The Society of the Cincinnati FrontPageMagazine.com | April 8, 2002 by Michael Tremoglie
"YOU REMEMBER TIMOTHY THOMAS, the unarmed young Black man who had outstanding misdemeanor warrants, who was killed by a white police officer in Cincinnati. While we still do not know the `official` reason for the killing, one thing we do know is that Brother Thomas had misdemeanor traffic tickets. We know he ran from the police. We know that he was killed. We know the alleged initial statement by the officer was that Thomas`reached`for something. We know that was a lie. "
This essay was published in the commentary section of the website of the Cincinnati Black United Front. The article is titled "Irony of Ironies."
"Newsline subscriber Thomas Haas survived two critical incidents in Cincinnati within 17 days apart – one during which he was shot at between 15 and 20 times. Haas was willing to share his experiences with fellow Newsline subscribers with the hope that others might take something from it that could ultimately save a life, if faced with a similar situation…The first incident took place on July 10, 2001, shortly after midnight in Cincinnati District One..."I am an FTO and had a new recruit with me in training," Haas, a 10-year veteran for the City of Cincinnati, said. "He was approximately 2 weeks out of the [police] academy when this (first) event took place."
This is an excerpt of an essay that was published in Calibre Press’ Newsline and e-mailed to me.
These essays represent the dichotomy that is Cincinnati on the first anniversary of the shooting of an unarmed black youth by a white law enforcement officer.
The Coalition for a Just Cincinnati (CJC) and the Cincinnati Black United Front (CBUF) instituted a boycott of the city’s tourism trade last July. Entertainers Smokey Robinson and Bill Cosby cancelled their concerts because of the boycott, implemented because of the city’s lack of progress regarding racial issues. Black leaders, who accuse the cops of harassing blacks for three decades, sued the city of Cincinnati last year.
As the first essay suggests the CBUF is convinced that Cincinnati law enforcement officers are murderers. As the second essay suggests their premise is a fallacy. However, the BUF and the CJC claim they are engaged in a campaign for social justice.
Social justice.
Father Coughlin called his magazine Social Justice--and he was anti-Semitic. Juan Peron termed his politics "social justice"--and he imprisoned and executed dissenters. Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin all said that their policies created social justice--we all know about them.
So, why should we believe the CBUF and their claims of social justice? From the first essay, it is apparent that they do not believe in "innocent until proven guilty." Their condemnation of Cincinnati law enforcement as racist is unproven. It is the usual canard. Fifteen blacks have been killed by Cincinnati law enforcement, ergo Cincinnati law enforcement is racist. Nowhere do they mention that 75% of those shootings occurred in self-defense. In fact, in a letter sent by the CJC to entertainers, they term the shootings "supremely suspicious."
There are three criteria for proving a causal relationship. They are:
- The cause must occur before the effect
- The cause and effect must be related empirically
- The observed relationship cannot be explained by the effect of another cause
As is usually the case the claims by the Cincinnati civil rights groups possess the first two criteria. They do not possess the third. Obviously, the CBUF is not concerned about scientific factual evidence.
The Black United Front is affiliated with the African Peoples Revolutionary Party--a socialist organization. They along with the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the New Black Panther Party-a CJC constituent- organized a " March for Justice " last June in Cincinnati. The Revolutionary Communist Party is particularly interesting. Their leader Bob Avakian wrote an essay for their website which states that as a white person he cannot lead blacks; as a communist he must.
All of which has to make one question whether the events in Cincinnati are genuine complaints by a certain portion of the citizenry who feel they are being treated unjustly, or is it nothing more than communist agitprop and exploitation by opportunists who want to enrich themselves and obtain political influence for their own benefit?
The irony of this is that the black leaders are being sued themselves. The Cincinnati Arts Association is suing the boycott leaders for prompting the entertainer’s cancellations. In March some black community activists formed an anti-boycott group appealing to the entertainers to reschedule their concerts.
Ahh, the Byzantine complexity of being a leftist…. Michael P. Tremoglie is a freelance writer currently working on his first novel, and an ex-Philadelphia cop. E-mail him at elfegobaca2@earthlink.net.
gag alert
From the Mpls (red)Star Tribune
Syl Jones:
Cincinnati -- Confederate to the core
Published Apr 7, 2002
CINCINNATI, OHIO -- The inciting incident is by now infamous: On April 7, 2001, white police officer Stephen Roach shot and killed African-American Timothy Thomas in a dimly lit alleyway in Cincinnati's largely black Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. He was the 15th black man to die at the hands of the Cincinnati police in recent years, and concerned citizens, both black and white, staged a four-day riot to protest the shooting. Roving gangs pulled people from their cars and destroyed private businesses and homes, costing millions.
