There were dead in the State of the Union. I’m not talking about Congressman George Santos. I don’t think he will have a long life in the Chamber of Deputies, because his immensity of lies threatens to end him.
I don’t mean Kevin McCarthy, who in his abject drive to become Speaker of the House has put a noose around his own neck.
Nor am I talking about President Joe Biden, who is still struggling in the polls for exactly the reason he was elected — that he is a calm, reflective antidote to Donald Trump’s endless madness that has now become his biggest obstacle, with a public addicted to drama and scandal recoiling from his reflected posture.
I’m talking about two black men, both killed by the police: one a few years after the end of the civil war in the US and the other just last month.
On March 31, 1870, a Philadelphia policeman shot an unarmed black man, Henry Truman, in an alley in Society Hill. The projectile penetrated the abdomen and claimed his life.
In the following days, the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper published the testimony of witnesses. Jennie H. Gardner, 19, described how the officer grabbed a suspect, who escaped and “disappeared down an alley.” The officer chased after him and ran into Truman, who asked him what the problem was.
Then, Gardner said, the officer replied, “I’ll show you what the problem is” and walked across the street. “He then drew his revolver and intentionally fired. I was at Truman’s side at the time.”
The officer was arrested, and his bail request was denied. At trial, the officer argued that he feared for his life and fired in self-defense (does this sound like something you’ve heard before?) when a crowd followed him, cornered him and “started throwing rocks and shouting ‘kill the white man’ and other threatening expressions of this nature,” wrote the Inquirer.
The jury didn’t believe it. The officer was convicted of manslaughter.
It was in memory of this episode, one of the first known cases in the US of a police officer killing a free and unarmed black man, that members of the Congressional Black Caucus, linked to the caucus of black congressmen, wore pins with the numbers 1870 in the State of the Union address. , on Tuesday night. The gesture was intended to draw attention to the long and seemingly endless history of this type of violence and the dire need for police reform.
As Democratic Representative Bonnie Coleman of New Jersey said on “The Dean Obeidallah Show” about police killings of blacks, “Things haven’t gotten better. We’re getting worse about it.”
In fact, 2022 saw the highest number of police killings ever recorded, with blacks being disproportionately more likely to be killed than whites.
In some respects, the way we process these cases has become more complicated. In 1970, the policeman was immediately arrested and convicted in less than two months. Today courts and state legislatures protect police officers in so many ways that arrests and convictions are rare.
Also in attendance at the State of the Union address were the mother and stepfather of another black man who met the same end as Truman 153 years later: Tire Nichols, who died last month after being savagely beaten by police in Memphis, Tennessee.
In an act of the perversity of someone who has shot down a large prey, one of the police officers photographed Nichols’s bloodied body after the beating and sent the photo to others via cell phone.
Biden sympathized with Nichols’s parents, spoke of the fear faced by black people and families; mentioned his executive order “to all federal law enforcement officials prohibiting chokeholds, limiting search and seizure orders in homes without prior notice to residents, and other key elements of the George Floyd Act”; and urged Congress to “pull together and finish the job of police reform.”
It was a throwback to the 2021 Biden who, in his speech before a joint session of Congress, said: “We must unite to rebuild trust between the police and the population they serve, to eradicate systemic racism in our justice system.” criminal law and to enact police reform in the name of George Floyd, which has already passed the House.”
Last year, during the midterm campaign, in which Republicans were playing on fears of crime, Biden did not include any reference to racism or reform in his State of the Union address, but said emphatically: “We must all agree that the The answer is not to defund the police. It is to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.”
Real police reform is even less likely to pass this Congress than the last one. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the top Republican negotiator for Senate reform, has posted on social media: “Resurrecting the House police reform bill is not going to happen.”
What people are aiming for now are smaller measures related to funding and training. But make no mistake: if these measures are approved, they will be minor changes at most. Meanwhile, black bodies, from Truman to Nichols, continue to pile up, and America resigns itself to fighting it.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
