Welcome Home Skip

I asked a friend his thoughts about Skip Gates' recent brush with the Cambridge Police. His response: it could not have happened to a better Negro. Amused, I asked him to explain. He expounded further, saying Skip has been in the "bubble" of the Academy and, even though he writes about the African-American experience, he does not "live among us." If he did, my friend believes Skip would have been more forthcoming and accommodating when confronted with law enforcement. He would have given the police officer his name, social security number, date of birth, blood type and whatever information he needed to put forth, in order to terminate the encounter with the police officer, as quickly as he could. He would have known that, as a black man, there was nothing good to come out of the encounter by trying to effectuate his "rights." You see, most African-American men intrinsically know that escalating a police interrogation can lead to arrest, an ass-whipping or heaven forbid, death as in "Sean Bell."

But let's be clear: what happened to Skip Gates was unacceptable.

Skip has been an influential intellectual in America and deserves every accolade he has received over his illustrious career. His work incorporating DNA technology to trace African-American ancestry has been an important step in helping blacks understand who we are and, just as important, where we come from.

However, Skip has always been a company man at Harvard. When he announced his intent to assemble the preeminent Black Intellectual Think Tank at Harvard, I thought that was the statement of a confused individual. First of all, why would you want to build the preeminent black intellectual Think Tank at a white institution that erected its endowment on slavery? Why would you construct the premier Black intellectual Think Tank at an institution that triggered student protest for its failure to tenure a black female professor at its law school? But most important, what made Skip believe Harvard and its illustrious alumni would ever allow the "preeminent" black Think Tank to engage in honest dialogue about race and power in America?

Predictably, one by one, the scholars Skip amassed left disillusioned. The last and most prominent recruit, Cornel West, was summoned to former Harvard President, Larry Summers' office and told his work was subpar and was further admonished and ordered to cease recording rap records. According to West, in his book Democracy Matters, Skip effectively threw him under the bus by remaining silent. When there was a vote of confidence on Summers’ tenure, Skip backed the former president.

Although Skip has written eloquently about the black experience in America, he has chosen to live in the King’s court. There was always an intellectual distance between Skip and the black America he wrote about. Haki Madhubuti , in a searing essay, remarked that if Skip Gates chooses to write about us, he should at least come among us.

If he had shared in the day-to-day experience of everyday African-Americans, perhaps the public humiliation he faced at handcuffs of cops would have been less of a shock. Yet the only one that seems surprised that Skip was treated like a nigger is Skip. The sad truth is: most black men in America have had a Skip Gates moment.

My second year of law school, I walked down the street in my hometown, feeling really good about myself after earning 3.8 GPA at Tulane. I had a column published in USA Today and had appeared on McNeil Lehr to comment on the governor's race in Louisiana. I was feeling the difference between me and the poor, Larry English. To my surprise, a white police officer stopped me and asked me to get up against a wall and show my identification. Still astonished, I inquired why? She casually responded that there had been a report of a black man seen breaking into a car and I fit his description. I was dressed so preppy, I Iooked as if I had just walked out of Ralph Lauren's display window on Madison Avenue.

I refused the officer’s request. She flung me against a wall. An undercover white officer driving by jumped out of his vehicle and ran to her aid. He put his elbow in my back and "said motherfucker if you move, I will kill you." Just about this time, my father, who was headed to my downtown office, walked around the corner to witness my arrest. And I began to cry.

A few minutes later, a black police officer arrived on the scene. She explained to the rabid officers that I was Larry English, a former president of the city’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; chairman of the Shreveport Housing Authority and a weekly columnist for the Shreveport Journal. I was let go with no apology.

In my next column, I wrote of the incident. I received a letter from a white civil rights lawyer in New Orleans. He had lots of empathy for my degradation, but warned that there was always going to be a "oh shit" moment when the police realized that I was not only a law-abiding citizen, but one with a certain "status" in town. But he also added that if I had not been "Larry English," I would still be sitting in jail for a crime I not only did not commit, but had no knowledge of, if for no other reason that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was right.

On that day, when I was feeling so good about what I had accomplished, I was brought back home to reality of being black in America. However, even now Skip seems confused. He issued a joint statement with the Cambridge Police, saying it had been a misunderstanding, and then almost immediately, called for an apology from the arresting officer.

Skip, you can use your platform to bring down the wrath of God on the Cambridge Police. Or, you can use your incredible gifts as a teaching moment for America. You can teach her about how race, power and ignorance intersect when a black or Latino person is stopped by the police. You can use this podium to fight for the thousands of blacks and Latinos who don’t have an “oh shit” card to play. Welcome home Skip. We missed you.

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.