“Or does it explode?”
—Langston Hughes
“A Raisin in the Sun”
I was fourteen years old, watching Saturday afternoon TV, at the precise moment my childhood ended. It was May 17, 1980, and the local television station began scrolling a silent announcement across the bottom of the screen: AFTER DELIBERATING FOR LESS THAN THREE HOURS, A TAMPA JURY.…
My heart began to race, and I felt the taste of something sour rise in my throat. After a trial lasting six weeks, the verdict in the Arthur McDuffie case was in.
It wasn’t his life, but his death, that had made Arthur McDuffie a household name in Miami that year. The thirty-three-year-old insurance executive had been beaten to death by Dade County police after he had led them on an eight-minute high-speed chase on his motorcycle. His beating was so severe, his skull had been cracked in half, from front to back.1
Arthur McDuffie was black. The four police officers on trial were not.
Realizing they’d killed McDuffie, police had tried to cover up the crime by bashing the motorcycle with “Kel-Lites,” heavy police-issue iron flashlights, to make it appear that it had crashed. Officially, his death had been called an accident: He’d cracked his head open after flying off his motorcycle, police lied, just as they had for generations from Mississippi swamps to Florida back roads. Such lies have a long history.
This particular lie might have lived forever if not for a courageous and persistent Miami Herald police reporter, Edna Buchanan, who got a tip, so she met with McDuffie’s family, examined the motorcycle herself, and saw the truth, which she printed in the newspaper for all to see: McDuffie had not died in a motorcycle accident. He had died at the hands of men.
The charge, inexplicably, was manslaughter. That in itself had caused a furor. When the subject of the manslaughter charge was raised at a candlelight vigil at our Unitarian church, I’d choked into sobs when I tried to talk about it. The judge determined that the case could not be tried fairly in Dade County, so it was moved upstate to the predominantly white community of Tampa in west-central Florida, where an all-white jury was selected to hear the evidence. If I’d had any fears at all about this trial—and, despite my parents’ concern, I had utter faith in the strength of the evidence of a dead man’s splintered skull and a tampered motorcycle—maybe it was that there might be a mistrial and the whole case would have to start again, or that the penalties for manslaughter would not be as severe as these officers deserved. (Eventually, one of the officers was charged with second-degree murder.)
I could not believe the words I saw at the bottom of the television screen on May 17, 1980: A TAMPA JURY HAS FOUND FOUR OFFICERS NOT GUILTY.
Did it say, could it say, not guilty? I blinked, stared at the screen, and blinked again.
“Mom!” I yelled, my limbs shaking, “It’s not guilty!”
I’d only experienced a shock like that once before: When I was thirteen, I’d been barely awake as I listened to my favorite morning radio program on pop station Y100 and the newscaster announced that State Rep. Gwen Cherry had been killed in a car accident the night before after driving into a Tallahassee ditch. I’d heard this same newscaster morning after morning, but suddenly he was talking about someone I knew, and I’d felt as if I’d slipped into a strange, jarring dream. Gwen Cherry was my godmother. She’d sponsored me when I spent a week serving as her page in the state House of Representatives less than a year earlier. She’d posed with us in the photograph my family took with Jimmy Carter when I was ten. She was one of the Miami black community’s favorite daughters, and my mother loved her like an older sister. Gwen Cherry’s death was a personal tragedy to my family.
As terrible and unexpected as personal tragedies always are, they can heal. But May 17 was different, and I knew it. The Arthur McDuffie verdict was something beyond personal, deeper than personal. It was staggering. It wasn’t just about McDuffie, a man we had never met. It was about all of the black people in Dade County. It was about all of us everywhere.
Arthur Lee McDuffie was a top performer at his insurance firm. He was a community volunteer. He was a former Marine who’d served as a military police officer. He had three children, and he’d been planning to remarry his former wife, a nurse. Aside from traffic violations, he’d never had any run-ins with the law. The night he died, he’d been doing silly stunts on his motorcycle, popping a wheelie like daredevil Evel Knievel, and he’d sped off when police spotted him. He led them on a chase.2 For some reason, he was being a cowboy that night. Who can say what he was thinking? Did he think he’d just shake them and write the night off as an adventure to share with his buddies? He had to know it was foolish to run. He had to know he’d be in a pile of trouble, but I wonder what was going through his mind when he scooted his motorcycle to a halt near the expressway on-ramp and waited for the police to climb out of their cars, as if to say All right, ya’ll, I’m just playing. Did he think he’d get only harsh words and a night in jail? Had he forgotten he was a black man?
