses, restaurants, buses, trains, schools, beaches, weddings, graduations, funerals, stores, stadiums, arenas, downtowns, uptowns, suburbs, lingerie shops, mobile beer bicycles, Fourth of July parties, Memorial Day ceremonies, frat houses, and nightclubs in hundreds of cities big and small around the country.498
They are easy enough to find in Jacksonville. Does Wal-Mart ring a bell? It should: People around the world saw hundreds of black people rampage and riot through a Wal-Mart one year before.499 But Pulliam pretended these two incidents have no similarities.
Three months later after the Christmas Day riot, it happened again: Large-scale black mob violence at a Jacksonville mall. More than 100 black people were waiting to see a movie when fighting and chaos began. After security disbursed the crowd, 40-50 of them went to a nearby Chick-Fil-A restaurant, where they broke a glass door, overturned furniture and even fired a gun. A 14-year old boy was arrested.
Once again, Channel 4 did not report the crowd was black. Or that the violence was part of a pattern. But viewers had no problem figuring out on their own that their town was, once again, under siege from unacknowledged racial violence. One viewer made a list:500
“Let's see, July 17 2012 -Northside Walmart,” he said, beginning his list of recent black mob violence in Jacksonville. “Memorial Day 2013 - Jacksonville Beach. Christmas Day 2013 - Northside Towne Center. Now Orange Park Mall. Mobs all, thuggish behavior with no accurate reporting of participants. Media bias OR fear of admitting reality?”
At least two Jacksonville reporters had no trouble putting the violence in context: “Black mob violence is no different in Jacksonville than most other places in America: but that is the point — it happens a lot, the local media refuses to report it, and lots of people try to wish it away,” said Chuck White, who hosts a local talk radio show with his wife Colleen at AM 1600 the Beach. “This is the third time, in recent memory, that black youths have staged short term uprisings and there is barely a word from the local press.”
Three? At least. In 2010, 27 black people were taken to the emergency room after large-scale violence at a local high school had to be quelled with copious amounts of tear gas. And this was not the first problem inside Palatka High school that week, said Channel 4.
If all Pulliam knew about black mob violence is what he learned at local and national meetings of the National Association of Black Journalists, then it is easy to understand why he is so confused: NABJ does not focus on black mob violence or black on white crime.
Instead, the group and its members concentrate on how black people are victims of relentless white racism. And how black people such as Trayvon Martin are under the constant threat of white violence. At the 2013 NABJ convention, Trayvon’s parents were featured speakers in front of a standing room only crowd, where they were received as celebrities, if not heroes.
NABJ luminary Brittney Cooper recently wrote an article for Salon whose title says it all: “Open season on black teenagers: The onslaught of white murder.”501 O.K.
But black on white crime? Black mob violence? The Knockout Game? All of which exist exponentially out of proportion? Not so much: Many NABJ members say those stories are part of a hoax. Others grudgingly admit what thousands of videos show, but say it is justified. Or, like in Jacksonville or Louisville, where white people did something to cause it.
A few days after the Christmas riot, another NABJ bigwig Tonyaa Weathersbee -- writing in the Florida Times -Union -- was happy the judge allowed several of the violent offenders to take an anger management course or enlist in the army in lieu of jail time:502
“I didn’t want to see another African-American male thrust into a system that may or may not take into account all of the events that precipitated this,” the Rev. John Guns, told Weathersbee. “My fear was that they needed to be given a voice, because the system may not hear them.”
Weathersbee never really got around to telling us what “precipitated” the violence and the attack on the white female officer. Or what the rioters wanted to say that, not being heard, sparked the violence. Other reporters were not quite as squeamish:
“One of the young suspects refused orders to leave and began to incite the crowd yelling, “— — you, crackers, I ain’t going nowhere,” according to her arrest report. Most of the crowd was black, while several officers were white.”
For at least one resident, this latest example of black mob violence was the final straw: “It has gotten pretty bad here in the Jacksonville area,” said one long-time Jacksonville resident. “Over the last few years it has gotten to where we don’t really want to go anywhere where there will be a large crowd of people at night anymore. The beach incident over last Memorial Day and the riot on Christmas night have just about sealed my decision to leave this area once my kids are finished with school.”
Let’s finish up in Baltimore: August 2014 a group of black people attacked a white college kid living in a gentrified neighborhood that everyone there thought was safe. Including the victim. When the black mob attacked him, the local TV station sent Bill Simms, a card-carrying member of the NABJ, to the scene. He identified the thugs as teens.
Someone else at the station identified them as black people in the web text that accompanied the article.503
One way or another, someone is off the reservation.