On The Anniversary Of Dr. King’s Assassination, A Grave Injustice
Attorney General Sessions is taking steps to undo the civil rights icon’s legacy.
Forty-nine
years ago on this very day, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in
Memphis, Tennessee, fighting for sanitation workers and preparing to
lead the poor people’s campaign. It was exactly one year since Dr. King
delivered his Beyond Vietnam sermon from the pulpit of Riverside Church
in Harlem, New York. Yesterday, on the eve of this day of memory, it was
made public that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called for a
review of federal agreements with dozens of law enforcement departments,
including a 90-day delay of an already agreed upon consent decree with
the Baltimore Police Department. It is, in effect, suspending and
attempting to eradicate concrete police reform that many of us in the
civil rights and activist community fought for and got the Obama
Administration to begin. It is the epitome of insult and a slap in the
face of justice that the Attorney General would, on this day in
particular, try to roll back the clock on police accountability and
fairness.
Keystone-France via Getty Images
Oftentimes,
people like to gloss over the depth of Dr. King’s work or pick and
choose the things that they are comfortable with. When I was
13-years-old, I became the youth director of the New York chapter of Dr.
King’s SCLC Operation Breadbasket. We were required to read his last
book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” In that very book,
Dr. King challenged police brutality and police misconduct. As one who
has kept in mind the principles of this great civil rights leader ever
since that assignment until the present day, I am appalled that anyone
–- let alone the Attorney General ― would be against looking at the
pattern and practices of police agencies. Correcting these patterns so
that departments can be held accountable and they can then better serve
the community against crime, and also remove those who commit crime
within their own ranks should be a top priority for the highest law
enforcement official in the country.
Some of us in, the name of Dr. King, will not be turned around on the bridge that we built...”
According to data compiled by the Washington Post,
over 250 people have been shot and killed by police just in 2017 alone.
Not only do we need independent oversight of police killings, but we
also need oversight of any areas of systemic racism and institutional
bias in policing. The effort for reform is not anti-police, but rather
anti-police brutality, which is a crime. In our meeting with Sessions
last month, my colleagues and I raised this key fact to him. He did not
at that time say that he was going to order a review of federal
agreements, though it was clear that he was leaning in that direction.
It should come as no surprise that Sessions is taking this troubling
step just days before a hearing was scheduled for public comment on the
consent decree with Baltimore. Its fate, along with the fate of
agreements with police departments around the nation, now hang in the
balance.
You
simply cannot uphold the law by giving license to law enforcement that
they can break the law with impunity. What gives cops a bad name in some
areas is when good cops protect bad cops and prosecutors look the other
way. Dr. King challenged us with his life and words that it is our job
to make the comfortable uncomfortable, and bring comfort to the
uncomfortable. I imagine Sessions may have known of that legacy since
Dr. King began one of his greatest triumphant movements, the Voting
Rights Act, in his hometown of Selma, Alabama. He should therefore know
that some of us in, the name of Dr. King, will not be turned around on
the bridge that we built toward police accountability and fairness.
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