A Black American friend shook my perceptions when we broke bread over the weekend. He is very disappointed at what he calls the looting behaviour of some leaders of South Africa’s ruling political party. But says he’d never consider returning to the US because the country’s racial problems are so deep he reckons they’re insurmountable. That supports what I initially believed were outlandish views of “God’s Blogger” Jim Wallis who told me in Davos this year he is worried about an unravelling of the American Dream. This week’s rioting in Baltimore were sparked after yet another African American – this time 25 year old Freddie Gray – died in police custody from unexplained spinal injuries. Similar to what happened during the xenophobic violence in South Africa, a criminal element took advantage of the rioting. But as Gary Silverman of the Financial Times newspaper argues in this excellent piece, with the Baltimore riots, this time it really is different. Even to the events in Ferguson Missouri which unsettled Jim Wallis so much. – Alec Hogg
By Gary Silverman in New York*
This time was different. The rioting that erupted in the city of Baltimore on Monday marked an escalation of the racial turmoil that has flared across the US in recent months following the killings of unarmed black men by white police officers.
The earlier upheaval came in response to deaths in relatively out-of-the-way places – suburbs and smaller cities where many African-Americans have moved in recent years as white professionals have flocked to urban areas.
The classic case was in Ferguson, Missouri, a community of scarcely more than 21,000 people, where mobs rampaged after Michael Brown, 18, was killed. Other victims included Walter Scott, 50, shot in the back and killed in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Eric Garner, 43, who died in a police chokehold in Staten Island – the least populated of New York City’s five boroughs, boasting a terrain sufficiently leafy to accommodate a burgeoning population of white-tailed deer.
But the fire this time was in the inner city, the cauldron of the worst racial riots in US history, and that quickly upped the ante. Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, ordered the National Guard into the city of 622,000 people, describing his action as a “last resort . . . to restore order”. Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles cancelled their home game against the Chicago White Sox amid the tumult.
The violence started in low-income west Baltimore after a funeral was held for Freddie Gray, 25, a black man who died on April 19 of a spinal injury that occurred after his arrest. Looters ransacked liquor stores and a drugstore was set ablaze. More than a dozen police officers were injured as young people pelted them with bottles, bricks and other debris. More than a score of arrests were made.
On the east side of the city, a fire broke out after nightfall in a senior citizen centre being built next to a church. Although authorities told the Baltimore Sun that the cause of the blaze was under investigation, its flames provided the backdrop as television commentators in the US tried to make sense of the rage on the streets.
Their difficulties were demonstrated by Jamal Bryant, an African-American minister in Baltimore who leads a civil-rights group called the Empowerment Movement. He complained to CNN that pleas from Gray’s family for quiet on the day of his funeral – meaning no protests – had gone unheard by the young black rioters on the street.
“[The rioters] do not reflect the movement that by and large has been non-violent,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to the nation and I’m hoping that tomorrow will be a better day for all of us.”
But as Mr Bryant’s despairing remarks suggested, the return of urban rioting to the US pointed to more troubling scenarios – recalling the warning issued by the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson after racial violence in 1967 left scores of people dead in cities such as Detroit and Newark, New Jersey.
“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white – separate and unequal,” it said. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.”
During that era, Martin Luther King said: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
What has become clear in black communities across the US more recently is that there are many people in them who desperately feel they have something to say.
The result is that for the first time in long time, Americans have reason to worry about what used to be called a “long, hot summer” – with violence of the kind seen in west Baltimore begetting more violence.
It will make for an anxious spring in our hemisphere. The northern US is only now emerging from a brutally cold and snowy winter that made it hard to venture outside, much less protest or riot. But summer is almost here and that means the time will soon be right for dancing, or demonstrating or even fighting in the streets.
(c) 2015 The Financial Times Ltd.
