This moment is not a turning point. Not yet. At best, to borrow from Churchill, it is the end of the beginning of police reform. The guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd is welcome. It is the only verdict that could be called justice. The nation has breathed a momentary sigh of relief that its streets will not explode. Not immediately.
Americans took to the streets in protest in the last year over Floyd’s killing. And over the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and dozens of others less well-known who died at the hands of police (image). They were the largest civil rights actions in this country since the 1960s.
But the guilty verdict on Tuesday is not the end. Not a watershed. There were decades of lynchings across this country between the Civil War and the reforms of the Johnson administration.
In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday on voting rights, Senate Republicans trotted out one of their standard tropes. A century and a half ago it was Democrats in the South that implemented Jim Crow laws, they charged. (It is the Republican equivalent of neener-neener.) Jim Crow unwound the emancipation of Black Americans declared under Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. That period lasted a hundred years.
What the Republican taunt leaves out is it was the nation’s founders who permitted slavery to stand when crafting the new nation that preceded the Civil War and Reconstruction. That reminder is perhaps the ultimate “both sides do it.”
What Jim Crow, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, and hundreds of Republican-sponsored voter suppression bills proposed since last November have in common is a desire by white people to keep minority citizens in their second-class places. Disparate treatment of Black Americans by modern slave patrols works the same way. The goal is to show who is in charge and who is not. Especially now that white people are on their way to being a plurality, not a solid majority, in this ostensibly “one person, one vote” country.
Listen to Zoe Chace’s tale of election rigging and unsubstantiated charges of it against Black activists in Bladen County, NC. White Republicans in Bladen were fine with Blacks organizing so long as they did not win. When they elected a Black sheriff, allegations of cheating began to circulate among Whites until they became gospel. People in power do not like it when their supremacy is challenged.
Nor do police.
Chauvin cruelly and coolly strangled the life from George Floyd, a Black man, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, on multiple cameras, and under color of law for an alleged nonviolent offense. But if there is one predictable behavior of the sort of person who would do that under those or less-public circumstances. They do not back down. They double down.
This is not over.