Fear gripped the city as never before. Many normally peaceful residents marched against the authorities, demanding the resignations of the mayor and police chief. A strict curfew went into effect to keep people off the streets and to calm frayed nerves. But even before Officer Roach could be acquitted of murdering Thomas, yet another black man died in police custody.
As a protest against its critics, the Cincinnati Police Department quietly adopted a policy of non-policing certain dangerous neighborhoods. That policy, plus Cincinnati's peculiar penchant for street violence, has resulted in well over 250 people being shot since last April.
The city's conduct and that of its policemen have ultimately cost it a lot more than unfavorable publicity: Cincinnati is on the verge of settling a federal racial profiling lawsuit, as well as separate claims against it by the American Civil Liberties Union and several private citizens. The sweeping settlement -- yet to be accepted by all parties -- tacitly admits that the city has discriminated against African-Americans for at least the past three decades, although the language of the agreement specifically omits any finding of wrongdoing. Under the terms of the settlement, the city will pay $12.5 million over five years to institute an independent monitoring system that will track police complaints. It will change police operating procedures, including the use of dogs and chemical irritants against suspects, and it will mandate a new computer system designed to track how police use their weapons.
But why all the shooting in the first place? Two reasons: Cincinnatians of every race treasure guns almost as much as they love their former mayor, TV's Jerry Springer; and the "have-nots" are angry at the "haves" and determined to get their share of the wealth, even if they do it illegally. A recent federal study showed that while most municipalities thrived during the 1990s, poverty in Cincinnati's inner city increased as champagne flowed in its suburbs.
Those are the cold, hard facts. But to truly understand what it's like to live in a place like Cincinnati, it helps to experience the feelings behind the facts. Hospitable if not sophisticated, the city has long prided itself on its unique combination of Southern charm and Northern money. It nurtures a lively arts community and has managed to cultivate a liberal fringe of highly visible civil rights activists, which the city's leaders have tried to merchandise to Northern businesses seeking a cheap and diverse work force.
At its core, the city remains essentially Confederate and deeply divided. Up to and including the year 2000, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in Fountain Square as part of the city's annual Christmas festivities. Other municipalities might well have questioned the relevance of a universal symbol of hatred to Santa Claus and the celebration of Christ's birth. Not so in Cincinnati.
What happened last April was predictable: The once proud Queen City morphed into the Mean City, a cauldron of class and racial conflict that has often seemed on the verge of boiling over. In fact, the April riots marked the 11th time in the past 150 years that Cincinnati's streets have been rocked by mass violence. I was there for two of those occasions, in 1967 and 1968.
Unofficial police state
In 1968, Ohio Gov. James Rhodes called out the National Guard to quell race riots after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When, as a teenager, I walked out of my door one morning and saw armored tanks and trucks in the streets of my neighborhood, I froze in fear. Years later, while watching a sequence in the film "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," which chronicled the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the sense of dread it rekindled reminded me that I knew more about living in occupied territory than I'd imagined.
The city in the 1960s was an unofficial police state where hundreds if not thousands of blacks were taunted, arrested, beaten and incarcerated. As in most border towns, Cincinnati had its share of ruffians and street criminals, its shady subcultures that traded in sleaze. But the great majority of Cincinnati's African-Americans were timid by Northern standards, going out of their way to avoid giving whites further reasons to hate them and their families.
As a child, to avoid being victimized, I'd learned never to touch anything in any Cincinnati department store unless I'd made up my mind to buy it. I learned to say "Yes, officer" and "Thank you, sir" in response to verbal tirades and arbitrary behavior by policemen famous for wearing their white hats cocked to the side, like gangsters. I feared them because they hated me. The difference was, they had guns and clubs and pepper spray and Mace. We were at their mercy, and nothing we did could protect us against their often arbitrary use of force.
On the day I returned to my hometown to investigate the controversy, rhetorical flourishes promoting the city's "healing process" hung in the air. But in the midst of this benevolence came a painful reminder of just how prosaic the city can be: The 8-year-old daughter of a 29-year-old woman named African Evans died in a brutal rape and murder while Evans worked one of her two jobs.
Seizing on this tragedy, the city's right-leaning clear-channel talk radio station, WLW, ran nonstop news programming highlighting the crime in veiled but obviously racial terms. They reported the location of Evans' home, the fact that she'd earlier been charged with child endangerment, that the girl's grandmother had taken the children and then abruptly given them back, all in a kind of veiled racist code.
