SCOOP DIDN’T TAKE A LIKING TO BEING INTERRUPTED, but when the first gunshot cracked the night air, everything went silent. A random gunshot on a Saturday in Liberty City was not out of the ordinary, but tonight, the sound ricocheted in our psyche.
On the weekend, kids in the Beans were up to all kinds of mischief. Who really cared that someone took to blowing someone’s head off on a Saturday in our neck of the woods? Still, it was too early to be hanging on the corner of Sixty-second Street and Twelfth Parkway to pelt the customers with bottles as they drove in for the product. We usually did that when the sun went down. Back then, the only white people we saw were the ones who cruised the parkway on weekends to cop some weed or blow before heading back to the suburbs in southwest Miami-Dade and anywhere else they felt was as far away as possible from Negroes.
When another shot rang out everyone spilled outside.
Scoop continued, “Like I was saying—”
“Scoop, shut the hell up!” someone yelled. “Ain’t nobody tryin to hear that from you right now.”
Another shot rang out. Then pop! pop! pop!
My mother yelled for me to come inside, but what five-year-old is going to listen to such orders when it’s pandemonium outside? Then one of my mother’s friends came running up the courtyard. Everyone ran toward him. Even old Ms. Lowery, breathing machine and all, rolled her wheelchair out into the yard.
“What’s all this hollering going on?” the old lady asked.
The messenger took a deep breath. He was sweating like a pig staring down a barbecue. He knelt to catch his breath, then rested his hand on Ms. Lowery’s armrest.
“Y’all ain’t gonna believe this,” he said, panting. “It’s crazy, y’all.”
“Boy, if you don’t let it out, I swear on my mammy’s tombstone!” warned Ms. Lowery.
“Y’all ain’t heard it on the radio?”
“If we did, would we be out here staring at your ugly ass waiting for the news of the damn century?” Scoop fired back.
“They let them go. They free, y’all.”
Of course they did.
I don’t think I had ever felt pain in a person’s eyes, never heard it echo from his cheeks and scream from his chest. But when he said those four words, it was like pain had become a person and smacked everyone in the courtyard squarely on the jaw. Scoop smashed his Johnnie Walker bottle against the wall. His hopes that maybe there was some retribution on the way for his bitter past faded. The look on his face told on his years of hoping for that moment . . . of when he could say, “Damn, we won” . . . was gone.
Hope is a dangerous thing. It could lead your ass to the middle of the desert thinking there is a water hole somewhere up ahead, but you’ll only die of thirst before you get there. Doubt keeps your ass in the car waiting for help to arrive.
People in the hood use doubt as a defense mechanism. You can’t knock a man for thinking there is no sunshine when he lives beneath a constant cloud. When the obvious reality of “I told you so” comes around, it doesn’t feel so bad if you hold doubt close.
That Saturday afternoon, everyone thought, for once, that folks in Liberty City, Overtown, and Opa-locka would be vindicated. My mother ran inside to turn the radio on, and sure enough Jerry Rushin was on WEDR telling everyone to calm down and keep the peace. Rushin had been the pulse of the inner city for years, our voice on the radio keeping the temperature of Miami’s racial tension lukewarm when it was actually boiling over. But how could Rushin explain four cops caught on tape crushing Arthur McDuffie’s head “like an egg” getting to walk away scot-free? No, not even Rushin had the right words to calm years of coiled resentment from getting it up the rear routinely.
Arthur McDuffie was a cool brother. He was the type of brother in the hood just living life and taking it easy. His only vice was motorcycles. Well, not a vice actually, but a brother flossing on top a Kawasaki in the early eighties in Miami? It wasn’t something cops took kindly to. On December 17, 1979, he popped a wheelie for the last time. Word around the campfire was that McDuffie whizzed past a cop and had the nerve to give him the middle finger. Reports conflict on whether McDuffie stopped or kept on whizzing by and said to hell with it. When he did finally stop, imagine slave drivers catching Nat Turner on his way to France. Nine cops wailed a can of whup ass on that dude. They jumped on him like he owed them money. They smashed his head with a baton until he fell into a coma and eventually died. McDuffie’s mother, Eula McDuffie, told the press the obvious: “They beat my son like a dog. They beat him just because he was riding a motorcycle and because he was black.”
The cops ran over McDuffie’s motorcycle to make it look like he got his injuries from a crash. Talk about gangster.
My relatives were out there protesting with signs blaring JUSTICE FOR MCDUFFIE. It’s sad that it took McDuffie’s head getting cracked open to get people off the stoop and out in the street demanding better conditions, but, hell, it was a means to an end. Dr. King and Malcolm would have been proud to see all those folks out there protesting for equality. This was what those cats died for. Miami was the last stop on that civil rights train, and we were hungry for change. The cops were charged and officials moved their trial to Tampa. Up there, they felt those bastards would be safe.
Folks took a break from the usual springtime chitlins cookouts.