Arthur McDuffie was unarmed. The police cuffed his hands behind his back. A dozen police officers stood around him and beat him to a pulp with heavy Kel-Lites and nightsticks, spraying blood and cracking his skull open so badly that the medical examiner would later say his skull looked like a “cracked egg.” As one officer later described it, during the beating “they looked like a bunch of animals fighting for meat.”3
They were going to teach this nigger a lesson, goddammit, but they got scared. McDuffie’s injuries looked severe. The hospital said he was in a coma and would probably die (which he did, days later). According to an eyewitness who testified against the officers on trial, former Metro police officer Charles Veverka, the defendants tried to make it look accidental by smashing up the motorcycle. They killed a man and then conspired to lie about it.4 Three former police officers who were eyewitnesses—the most prized kind of witness in any courtroom—testified against their fellow officers. One officer in particular, they said, had straddled McDuffie while he hit him with the Kel-Lite.5
Yet an all-white jury, with the speed and conclusion of its verdict, had in effect shrugged its collective shoulders and said, Okay, we got no problem with that. Why did you waste almost three whole hours of our valuable time?
McDuffie doesn’t matter, I remember thinking. White people don’t think he matters. My mind could barely comprehend it.
Dorothy McDuffie, Arthur McDuffie’s sister, described her feelings to reporters in a way that captured what I believe most of black Miami felt: “It’s like something unbelievable.… I feel like I’m nobody. I feel like my family’s nobody. I feel like my people are nobody.”6
Yes, my parents were civil rights activists, and I’d been brought up on a steady diet of black history lessons. I’d known all too well that there was a time, long ago, when such trials were commonplace. Lynchings didn’t matter. Beatings didn’t matter. Rapes didn’t matter. I knew blacks had been considered nobodies in the old days of song singing and fire hoses. I knew my mother had been jailed for sitting at a lunch counter, and that her eyes had been injured when she was teargassed for marching down a public street. I knew my aunt had been kicked in the stomach by a police officer and that nobody had been willing to hear her grievance. That had been in the 1960s. Black people didn’t matter in the 1960s.
But in 1980? In the world I lived in?
That moment of realization, that awakening, was when my childhood ended.
Immediately after the verdict was announced, the phone at our house began to ring. Shock. Disbelief. Rage. My parents learned there was going to be a protest at the Metro Justice Building in downtown Miami at 6:00 that night. The troops were gathering, yet again.
I couldn’t muster any excitement over the prospect of carrying another sign, or yelling another chant. Not that day. My parents had been protesting and working for change all of their adult lives, and their work had still come to nothing more than this. A protest at the Justice Building? There was no justice. There never had been, and there wasn’t now. No placards or megaphones or marches or complaints were going to change it. Maybe it would never change.
I had a terrible headache, at the edge of a migraine. When my feelings tried to surface, I locked them down tight. What good were feelings? What would tears do for me? What could anger bring me? I’d made plans with a friend of mine, a tall white girl who lived nearby, Michelle Ricciardi, to see a movie that had just opened, The Nude Bomb. It was a comedy about a bomb that made people lose their clothes when it exploded, and it looked very stupid in the commercials, so it was the perfect refuge from my feelings. Michelle was one of my most constant playmates while I skirted that line between childhood and young adulthood; like me, she loved the TV show Emergency! and indulged me in fantasies about meeting my favorite actor from the show, Randolph Mantooth. Without complaining, she read piles of Emergency! stories I wrote about dramatic rescues and fire-station drama. Michelle was a safe haven.
I had asked Mom if I could go to a movie with Michelle instead of to the protest, and although she was surprised I wanted to remain behind, she had said yes. Dad was already out in the field in his capacity as a county employee, so my sisters went with my mother, and I walked to my friend’s house in the calm quiet of untroubled streets, where the McDuffie verdict was no more than an interesting topic of conversation in the living rooms I passed. I don’t remember even bringing up the Arthur McDuffie verdict while I was with Michelle. I didn’t care that she was white, or if she could understand how I felt. I didn’t need her to understand. I wasn’t looking for commiseration. I wanted an escape, if only for a few treasured hours.
Escape isn’t that simple. I couldn’t laugh at the movie the way I wanted. When Michelle and I got back to her house and began to eat dinner with her family, the local news was showing footage from a battle front. Burning cars. People running. A smoke-filled street. Like a scene from Beirut. The protest, which had begun peacefully, had turned into a riot.
“My family is there,” I said to Michelle’s family, disbelief wrapping around me. My friend and I were sitting in the white suburbs of Cutler Ridge, and my family was in the middle of a riot downtown. For a moment, my senses blurred.
