By Miami standards, it was a popgun riot, a little bitty thing. But I think about it from time to time and I still get a little sick. The terror is a vague thing now, but the shame … I guess it follows you into the clay.
I am not above attempting to enthrall an intern with tales of high excitement. I am not a romantic figure but I have not led a humdrum life, either. I have not done a lot but I have seen some things, right up close, and sometimes there were small risks in that. But one story I almost never tell, because it is personal in a way that leaps well beyond grief, love, hate. It involves fear, and that is nothing to be proud of.
It was June 27, 1991, a Thursday, about 10 P.M. It was hot, the way it can only get in Miami at night. Some places cool after it gets dark, but some nights in Miami it just feels like someone has draped a black cloth over the place. On South Beach, the wind blows off the water and cools it a little, but the ocean breeze never reaches Liberty City and Over-town. It gets hot there and stays hot till November.
My girlfriend at the time, Rachel, was a reporter for the Miami Herald, and said she had to work late that night on the big story of the day. The city was tense, more tense than usual. Black people—in many ways a forgotten people in Miami—were incensed by a court’s ruling that had overturned the conviction of a Hispanic Miami police officer in the manslaughter of two men. In some cities, such a thing would bring out the preachers and pontificators. It would solicit signs and picket lines. Miami is different. In Miami, it meant that the start of the burning, the rioting, was just a matter of time. Riots had raged and burned across Liberty City and Overtown four times in the past decade after white officers killed blacks or were acquitted in killings. Miami was due for another. It was almost tradition.
People were dying in racial violence here long before anyone had ever heard of Rodney King. The most recent riot had been three days of burning, shooting and beatings in January 1989, after Miami police officer William Lozano shot Clement Lloyd, twenty-three, an unarmed black man who was driving toward the officer on a motorcycle. The motorcycle then crashed into a car, killing Lloyd and his passenger, twenty-four-year-old Allan Blanchard. In the rioting that followed the shooting, one person died, 11 were injured and 372 arrested. Thirteen buildings burned.
Lozano was eventually convicted of two counts of manslaughter, and the community was satisfied. But on Tuesday, June 25, 1991, when a higher court reversed that decision to set the stage for a new trial, it was a match scraped across the backs of many black people here. The court had ruled that the trial should have been moved out of Miami because the fear of violence in the black community contributed to the guilty verdict.
For one night, then two, nothing happened. Black leaders walked the streets calling for peace, begging for it, telling the angry people there how senseless it was to burn their own neighborhoods, again. The peace held, but it was a rubber band stretched just a little too tight. The Miami Herald reporters were on constant watch, and I told Rachel to be careful. Riots will hurt you, faster than anything.
The St. Pete Times, not being the local paper, did not have to be so vigilant. I know how coldhearted it sounds, but the fact was, I had the night off as long as the city did not burn. With my girlfriend gone, with time to kill, I did what any man would do. I invited my friend Sean Rowe over to eat a steak and watch The Wild Bunch.
I forgot all about the possibility of a riot until the phone rang, and an editor at my paper told me I might want to stick my head outside and see if I smelled smoke. He told me that the worst possible thing had happened. A Miami police officer had shot a black man, and if the city had not erupted already, it surely would.
By early evening, a crowd of people had stormed a city bus, dragged out the driver, a woman, and beat her bloody. A police officer was run over by a car as a film crew watched, and whole city blocks of people were hurling rocks and bottles as scores of police moved in, standing vigil in bulletproof vests and helmets. They stood back to back in some neighborhoods, frantically scanning the rooftops for snipers, deflecting rocks with plastic shields.
I am not a brave man, but I do my job. I had heard of reporters who covered riots from their television sets. I may lose my nerve someday and do it myself, but at the time I knew I had to get close.
My Mustang had died on me the year before—actually the brakes failed and I crashed through a parking meter and into a palm tree on Biscayne Boulevard—and I had bought a burgundy 1969 Firebird convertible that would run most of the time. It was a good car to cat around in here, but a bad car to drive into a riot. It would be a magnet for attention, and when you drive around in a neighborhood where people want to hurt anyone whose skin is white, you cannot afford attention. My friend Sean, a former reporter for the Herald who was now an investigative reporter for New Times in Miami, told me he would drive us in his wife Lois’s Toyota. He grinned.
He is one of those rare people who thinks that the more absurd life is, the more it’s worth living. But he is also what we call in Alabama a capable man. If you insult him, he will fight you. He once rode a tramp freighter from Miami to Haiti with a crew of cutthroats and thought it was amusing that the raggedy, barely seaworthy freighter lost power halfway through the trip and, its lights dark, went drifting broadside through one of the most traveled shipping lanes in the Atlantic. He had serious guts, and while I knew that he wanted to cover the riot for his own paper, the real reason he went with me that night was so I wouldn’t go alone in a car that screamed, “Here I am. Hit me with a rock.”
The police were handling this riot differently from ones in the past, when they just cordoned off large areas and let the violence and the fires rage. This time they seemed determined to quell the violence, and moved into violent areas. That created, instead of a well-defined line of violence and defense, pockets of it. Some blocks were safe, some were not. We were unlucky enough to drive through one that was not.
