Even Jeffrey Wright Is Not Immune

When will the citizens of this community stand up and say "enough" and demand that a mayor and city council finally hire a police chief with the guts to bring true reform to the Shreveport Police Department by removing a rogue element that operates outside any norms of a civilized society? Maybe an Obama Justice Department will have the intestinal fortitude to do what District Attorney and Congressional Candidate Paul Carmouche and a string of U.S. Attorneys could not or would not do: prosecute police officers who brutalize and, yes sometimes murder their fellow citizens.

Jeffrey Wright is one of America’s most accomplished actors. Praised by the New York Times as the best actor on Broadway and considered by some as the best actor of his generation, Wright was subjected to the black man’s nightmare in our fair city. Like so many other black men in Shreveport and this country, Mr. Wright found himself lying on a street corner being repeatedly tasered, cursed, and called nigger by high-tech vigilantes paid with taxpayers dollars. I know this because I have talked to sources who have seen the police video and cell phone videos.

Mr. Wright you are lucky your encounter happened in front of a crowded nightclub and not an isolated street corner. Marquise Hudsmith was not so lucky. He was shot dead for waiving a cell phone on a dark street. I have posted the video below but I warn you it is so barbaric it sickens the soul.



Just two months ago, a Shreveport Police Officer staked out a burglary, watched a young man go into a furniture store and never called for backup. When the young man came out the store carrying stolen items, the officer shot the young man in the back killing him and then reported he used his car as a weapon. By the way this same officer has been involved in two other shootings one of them fatal and all involved a victim allegedly using his vehicle as a weapon. This officer has been on the force less than nine years. Most police officers go their whole career without pulling their weapon from their holster.

There have been numerous other police shootings in recent years including an invalid wheel-chair bound man, who was wheeling himself down a street and ended up being shot and killed after a "routine traffic stop” by Shreveport Police.

Now I know your friends on the Upper Westside will stereotype the city and police force as a bunch of racist rednecks but I am sure you will tell them that the city is majority African-American with a black mayor and police chief. And there are African-American officers who brutalize citizens with the same vigor as Bull Connors a generation ago. I sued the city when a black officer raped my client in the back seat of his police cruiser. He was a serial rapist who kept a rape kit of KY Jelly, gloves and condoms in the trunk and had been stalking women for years. A bad police force cuts across race and gender. They just bad.

Some of us in the African-American community thought the election of Cedric Glover and the hiring of Henry Whitehorn would bring a greater sensitivity to this problem. But we should have known better when one of Glover’s first official acts was to declare April Confederate History Month. His and Whitethorn’s failure to take on the Police Union and root out a small but dangerous criminal element operating within the Department is a betrayal of the thousands of citizens, some of them who had never voted before , who went to the polls to vote for something different.

What they got instead is a police chief and mayor who no matter what criminal activity police officers indulge in, they within 24 hours declare the ‘OFFICERS WERE JUSTIFIED.” What does a officer have to do to violate policy and be fired? Get caught on video, wearing a Klu, Klux Klan outfit, and sticking a cattle prod up a citizens' ass?

Mr. Mayor, whoever is advising you to hold the police cruiser and cell phone videos from the public should be fired immediately. They are incompetent and by you following their advice, it makes you look just as incompetent. By taking the position that you will not release the videos, further undermines the citizens' confidence in you, your police chief and the other 95 percent of outstanding police officers that go to work every day and risk their lives for little pay, so we can believe that we are safe.

Eventually, the truth will come out and you would have surrendered the moral authority of your office. And, for what? Do you not know that eventually those videos will have to be released and the world - through YouTube and the Internet- will judge you and the city in ways you cannot imagine?

Mr. Wright, I have no idea whether you broke the law that night and deserved to be arrested. But I do know you did not deserve to be brutalized, repeatedly tasered as you lay on the ground and be called a nigger. It may not mean much to you but a lot of citizens are truly sorry and extend to you an apology. They offer the same apology to Mr. Brolin and the dozens of other citizens who have suffered from the police this year.

Perhaps Oliver Stone's next movie could be about rogue officers in a police department down South that routinely brutalize and even murders its citizens and is protected by a District Attorney, Mayor, Police Chief and the silence of its citizens. It will not make as much money as Dark Knight or “W”, but it is a story worth telling.

A SHOUT OUT TO MY NIGGERS

Jessie Jackson talked into an open mike and used the word Nigger. I am not beating up on Jessie anymore. But let’s take this opportunity to broaden the discussion.

First of all it’s not the N word, the word is Nigger. I was born, raised and lived most of my adult life in the South and no white person ever called me the N word.
They called me Nigger. I have never understood why we have given this word so much power that we cannot say it.

Second I am a writer and lawyer and words are a powerful tool for either good or bad and I reserve the right to use every word in the human vocabulary to describe the human condition and to fight for a dream of a just society.

Thirdly, a white person is as free as anyone else to call me a Nigger, I don’t like it when they do it but I no longer feel compelled to want to kick their ass. After all it’s just a word. Now I warn them there are millions of African’s that WILL kick their asses if they call them a Nigger so as a general rule, if you white, you should not to go there.

Now part of the problem is that black people took this word that was meant to dehumanize us and turned it into something beautiful. It’s like what we did with the pig. White folks gave us the scraps and we turned them into chitlins, hog head cheese and pig feet.

White folks gave us the blues and we turned it into song and dance, jazz, reggae, hip hop, rap and now the whole world pops its finger to a music that began out of the pain that America gave us.

An example is Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangle Banner at the NBA Allstar game in 1983 .Now when you think about our history in this country, getting excited about the Star Spangle should be difficult. But like everything else in America that we have touched Marvin, made it ours. Check him out:




When one of my dear friends looks me in the eye and says “you my Nigger”, it is a codification of a bond that is deep that the word friend does not equal. In that moment he is telling me that “we came up the hard way, we stuck together and because of you I never felt alone, you have been my rock “

When black people are alone and drinking or smoking weed or just hanging out and we discuss our condition, we say “Niggers are a motherfucker.” Now we could say “I am deeply disappointed in some African-Americans inability to handle our ethical, personal and social responsibilities.” But among ourselves we created a language that is uniquely us.

Black people as a whole have drawn a line and said because we use the word, it is not proper for white folks to use and white folks respond in their usually selfish ways “that if you say it, we have a right too and if we cannot use it then neither can you.” And of course as always because some of us love white folks so much we rightly oblige. We start talking about ignorant stuff like holding funerals for a word. You would think that if we have to give up using Nigger, they should have to give up being racist.

It’s okay to for black people to say to white America, the word Nigger means many things to us and it is a part of our history that represents our darkest moments, but also of our ability to take ugliness and make it beautiful. It is a deeply personal word for black people and if you respect us, you should refrain from using it and just because we have made it cool, it does not give you a right to culturally appropriate it.

James Baldwin said " When i decided i was going to think like a nigger, eat like a nigger, make love like a nigger, live like a nigger, i had to leave America for fear of my life.