Where were my parents? My sisters? Were they safe? My eyes searched the chaotic video footage of flames and running people, looking for familiar faces. A newscaster, speaking in that rushed, confused outburst that TV reporters use when they’ve stumbled onto an unexpected story, said that people had reportedly died. People had died?
“Oh, my God,” Michelle’s mother said.
That night, I was the most frightened I had ever been for my family’s safety. For the hour or so between the time when I first saw the footage of the riot and I finally got a call from my mother, my separation from my family felt unbridgeable.
Lydia was ten years old, and Johnita had just turned twelve. They had been leaning against a police car in front of the Justice Building with Mom, watching the crowd and listening to speeches at the rally, when more and more people from the surrounding inner-city neighborhood began arriving, yelling their outrage. “The emotions were on the surface. You felt the mood shift,” Lydia recalls. “You knew something was about to happen.”
Johnita and Lydia remember that the car they were leaning against suddenly began to shake, then rock violently. People on the other side of the car were trying to overturn it, so they quickly moved away from it. The car was successfully turned over, and the crowd cheered. Another car was set afire. As soon as the violence erupted, my sisters were ushered to a nearby hotel by NAACP Regional Director Earl Shinhoster, who had come to Miami because of the tension in the black community. “That was our first exposure to anarchy, really,” Johnita says. “I could understand the rage, but the part of me that had been raised to follow the rules and be a good citizen couldn’t understand. There was a fear because I couldn’t relate to what they were doing, and I knew that people could get hurt. They were burning and destroying their own community, even, and I felt so sad.”
Even though she was the youngest, Lydia insists she was not frightened by the upheaval around her. Instead, she felt awed by it. “I don’t recall being afraid. Instead, I was sort of shocked and excited—not excited in the sense of being happy, but because I knew something significant was happening I didn’t have the words and emotional maturity to completely understand,” Lydia says.
Paralyzed by conflicting emotions—despair and elation—I watched the three days of rioting unfold on television. I felt despair because my city was burning, and the seething ugliness Miami usually kept tucked beneath its paradisial image was thick and acrid in the air. Innocent blacks and whites were dying unnecessarily, just as Arthur McDuffie had. That first night, passing white motorists had been pulled from their cars and killed. In the following days, most of the two dozen people who died were black; my family had heard stories of pickup trucks full of shotgun-wielding whites out looking for blacks to shoot. Isolated as we were in a mostly white neighborhood sprinkled with Confederate-flag bumper stickers, I was almost afraid to go outside. Because Dad was working for the Community Relations Board, he was out in the inner-city streets with a walkie-talkie trying to urge calm during a time when calm was scorned. My sisters and I never knew from night to night if my father would make it home. Miami was living a nightmare, a chaos of hate and fear.
I also felt elation—yes, elation—because of one thought soothing my young psyche: Well, someone’s going to listen. Someone’s going to listen now.
In some ways, I was right. For a time, anyway.
President Jimmy Carter came. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission came. Janet Reno, upon hearing the verdict, had said she was “bitterly disappointed.”7 My parents testified, submitted documents, went to meetings. Meanwhile, more and more Cubans were welcomed when they came to make Miami their home—thousands upon thousands in the Mariel boatlift—while Haitians were still sent away. Arthur McDuffie was still dead. His killers were still free.
While administrators piped in saccharine-sounding Muzak to help ease tensions at my racially mixed school, I wished myself somewhere else by writing an essay about the society I wanted to live in, one that would be gentler to my heart.
I want to live in a society where “Jew” is no longer a dirty word.… And no one remembers what “nigger” used to mean.… A society where the executives never say, “You can’t have this job because you’re underqualified” and they really mean, “You can’t have this job because you’re Black … or a woman … or a Jew … or a Latin … or a homosexual.… In my society, when they say, “Some of my best friends are …,” they really are. But nobody cares because they’re really all the same. Prejudice is something that the children read about in their history books and they shake their heads saying, “How foolish they were back then!”
I wrote and wrote. I wrote about an end to pain, an end to hate, an end to discrimination. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, Jews; all of us could live in peace, side by side.
That’s where I want to live … maybe that sounds like Heaven, but if I lived there right now, I’d call this society Hell. You know why? MAYBE IT IS.
My mother told me how lucky I was to be able to express my feelings in writing, that so many people had to resort to other means, or were strangled by the emotions gathered inside of them. Yes, I realized, writing would be my saving grace. Writing would keep me sane. I later wrote a ten-minute speech based on that essay and won county honors at school speech competitions telling the story of how I’d felt. Again, I had an outlet.
