{"id":1859,"date":"2015-05-08T16:13:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T14:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=1859"},"modified":"2015-05-29T00:08:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T22:08:55","slug":"baltimore-in-black-and-white-and-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/baltimore-in-black-and-white-and-gray\/","title":{"rendered":"Baltimore in black and white and Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Why<\/a>Among the aging paperbacks on my bookshelf is a thin volume from 1963 by Martin Luther King, Jr., called Why We Can’t Wait<\/em>. King wrote this nearly 10 years into a civil-rights movement whose origin he placed in a Supreme Court decision<\/a> in 1954. The book came years after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott<\/a> and several marches King had organized. It even came after his “I have a dream” speech filled the National Mall<\/a> in Washington, DC, out to the horizon \u2014 a high-water mark in a people’s struggle for justice.<\/p>\n

From King’s perspective, this movement hadn’t been a linear process. Things had reached a critical point, he said, near the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963. Exactly 100 years had passed since Abraham Lincoln had declared an end to slavery in the United States. The arrival of this anniversary, said King, had led African-Americans to ask out loud whether they had indeed achieved the equality Lincoln had intended.<\/p>\n

In 1963, with an entire system of segregation in place to keep blacks and whites apart, the answer to that question was obvious, and it was remedied in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since then, two generations have passed, but again America faces a civil-rights movement that is starting to reach critical mass.<\/p>\n

Two generations later…<\/h2>\n

As in the 1950s and ’60s, particular incidents are causing this to flare up. Last week’s protests in Baltimore, Maryland, revolved around the death of yet another unarmed black man during an arrest. (Such incidents, in a number of cities, have become so common that “unarmed black man” is now a meme.)<\/p>\n

Gray’s crime was making eye contact with the police<\/p>\n<\/div><\/p>\n

Freddie Gray was no saint \u2014 he had a lengthy police record \u2014 but his crime on April 12 was making eye contact with police officers, then running away. The police caught up to him and found he was carrying a pocketknife. They put handcuffs and ankle restraints on him, shoved him into an empty van, and drove off without strapping him in. By the time the ride was over, Gray’s spinal cord had been severed; he soon died from this. An allegation by police that Gray had somehow caused his own injuries was just one of several statements that evidence appeared to contradict.<\/p>\n

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