Review of new civil rights era history finds valuable lessons for Ferguson officials

At WaPo, Kevin Boyle reviews Professor Renee Romano's new book Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders. Harvard University Press is publishing the book, which it summarizes this way:

Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public trials contribute to a public reckoning with America’s racist past? Racial Reckoning investigates that question, along with the political pressures and cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these decades-old crimes. 

 

Renee C. Romano brings readers into the courthouse for the trials of the civil rights era’s most infamous killings, including the Birmingham church bombing and the triple murder of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner. The activists who succeeded in reopening these cases hoped that bringing those responsible to justice would serve to highlight the state-sanctioned racism that had condoned the killings and the lingering effects of racial violence. Courtroom procedures, however, worked against a deeper exploration of the state’s complicity in murder or a full accounting of racial injustices, past or present. Yet the media and a new generation of white southerners—a different breed from the dying Klansmen on trial—saw the convictions as proof of the politically rehabilitated South and stamped “case closed” on America’s legacy of violent racism. Romano shows why addressing the nation’s troubled racial past will require more than legal justice.

Professor Boyle believes Romano's book offers useful lessons for today's tensions - for Ferguson's civic leaders. When grand juries finally began issuing indictments for civil rights era murders in the late 1980s, "prosecutors salved [old wounds] in a particular way" -- by marginalizing "the trials' racial meaning"  and by emphasizing the extremism of the individual defendants. As a result, the social context in which the defendants lived when they committed their crimes was largely ignored, which made it easy to push needed reforms to the back burner. 

Boyle believes officials in Ferguson must consider race and class dynamics if the grand jury chooses to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. Otherwise, they too risk missing an important opportunity to actually make a difference. Boyle writes:  

[Romano argues that the defendants] were also products of a social order that depended on the brutality that men like Beckwith and the Birmingham bombers embraced, even as the better sort looked away. By building their cases on individual culpability rather than communal responsibility, prosecutors obliterated that critical context. Not that they had much choice. Romano readily admits that the cold-case trials were shaped partly by the restrictions the courts imposed — judges simply weren’t going to let prosecutors introduce evidence that didn’t bear directly on the defendants’ actions — and partly by the state’s reasonable assumption that it was better to try a human cockroach than a racist social system. In the end justice could be served. But it was justice of a very particular sort.

 

The Ferguson trial [against Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brownl, should there be one, won’t play out exactly as the cold cases did. Wilson isn’t a Klansman, after all. By all accounts he’s an ordinary suburban cop who, until Aug. 9, didn’t have a single mark on his record. But he worked in a town that’s been battered by white flight and economic decay. Ferguson’s poverty and unemployment rates are twice what they were 14 years ago. Its property values have spiraled downward. And its tax base has crumbled: Last year expenses outstripped revenue by $7.3 million, a gap the white men who control the local government have tried to fill by borrowing — this year Ferguson will pay $2.88 million just to service its debt — and by ratcheting up fines that fall disproportionately on the town’s African American population. Those dynamics didn’t make officer Wilson shoot Brown. Without taking them into account, though, that terrible moment is reduced to a tragic encounter between two young men on a suburban street, driven by whatever emotions and demons they carried with them. As Romano’s insightful book makes clear, that isn’t enough.

In 2004, Boyle won the National Book Award for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.