Later, as an adult and a reporter for the Miami Herald, I would have the added buffer of a journalist’s objectivity to keep my heart safe from pain. Journalists are trained to be life’s observers, never participants. Even involvement in community protests and advocacy organizations flew against my job regulations, so I contented myself to write about people I believed might never otherwise be heard—blacks, as often as possible—and I wore that as my shield.
But at the time, my discomfort with individual confrontation quickly steered me away from the kind of journalism that would put me in constant conflict with my sources. I would not be like Miami Herald Pulitzer prize–winning writers Edna Buchanan, who had uncovered the Arthur McDuffie story, or Gene Miller, who had first brought the plight of former death row prisoners Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee to public consciousness. Likewise, I would not be a fiery columnist, pointing fingers and ruffling feathers as a mouthpiece for my people. (By the time I would leave the Herald, I was probably best known for the column I wrote about dating and relationships.)
During the ten years I worked at the Miami Herald, I covered two civil disturbances, the recovery of bodies, car accident fatalities, and government scandals, and every minute I spent gathering news wore on me. I knew I had reached the point when I could no longer be a news reporter when I was sent out in a downpour to get a comment from the family of a well-respected school principal who had been shot to death by her husband. As I stood in the rain on this family’s lawn, a young Hispanic man escorted his father out beneath an umbrella to talk to me. The old man had dry lips and hollow eyes, and he said something beseeching to me in Spanish.
“What did he say?” I asked the son.
“He said, ‘Please don’t bring our family any more pain.’ ”
I walked away with tears streaming down my face, filled with self-loathing. What business did I have intruding on the worst moment of this man’s life, after the violent loss of his daughter? I didn’t want my writing to bring anyone pain.
Instead I was drawn to the features section and human interest stories. I still take pleasure in the memory of the stories I wrote that I believe helped readers learn about people who might have otherwise been voiceless: Like Sharmanita Grays, the teenaged victim of a serial killer, who had been making a rag doll in class before she died, and the teacher who saw to it that her unfinished doll lived on as a cautionary tale to other troubled young students. Or the late Liberty City muralist Oscar Thomas, who labored in the community he loved to bring colors, beauty, and images of heroes—Dr. Martin Luther King, chained Haitian refugees, Alex Haley—to an otherwise dismal cityscape. Or how an elementary school in South Dade County braved its way through the disaster of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. I wanted to write about quiet triumphs, not adversity.
And I tried to forget about Arthur McDuffie.
In 1991, soon after Los Angeles riots incited by a videotaped police beating of a black man named Rodney King, Miami was the only city in the United States to snub Nelson Mandela when he made his tour after being released from a South African prison. While Mr. Mandela was being honored with parades in the streets of Atlanta, and addressing Yankee Stadium in New York, Cuban-American leadership in Miami signed a document denouncing Mr. Mandela because he had refused to distance himself from Fidel Castro, who had been supportive of the anti-apartheid movement. That leadership included Xavier Suarez, the mayor of the city of Miami.
Nelson Mandela was an international symbol of hope in the face of overwhelming racism, and suddenly the city I lived in felt like an island. My sister Lydia and I accompanied my mother and Aunt Priscilla to Miami Beach, where blacks were gathering to support Mr. Mandela to counter scheduled protests outside of the building where he was making an address. That day, I heard the hateful words Go back to Africa! lobbed at us. That same night, Johnita returned from Europe after spending a year at the University of Sussex while studying race relations in England for her master’s degree in psychology. At Sussex, she had joined with her international student friends from England, Italy, South Africa, Zambia, and Costa Rica in celebrating Mr. Mandela’s release and embracing humankind’s progress—delayed though it was. When she saw our exhausted faces after our pro-Mandela demonstration, she told us sadly, “Yes, I’m definitely back in Miami again.”
Still, I was more upset by the actions of Miami’s leaders than by the careless words of a few emotional Cuban protestors who could not see beyond their own pain. Leaders are supposed to represent everyone. Weren’t we anyone?
That nagging thought came to me again: Blacks don’t matter.
I had a very strange dream on May 20, 1991, the date blacks in Florida celebrate as Emancipation Day because it was in May that the news of slavery’s end trickled southward to our peninsula. Ironically, almost to the day of Miami’s riots eleven years before, I described my dream in a wire-bound notebook I kept as a journal.
In the dream, I was shooting a film documentary. My father, or someone very much like my father, was pointing out the exact spot of the McDuffie beating.
