Apartheid. USA 1988

April 10, 1987:

There are 280 000 residents in Tampa, Florida, and 25 percent of them are black. Tampa has a 721-member police force, which lately has become the centre of serious racial tension in the city. Pulled over for a moving traffic violation, Dwight Gooden, the New York Mets' star pitcher and four of his hometown friends, all black, got in a brawl with white police officers last December. Mr Gooden (22) contended he was beaten by the officers but he later pleaded no contest in third-degree felony charges of battery on a police officer. He was sentenced in January to 3 years' probation

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and community service, a sentence amended this week to allow for spot drugs tests on the athlete after word that he was undergoing treatment for cocaine use. In the weeks before this incident, two armed blacks who reportedly wounded other blacks were shot by the police. One died. Just a few days after the Gooden incident a black man who reportedly shot at black drug dealers in his neighborhood with a rifle was wounded by police. On February 13, an unarmed black drifter with a history of mental problems died when officers attempted to subdue him. Witnesses said an officer used a ‘choke-hold’ on the man, but police officials described it as a ‘carotid hold’, a grip that can cut off the flow of blood to the brain but does not collapse the windpipe of the suspect. The death set off two nights of racial unrest in the Collge Hill area, with black youths hurling stones and fire-bombs at passing white motorists and the police.

In March a black robbery suspect was shot in the back and killed by a pursuing policeman. Last week, in another incident that provoked an outbreak of stone-throwing on the streets, a black drifter died in a scuffle with the police. The cause of his death is still under investigation but an autopsy report ruled out police-inflicted trauma or suffocation. Black leaders said the deaths of four black men at the hands of the police in less than four months was unacceptable. ‘We have too many incidents for them to be accidents,’ complained Robert Gilder, former president of the Tampa branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Robert L Smith, Tampa's public safety director said, ‘The facts are that in three of the four deaths of black men, the police were responding to calls for help from the black community, and in two cases death was accidental.’^80.

Crown Heights, just east of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is a neighborhood of broad, tree-lined streets, neat three-story houses and small-scale apartment buildings. It is also

80. The New York Times, from a report by Jon Nordheimer

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a community divided by race, religion and culture. Blacks and Hasidim Jews feel threatened by one another, and racial tensions have festered in the area for some time. The ill ease between the two groups has several reasons. Blacks and Hasidim compete for housing. Although established black residents said they had been harassed to move, Hasidim argued that there was no such effort. The Hasidim control a private security force that some blacks perceive as antagonistic to them. But the religious group argue that they are targets of crime and that the patrol is necessary. The Reverend Heron Sam, rector of St Marks Episcopal Church, the largest black church in Crown Heights, said however Hasidic leaders had asked whether he was willing to sell his church. ‘What gall,’ he said. Father Sam is also distressed about the all-white volunteer security force run by the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council. He calls it ‘a vigilante squad’ that must be disbanded if the two communities are to coexist at all. ‘What is called crime in any other neighborhood is called racial tension here,’ Rabbi Yisroel Rosenfeld, director of the Jewish Community Council said. ‘You know, if someone is mugged, you know the person is black. There is no secret about that. When you talk about crime in this neighborhood it is a oneway street.’

On February 26, at about 1:30 a.m. someone placed a cardboard orange-juice box and a can containing petroleum in the basement of Willie Mae Reddish house and set them afire. Mrs Reddish, a black woman, fled the fire with her mother and three sons. As the family ran, Mrs Reddish said, she hear someone chanting, ‘Burn, burn, burn.’ A witness saw two men, one dressed in a long black coat and fedora, by which Hasidic Jews can be recognized, and the other in a blue coat, run from behind the Reddish house to the basement area of a dormitory for Hasidic Jews at a nearby yeshiva, according to police reports.^81.

81. The New York Times, from a report by Lydia Chavez