Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,731

This is the grave of Freddie Gray.

Born in 1989 in Baltimore, Gray grew up hard in the streets of that rough city. He was the son of a single mother and he struggled in school. He had some skill as a football player, but was a terrible student and dropped out in the ninth grade. He was like so many kids on the Baltimore streets. He already had 18 arrests, mostly on minor charges such as drug possession, but with a few assault charges too. It is tremendously unhelpful to consider whether Gray was a “good” kid or a “bad” kid, I don’t even know what those terms mean in this context. What I do know is that the kid never had a chance.

On April 12, 2015, cops were patrolling the Gilmor Houses, a project with a high rate of drug dealing. This was part of an enhanced policing strategy to try and limit the drugs in this project, which of course did nothing to deal with any kind of root cause here. The cops saw Gray and he started running. It doesn’t matter why and we can’t know anyway. They easily caught him. He had a switchblade on him, but he didn’t pull it or anything. He didn’t resist in any way. The cops dragged him to a van, while he screamed for help. Witnesses said the cops were beating the shit out of him, kneeing him in the back and beating him with batons. The BPD denied all of this, but who would believe them?

Then the BPD threw him into the van and drove around, tossing him from side to side as part of a torture regime. This turned out to be common. Take a handcuffed arrested person, put him in a van, and drive crazy so he pounds against the sides of the van without any ability to protect themselves. In this case, it killed Freddie Gray. After 30 minutes, the cops realized what they had done and called paramedics to take him to the hospital. The BPD claimed it did this because he was acting irate but cellphone footage showed him being completely motionless by this time. Paramedics treated him on site for 20 minutes, but he was in a coma and they took him to the hospital. Basically, he had a broken neck. Just six days earlier, the BPD had revised this policy to make such actions illegal, but the cops on the ground ignored their superiors.

Gray died after a week in the hospital. He was 25 years old.

News of Gray’s murder caused massive outrage and not a bit of surprise. You might think that the most famous cop show in television history that was a devastating portrayal of the failures of the BPD might have led to some kind of self-reflection by those cops, but no, of course it did not. These people are thugs. Is there really any difference between the gangsters and the cops in cities such as Baltimore. This happened a year after the murder of Michael Brown by cops in Ferguson, Missouri, and a lot of people were sick and tired of police violence. So even before Gray’s death, protests outside the BPD had begun. But when he died, they grew rapidly. By April 25, people were ready for more active resistance. They began throwing rocks at the cops and setting fires on the street. On April 27, after Gray’s funeral, protestors overturned cop cars and set them on fire. This of course led to the inevitable crackdown from Governor Larry Hogan. The BPD were the biggest assholes possible through all of this, with talk about the protesters as a “lynch mob” being beyond offensive. It’s true that the protesters didn’t really have a strategy per se, but that’s what happens when your law and order are a bunch of murderous assholes. People just respond with the fury of the desperate.

On May 1, the medical examiner ruled that Gray’s death could be considered a homicide. Six officers faced at least some charges. One cop had a second degree murder charge. Not a single one of them served a day in prison. Of course this all became a proxy for the larger culture wars. People such as Alan Dershowitz were on the media all the time defending the cops, saying the worst possible things about Gray, etc. The cops later all sued State Attorney Marilyn Mosby for the supposed oppression they had faced, but that lawsuit was thrown out and even the Supreme Court denied them on appeal. I believe all six officers remained on the force after internal disciplinary procedures. A couple of them received some light punishment. All in a day’s work in Baltimore.

The murder of Freddie Gray was just one of many police murders leading to the Black Lives Matter movement in the second half of the 2010s. Let’s close this by quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates’ rejection of those calling for calm in Baltimore:

Now, tonight, I turn on the news and I see politicians calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and “nonviolent.” These well-intended pleas strike me as the right answer to the wrong question. To understand the question, it’s worth remembering what, specifically, happened to Freddie Gray. An officer made eye contact with Gray. Gray, for unknown reasons, ran. The officer and his colleagues then detained Gray. They found him in possession of a switchblade. They arrested him while he yelled in pain. And then, within an hour, his spine was mostly severed. A week later, he was dead. What specifically was the crime here? What particular threat did Freddie Gray pose? Why is mere eye contact and then running worthy of detention at the hands of the state? Why is Freddie Gray dead?

The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray’s death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.”)

Freddie Gray is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Woodlawn, Maryland.

I have a confession to make. I did not take this picture. Oh, I visited the grave, I wouldn’t cheat. But see, Gray is buried in the new section of burials and that means people are still being buried there. When I went, there was a man, clearly mourning a loved one right next door. He was older, it was quite possibly his wife. I pulled by and went to a distant corner to wait. But he remained mourning. Obviously I would never interrupt something like that for something like the grave series. So forgive the fact that I did not actually take this picture.

If you would like this series to visit other Black Americans murdered by racist evil cops, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Michael Brown is in Normandy, Missouri and Eric Garner is in Linden, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.