It was our time.
There were people who never tuned in to the news a day in their lives, but now everybody was following the daily coverage of the case of the century. In between a bit of Marvin Gaye and James Brown, Rushin gave updates on the ins and outs of the case.
The trial started on March 31 and it was commotion from jump street. The defense removed blacks from the jury pool. Details about the beatdown shocked the world. Those were some cold-blooded dudes. After pulling McDuffie off the bike, they beat the brother with nightsticks and flashlights.
The one Cuban cop was the most vicious. He sat on top of McDuffie and slammed a nightstick into the back of his head. America was shocked by the news coming from paradise. The thing is, those pictures on Miami postcards of pearly white sand beaches and art deco hotels were as foreign to us as the idea that people actually had the kind of money to stay in hotels like that. Then the verdict was read.
Not guilty.
Normally, those two words are beloved in the hood. When your reality always seems one mistake away from the chain gang, those two words serve as a lifeline. That Saturday the words yanked a grenade pin. Those jurors were as good as dead. They drove a spear into the heart of black Miami that’s never been removed.
When Eula McDuffie cried in that Tampa courtroom, her tears fell on all of us. News travels fast in the hood. Folks didn’t have to wait for the Associated Press to say that once again we got bamboozled. Deejay Iceman tried to calm down the angry callers on the radio, but like I said earlier, no one could stop this hurricane. When a sleeping grizzly bear rises, he will bite your fucking head off.
That Saturday, the crowd kept growing larger in the courtyard.
“It doesn’t make any sense to listen to the radio. It’ll just get everyone riled up!” my mother said, breaking the silence in the wake of the initial news. Nevertheless, everyone huddled around Scoop’s radio. Rushin’s voice came over the airwaves asking community leaders to hold a town hall meeting on Monday.
Yeah, hope is a blind leader. It took us into the middle of the Sahara without food, water, or shelter and said find your way back to sanity. If only folks had held on to doubt and looked at history, we would have known those cops would get off scot-free. Instead, everyone sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and marched the avenues talking about a change is coming. No one played Sam Cooke that Saturday. In this part of town, the Malcolm X murals along Seventh Avenue seemed to yell. But I’m not sure if even that fiery brother would have condoned what happened over the next four days.
“Hell, what did y’all niggas expect?” yelled Scoop. “This is the South, goddammit. Stop letting those uppity up-North Negroes keep filling your heads with pie in the sky!”
Scoop was right. For all its tropical fanfare, Miami is the last stop in the Deep South. You can call it Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia with an orange twist.
The next few minutes lasted an eternity. A calm before a mad storm gripped Liberty City. The quietest part of a hurricane is several minutes before the deadly inner wall rips through. My mother kept yelling for me to come back inside, but I did what all the other frustrated five-year-old kids did that Saturday. I grabbed a rock.
I raced to join the crowd that was spilling out toward the avenue. When I reached the parkway, police had blocked off the intersection where the usual white customers trickled in. Someone set a trash bin on fire. All hell broke loose. People threw bottles, rocks, and any other makeshift weapons they could hurl at the passing cars. The street turned into bedlam. They chanted, “Kill whitey! Kill whitey!” and all kinds of other racial shit. The sins of a couple murderous cops brought out the worst in everyone.
Cops roped off a section of Sixty-eighth Street in the middle of traffic where a couple hundred people crowded around what looked like bodies on the ground. I tried to duck past the police barricade, but an officer stopped me.
“Back up, folks, back up!” he yelled. “I’m not gonna tell you guys twice!”
How could this dude expect any of us to respect the boys in blue right about now? They cracked a man’s skull on a Sunday morning and got to ride off into the sunset! One lady screamed, “Lord, y’all done kill those poor, innocent people!” A Haitian businessman ran out of his bodega screaming for help.
Debra Getman got away that evening, but Jeffrey Kulp and his brother Michael got caught in a whirlwind. They were just some white kids from Pennsylvania trying to catch a tan in the Miami sunshine. On their way back to their hotel from the beach, they got lost in our hood. With no radio in the car, they cruised right into a death trap. A shower of concrete, bottles, and rocks shattered their windshield. The car swerved and hit the sidewalk, then smashed into an old man and little black girl. Some dudes pulled those two guys out the car and beat the white off them. Debra made a dash for it past my project building, and a couple folks helped her into a cab. Meanwhile, Jeffrey and Michael were being stomped to death. For a solid half hour those dudes were hit with rocks, concrete slabs, and just about anything else that angry crowd could get their hands on. One dude even took a newspaper dispenser and smashed it into Jeffrey’s skull.
They didn’t stop there. The gunshots we had heard were the ones fired into Jeffrey and Michael. After that, someone drove a Cadillac truck over their bodies. The driver jumped out and jammed a screwdriver in their chests. The devil came to Liberty City. He and his imps removed all the humanity from our projects as the sun began to set.
