Conservatives have roundly mocked the chyron used by CNN to tell us about the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” as a television reporter who might as well have been called Baghdad Bob stood in front of a burning building.
So now we come to Amelia Carter, an organizer for the Philly Human Rights Appeal event, Human Rights Violated Here, scheduled for May 31. She is from Philadelphia and lives on 52nd Street. Miss Carter was granted OpEd space in today’s what might as well be called Philadelphia Enquirer:
To make change in policing locally, we need to look in new directions.
By Amelia Carter | May 28, 2021
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. One year since the public flooded the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people. And one year since our communities — including mine on 52nd Street — experienced the severe state repression that followed that call.
I have never seen or felt anything like the seven-hour police occupation of my predominantly Black neighborhood, Cobbs Creek, on May 31, 2020. Although neighbors screamed, “Kids live here! Please don’t shoot,” tear-gas canisters flew relentlessly through the air, landing on residential streets. Gas quickly filled the nurseries where babies napped and the hallways where everyday people did everyday things. To escape the tear gas, families were forced from their homes into the street, where police were indiscriminately shooting people with rubber bullets. The cops said they were there to protect us from rioters — but it was them we feared.
The thing that struck me most about that day was the unity I experienced with neighbors. People sprung into action: bringing milk for our stringing eyes, picking us up off the ground, even as they were stumbling. Some made makeshift protest signs and confronted police directly on Chestnut Street as the tear gas finally subsided. At one point, we all decided — without speaking — to hold the line at Chancellor Street to ensure tanks didn’t press farther into our neighborhood. Without realizing it, we all became activists that day.
There’s much more at the original, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the title. But what you will not find in the 802 words the Inquirer granted Miss Carter is why the police were using tear gas, were using force along 52nd Street. Fortunately, the Inquirer did report just why that happened:
Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?
That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.
Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.
What Miss Carter told her readers was “the public flood(ing) the streets, calling for an end to police impunity, the defunding of police budgets, and investment in Black people,” was in fact, a destructive riot. The Inquirer reported that:
- A crowd had broken into the Foot Locker store at the intersection of 52nd and Chestnut Streets;
- people breaking into stores;
- a few setting police cars on fire; and
- some officers pinned down by people throwing rocks along one of West Philadelphia’s busiest business corridors
From the story:
Just before 3 p.m., an officer’s voice crackled over police radio.
“Just to advise you, at 5-2 and Chestnut off of 5-4 and Market, we’ve got a large crowd gathering.”
Radio calls from that afternoon depict an increasingly volatile scene stretching from Arch to Chestnut Streets growing chaotic, and quickly. For 90 minutes, police asked for backup, and as it arrived, people pelted police officers with debris, according to radio calls. People smashed the windows of police cars, looted their contents, and set some ablaze. Others put a burning squad car in drive and pushed it toward officers on the street.
Fifteen officers were injured. A captain took a cinder block to the leg and developed a blood clot and needed emergency surgery. Inspector Derrick Wood, a 22-year veteran who oversees police operations in West Philadelphia and has made rebuilding the relationship with residents a focal point of his command, suffered a fractured nose in two places when he was hit by a brick.
To be fair, Miss Carter did link that story in her original, but she never indicated, in any other way, that the police were using force because the Mostly Peaceful Protesters™ were rioting.
52nd Street is a mostly black business corridor; the police were attempting — sadly, with little success — to protect the black residents who were not rioting, and the primarily black businesses from being damaged or destroyed. “Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed,” the article originally entitled “Buildings Matter, Too” noted.
I suppose that Miss Carter doesn’t think that buildings matter, despite the fact that people, including a majority of black people, live and work in the neighborhood the police were trying to defend.
But, let’s tell the truth here: the neighborhood are afraid that 52nd Street is ‘gentrifying.
The topic of the community meeting — a plan to beautify 52nd Street, to make it safe, welcoming, and prosperous once again — was, on its face, nothing but good news for West Philadelphia’s long-declining business corridor.
Yet the audience of about 50 residents and retailers, mostly African American, grew increasingly agitated as urban designer Jonas Maciunas flipped through a PowerPoint presentation of proposed improvements. Many weren’t seeing a vision of a neighborhood revitalized from Market to Pine Streets. Instead, in the talk of redesigned intersections, leafy thoroughfares, and better bus shelters, they heard the ominous whisper of gentrification.
“It just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way,” said Carol Morris, 68, a retired elementary school teacher. . . . .
The area’s population remains predominantly black, but residents say they’ve noticed a growing white presence.
I suppose that, for that neighborhood, more white people is considered a bad thing.
Integration was supposed to bring white and black Americans closer, to beat down prejudice and discrimination. I guess that the (mostly) white liberals of the 1960s thought that to be a good thing, but apparently many in black neighborhoods don’t see it that way.
And so we return to Miss Carter. Her complaint is that the law applies to black people as well as whites:
As Malcolm X pointed out, we will always be limited in our ability to fight for the rights of Black Americans through civil rights, because that requires asking for justice from the very systems built on our oppression. Instead, just as the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois appealed to the United Nations, we must claim the rights and freedoms entitled to us in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and join hands with survivors of state repression around the world to upend this broken country. We must recognize that, just as America weaponizes diplomacy to wage long-haul wars abroad, the police are its mechanism for shoring up the empire at home.
The City of Brotherly Love, the city in which Miss Carter lives, has seen 211 people murdered so far this year, and the great majority of those murder victims, in a city that is not majority black, are black. Does she not want the police to respond to calls over robberies or rapes, over arson and vandalism, over muggings and murders?
The police are not there to oppress black people; the police are there to try to enforce the law. Does Miss Carter believe that enforcing the law is “oppression” of black people? Does she believe that the laws should somehow be different for black Americans? Philadelphia got its ‘social justice’ prosecutor in District Attorney Larry Krasner, and all the city, all the black neighborhoods like Miss Carter’s, got for that is more Philadelphians, primarily more black people, pouring out their life’s blood on the city’s mean streets.