There is a feeling that comes over a place in a time such as that, or maybe it just comes over you and you project it onto the dark buildings and broken streetlights around you. You can get killed dead in broad daylight in Overtown and Liberty City in the calmest of times, by people who only want your car or your wallet. But I had driven all over those neighborhoods, day and night, and never felt this kind of menace.
That night, as we weaved our way through the neighborhood, I was afraid of it. Now and then we would see people running. I remember one man carried a length of chain. Sean and I didn’t talk much; I guess we were afraid our fear would show too much.
It happened on Third Avenue Northwest in Overtown, in front of a small housing project. There seemed to be a lot of people out in the street, but they were quiet, lining both sides of the road. There were men and women and some children, and we slowed down to a crawl because some of the children were running back and forth across the street.
The next second, the air was full of rocks and bottles and curses. Some banged into the car, one smashed a side window and one hit me under my ear, where my jaw links to the rest of my skull, and for a second I didn’t know or feel anything. Sean told me later that I screamed when I was hit. I just remember rocks and curses flying, as a young man without a shirt on came running straight up to the now open window and threw something inside, point-blank, but missing me somehow, missing Sean. As frightened as I was, I managed to mumble, “Whatever happens, keep moving, just keep moving.” Then I saw something that made me sick with fear.
As we rolled slowly between the rows of people, trying not to hit anybody, I saw a long black car, a junker, roll out from between the buildings and block the road. There was no one at the wheel; people were pushing it out there to block the street. Instead of panicking, Sean whipped the steering wheel to the left, hard, taking the car up onto the sidewalk, off the road completely, and somehow missed the trees, the parked cars, the people. Somehow, we got around it, we got away.
I do not want to believe it, but I think we might have died there, if he had lost his nerve, if he had stopped, if he had stomped hard on the accelerator and run over someone. People say all the time, with trite and silly melodrama, that someone, by their actions and clear thinking, saved their life. It may be that this time, he did save mine.
We made it to a block that the police had more or less secured. Some jackass television reporter tried to interview me, and I said no, I don’t think so. There were other people there who had been through the same thing, and they were black. In the dark, in their anger, people had thrown rocks at anything that moved. I was a little fuzzy-headed, but fine. I went looking for a phone, to call in the story.
It would not be much of a riot, by Miami standards, just that one night of anger. Once again black leaders like H. T. Smith, a prominent lawyer, stepped in and went neighborhood to neighborhood, calling for peace. This time it held, until the anger subsided to a low boil, which is about normal.
We found two rocks in the car, one beside my seat, the one that hit me. I put it in my pocket.
The next day I put it on my desk, as a paperweight, as a reminder.
The morning after, daylight revealed the old and new scars that covered Overtown and Liberty City, the burned-out and boarded-up hulks, vacant lots with a stub of a wall left standing, weeds where there used to be a store. I drove through the neighborhoods and tried not to be afraid anymore. Once, a man walked quickly out the front of a store and I jerked the wheel so hard I almost ran off the road. I had to remind myself that I was not weaving through a war zone but riding through a place where people lived. That was the story I tried to write for the next day’s paper with a young black woman named Janita Poe, who came down to help.
I remember the hopeless words of Willie R. Colman, who had moved to Overtown with his wife in 1968. He had seen black and non-black businesses leave because of the riots, rips in the fabric of Miami that were never mended.
“Why they going to come back?” asked Colman, a seventy-one-year-old retired construction worker. “Ain’t nothing to come back to but ashes.”
But it was the anger and hopelessness in the words of one young black man, an eighteen-year-old named Tony Fox, that I remember most. To him, rioting was a way to get even, to make people listen. He said he would trash and loot with others, because in his neighborhood blacks owned nothing. They just lived in the hot houses with the two-inch-long palmetto bugs, almost in sight of the condos of the more prosperous Hispanics who came to Miami and flourished, leaving black people behind. In their eyes, they had been subjugated by the old Crackers, and now they were subjugated again by people who were not even born there.
“It ain’t right. We ain’t got no money. That’s why they destroy the buildings. It’s a way to get even.”
This is a business, this journalism, that likes a good trend. We can examine it from four different directions and get some college professors to tell us what we ought to think, and we pass it on to the readers. Over the years, it became fashionable to talk about hope in Miami’s black community, about growth. There has been some.
The years of violent public reaction to injustice are over, one black leader promised. Miami burned for the last time, and only a little, that night Sean and I took our ride in the unfortunate Lois’s Toyota.
Sean Rowe and I were close friends for the time I spent in Miami. When I moved away we drifted apart, and when we did talk we seldom talked about that night. Men, especially where I was raised, don’t like other men to see them so afraid.
I kept the rock on my desk for a long time. One day I looked at it and just didn’t like remembering anymore, and dropped it in the trash can.
I called Sean some time back, after years. I did not apologize for not calling sooner and he did not apologize for not calling me. I told him what I was writing about that night, and asked if I could read him what I had put down. I needed to know whether I had gotten it right. He listened, and told me he thought that, yes, it was right, it was true. But he said I was too tentative in what it might have turned into that night. “I have no doubt that, if they had ever gotten us out of that car, they would have killed us,” he told me. I guess so.
He told me some things I didn’t know. He told me he had kept the other rock we found in the car, as I had kept mine, as a morbid souvenir. And like me, one day he just didn’t like looking at it anymore, and he dropped it in the trash.