The final phase of the dream was to be there, to see it.… I saw the slow-moving procession of police cars, sirens flashing—I knew it was time. I felt a surge of adrenaline, excitement.… I felt like a removed, detached journalist about to witness the one story blacks in Miami have never recovered from.
I couldn’t see what was happening for the crowd of officers.… Then, I had a view. A single officer stood over a dazed, bleeding McDuffie, who was on his hands and knees. The officer grabbed a handful of his hair to lift his face up, then he smashed his flashlight down on McDuffie’s skull. A scream, a howl, rose from my throat. Simultaneously, I knew my anguished cry had become a part of the history of the event.… I had not seen the beating, I thought; but in reality I had been there all along, helplessly mortified and outraged like the woman on her knees at Kent State, captured by a photographer. My cry in my dream woke me up.
I had not forgotten. Eleven years after the fact, as a twenty-five-year-old woman, I woke up sobbing like a child. It hurt. It still hurt. I had never cried about Arthur McDuffie’s unpunished death as I did that day, even on the day of the verdict, when my childish illusions about the world I lived in had been shattered and Miami began to burn.
In a dream, there is no place to hide.
For all the pain I felt as an adolescent thrust into the social and political fabric of Miami, my parents’ activism also brought me unparalleled joy—because we were an NAACP family, through and through. With one of my book advances, I bought NAACP life memberships for both of my parents and my grandmother. And the NAACP gave me a wonderful gift.
The summer after the Miami riots, when I was fourteen and a high school sophomore, I entered the essay I’d written about former school superintendent Dr. Johnny L. Jones into a high school contest sponsored by the national NAACP called ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics). My essay was defiantly entitled “Dr. Johnny L. Jones: Come What May, We’re Here to Stay,” and I opened it with my favorite Frederick Douglass quote: This struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, but it must be a struggle.
At the time, the NAACP’s competition for high school students was new, but it gathered quick momentum because of the vigorous energy of its founder, pioneering Chicago newspaper columnist Vernon Jarrett, who has a deep love for young people. Jarrett, with his salt-and-pepper hair and high expectations, believed that young scholars should be celebrated for their achievements in the arts and sciences just as athletes were celebrated on the football field and basketball court.
The awards ceremony took my breath away. I had never seen anything like the energetic procession of young people behind their cities’ banners as they marched into the auditorium to the cheers of their parents, chaperones, and friends. Reading winners’ names with a dramatic timbre as the trumpets in “Fanfare for the Common Man” pealed majestically from speakers, Jarrett made all of us feel as if we were Olympians. I had won contests before, but never on a national level, and I won my first national prize at ACT-SO that summer of 1980: a gold medal in essay writing. I was greeted by pioneering scholar Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the son of former slaves who grew up to become the dean of Howard University’s school of religion and the president of Morehouse College.8 Dr. Mays handed me my prize. I was also greeted by historian Lerone Bennett Jr., author of Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1962, so I stood between two great figures in black history. My heart, which had been so battered by crises, soared.
To this day, when I hear Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” with its booming timpani drums and unforgettable trumpet salute, my memory takes me back to those grand ACT-SO award ceremonies at NAACP conventions. Nowadays, those ACT-SO ceremonies are televised nationally, although they were not when I was a teenager. But I didn’t need the eyes of a national television audience on me. Those processionals were the proudest moments of my young life.
Even more important, my participation in the ACT-SO competition over the next three years gave me the opportunity to meet other young blacks in Miami and from all over the country. They knew about the NAACP, and just as I was dedicating more and more of my time to my writing, they were pursuing their own dreams of becoming scientists, singers, orators, photographers, chemists, inventors, leaders. I met a brilliant student from Miami Central High School, Ivan Yaeger, who invented a bionic arm for his ACT-SO project! (I always knew Ivan was special, and in 2001, he was featured in People magazine because he had modified the invention he first built in high school to give a young girl who was missing an arm the chance to live an easier life.)
During the time that I might have felt the most despairing because racial politics in Miami were so explosive, ACT-SO constantly reinforced in me that the next generation was ready to take on the challenges of the post–civil rights era. The world would be ours to conquer. Although I did not develop close personal relationships with many of my fellow ACT-SO competitors, I felt the glow of their ambitions and talents. I felt the glory of their company. At ACT-SO, I never felt alone or afraid.
To me, the words of James Weldon Johnson’s great anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” were a rallying cry. Especially after the Arthur McDuffie riots—the event that demonstrated to me how far there was yet to go—I sang those words with renewed, near-fevered emotion at the NAACP gatherings: Let us march on ’til victory is won.