In the bad old days, the Cincinnati media were not above blatantly announcing the race of the less fortunate or the criminal, assuming that such knowledge would further justify discrimination against African-Americans. For instance, in the Cincinnati Enquirer of Nov. 3, 1875, a below-the-fold heading reading "White Is Black" casually and comically announced that a man who broke into someone's home was colored. This was considered polite in those days, when more inflammatory words were often used to describe African-Americans, even in the newspaper. Similar stories appeared in other editions, but the ones involving white burglars contained no mention of their race.
The tradition of noting the race of black criminals -- and even suspected criminals -- continued long into the 20th century. In 1966, after police proposed a sketchy theory that a black man had murdered a number of women, the Enquirer's headline announced, "Negro Killed Three Women."
Between the lines
But, in the ensuing years, Cincinnatians grew more sophisticated in hiding their feelings about race. Minneapolis and other Northern cities led the way in perfecting this skill. Instead of saying that a criminal was black, his photo would be published in the newspapers, or pictures of his half-naked black neighbors would be used to illustrate the story. Instead of saying openly that those people were the cause of growing crime in the city, individuals spoke in demographic code, condemning persons who lived in certain areas of the city, using words like "inhuman," "savage" and "dirty," while lamenting the "plummeting property values."
So, it was somewhat confusing but comforting to me upon my return when Bob Trumpy, a former Cincinnati Bengals football player and part-time talk show host, went on radio and condemned the rape and murder of African Evans' daughter in highly racist terms. He called the people in the surrounding community "inhuman" and then made the quintessential link to race by opining that the black community "seems to think that they are owed something by the white community," effectively converting a tragedy into a racial incident. He said he couldn't wait to hear "the excuses" that would come out of the black community, and he implied that African-American leaders were too busy whining about conditions in the city to prevent tragedies like this one.
I pulled over to listen to the tirade of hatred spewing from the radio. I chuckled at the number of people who called in to support Trumpy's racist views and listened intently to the one African-American woman who ventured a different opinion in a trembling voice. "Don't you realize that what you're saying is racist, sir? Don't you think we all grieve for that child and its mother no matter what color we are, sir?" This woman's remarks were emblematic of the well-mannered, long-suffering, lower-middle-class black community in which I grew up: reasonable, intelligent and polite to a fault.
Cincinnati is famed for its lawbreakers, scofflaws and all-around nitwits: Pete Rose, Springer, Larry Flynt, Charles Keating and Marge Schott, to name a handful. Not a single one of these has ever carried the burden of representing the entire white race. What they represent is blue-ribbon, championship stupid. They're gold medalists in the Idiot Olympics, and, by the way, each is highly successful, which raises a serious question.
Had a black man signed a check written to a prostitute, as did Jerry Springer, or founded one of the most perverse porn empires in the history of the world, as did Larry Flynt, would he be listed as one of Cincinnati's favorites? Would he have received a second chance? Had a black woman commented that "Hitler was right," as did Marge Schott, does anyone doubt that we would still be searching for her body today?
All of which is to say that if Cincinnati wants to understand the nub of its problems, it need look no further than its racial double standard in virtually every area of life. Federal investigators estimate, for example, that 93 percent of all traffic stops in the city involve black drivers. From an African-American perspective, that means that most of the Caucasian yahoos driving across the bridge from Kentucky -- with their feet hanging out the windows -- are never questioned by police.
Meanwhile, Cincinnati police hunted down Timothy Thomas because he had 14 outstanding traffic warrants, nearly all of them for minor violations that could have been the result of police harassment. And, even if they weren't, Timothy Thomas was a human being who deserved a chance to defend himself.
The operative assumption among many whites in southern Ohio has always been that if black people are involved, the activity is probably criminal. Many whites believe this because it reinforces old scripts that played out in their forefathers' heads and hearts, affirming the inferiority of African-Americans, giving them a seeming psychological edge.
By this formula, Cincinnati seems doomed. Officer Roach recently resigned his position in Cincinnati and took a similar job with the nearby suburb of Evendale. The events of Sept. 11 brought a temporary lull in the protests. The settlement of the federal lawsuit holds some promise. But summer -- the season of Cincinnati's greatest discontent -- is just around the corner, and the rage that fuels conflagrations like those of last April still flows freely, like the river on which the city sits.
-- Syl Jones, of Minnetonka, is a playwright, journalist and corporate consultant.
© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