I stood there trembling, with the madness running around me. Cars were set on fire and smoke clouded the sky. I hid behind a lamppost, hoping it would stay lit, afraid the darkness would just swallow me whole.
Three more people were beaten and stoned to death a short time later. By now, Rushin’s pleas on the radio for folks to calm down had faded. The violence spread from my projects to the Scott Carver projects. An old lady’s car was overturned and set on fire. Most folks in Liberty City that weekend were actually trying to keep the peace, but the enraged minority was determined. It wasn’t safe for anyone to choose the other side. No one listened to the radio. The worst state of mind is when you realize that the hope you wanted to hold on to had you living in the dark all these years. You can’t reason with a person when the rules they were taught to live by are used against them. Violence begets violence.
That Saturday, it wasn’t just white folks who caught the beatdown. A Cuban butcher and Guyanese store clerk were also stomped to death.
I guess the rioting was the community’s way of finally taking back their self-respect, but we lowered ourselves to the evil that caused the riot in the first place. People sped down Northwest Twenty-seventh Avenue so they wouldn’t get caught in the shower of rocks and bottles thrown from everywhere. Kids ran through the streets carrying rocks as big as baseballs. They threw them at any poor sucker caught in the cross fire. Radio hosts instructed travelers to bypass Liberty City on their way home.
Leaders held a rally in downtown Miami at the Metro Justice Building. Now, ask yourself, whose million-dollar idea was that? Picture more than a thousand angry Negroes who already feel slighted by the police gathered at the very headquarters that represented the system they felt failed them. Initially, it was a peaceful rally, blacks and whites gathered together waiting for some light in this dark hour. Then some idiot cop decided to accidently drive his patrol car over the foot of a black girl, turning the peaceful powpow into all-out chaos. Folks started pelting the officers with bottles and began overturning cars. They threw gas bombs and fired shots in the air. Those cops hightailed it out of there.
The situation was getting crazy in Miami. White- and Cuban-owned businesses all throughout Liberty City were looted and burned to the ground. In a weird way, I felt empowered. The burning and the mayhem made me feel like I was part of something. Standing there behind that lamppost, staring at the brothers yelling “Who’s your bitch now!” and “We’re not taking this shit no more!” made me feel powerful. I was a kid, but you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t King Kong at that moment.
Thousands of people were in the streets. People wheeled shopping carts with televisions, stereos, and other appliances. One dude sold sneakers at the corner of Twelfth Parkway and Sixty-second. It’s funny how people can turn righteous anger into a hustle.
The scene on Seventh Avenue was what folks dreaded most. The avenue is what Lennox Avenue represents in Harlem. Stores were flattened. The only life on that strip was the flickering fires that could be seen all throughout the shopping district, but the biggest fire was at Norton Tire Factory. It’s where cops beat and interrogated black folks during the 1960s and ’70s. Folks took pleasure in lighting that fire.
Jumbo’s was one of the few places spared in the riots. The soul food restaurant had its own affinity to Liberty City. It was the first eaterie to be integrated in Miami. The Jewish cat Bobby Flam that ran the place was a straight talker who felt blacks were being disenfranchised. The day he decided to hire black employees, all thirty of his white employees stormed out. Even to this day when asked about his motives, he replies, “It was the right thing to do.” That Saturday night, Bobby’s electrician called to warn that “there would be trouble later.” Bobby told his staff to take the night off. Instead they showed up to guard the place.
By Sunday some white folks started firing back. That’s what people don’t understand. Violence doesn’t have a face to it. You push little Ms. Mary Poppins in a corner and she’ll knock your ass out with her umbrella. It is what it is. Even a preacher got whacked that morning. When the National Guard finally got the situation under control on Wednesday, the damage was already done. Eighteen people were dead and the price tag on damages was $100 million. But everyone in Liberty City thought it sent a message.
“We’re tired of living over here in hell while the rest of y’all enjoy paradise.” You might as well have posted that sign on the entrance to Liberty Square Houses. In the courtyard Scoop bragged about how “they gotta take notice now.” He even seemed sober for an entire week.
My mother didn’t speak much about the riots, but I know she felt black folks lowered themselves to the level of those murderous cops. I think everyone in the projects felt that way. Like I said earlier, McDuffie was a cool brother, and it was an unspoken truth, but everyone knew he wouldn’t have wanted to know his death caused innocent people to die. It caused more mothers to lose sons and a neighborhood to lose its humanity, but sometimes the means justify the ends. Folks were sure officials would take notice of the neglect that caused Liberty City to be rotting from the inside out while fancy skyscrapers were sprouting all over Miami. The neighborhood wouldn’t go unnoticed anymore and businesses would come to Liberty City. The means did cause a lot of pain, but we were used to that shit in our corner of the city. Now, we wanted the life we saw on those commercials and postcards about Miami.
But when the smoked cleared, we were still left with Pork-n-Beans.