Apartheid. USA 1988

February 8, 1987:

Don Wycliff observed in the ‘Editorial Notebook’ of the Times, ‘In Chicago, it used to be routine police practice to sweep up large numbers of young black and Hispanic men on disorderly conduct charges, hold them overnight and release them the next day without prosecution.’ In 1982, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the practice in Federal Court. In 1983, when Harold Washington took over as Chicago's first black mayor, the city entered into a consent decree to end the sweeps. His predecessor had defended the policy. Mayor Washington apologized for there ever having been such a practice in Chicago. ‘It was then, for the first time, that black political power acquired real significance for me,’ wrote Wycliff, ‘It meant that the police could actually be forced to exercise some discretion and restraint towards black people.’ He continued in the notebook of the Times that a dangerous, humiliating, sometimes fatal encounter with police was almost a rite of passage for a black man in the United States. Such encounters are staple in black literature - see James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or Richard Wright's Native Son. Even black men who share no other problem with the black lower class share this one. The most successful, respectable black man can find himself in a onesided confrontation with a cop who thinks his first name is ‘Nigger’ and his last name is ‘Boy’. Wycliff: ‘It has happened to me more than once. It has happened to other members of my family. I think in particular of an uncle,

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once kind and gentle, who now resides in a psychiatric ward in Waco, Texas. My parents say that his long descent into insanity began with a brutal beating by two Houston policemen in the 1950s.’^44.

44. The New York Times, editorial page (excerpts)