The President is between a Rock and a Hard Place
by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.
The President of the United States is not the president for Black people only. He is president of all the people who live and reside in the United States of America.
There are a lot of things I’m sure he would like to say regarding the situation in Ferguson. We still must remember that he is also Darren Wilson’s president who shot and murdered teenager Michael Brown.
We need to have a conversation on racism in America on how difficult it is for young Black teenagers, especially when the town is 75 percent Black and 95 percent of the police officers are white.
I reared two sons in Birmingham, Alabama in the ’60s and ’70’s. Every time they left home when they were teenagers I gave them a lecture and never slept until they returned. My lecture was – “If the police stops you, keep your hands on the wheel, and whatever they ask you for, say ‘Yes,sir’ and give it to them. Make sure you are not in the car with any white people, especially white women.”
The people in Ferguson have a right to be upset, but they still must have peaceful demonstrations and should not break any laws like blocking traffic or looting. Activists are calling for students to walk out of school and employees to walk off the job nationwide at 1 p.m. ET Monday to protest police violence. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Ferguson-area organizers called for a Black Friday shopping boycott, forcing the St. Louis Galleria to shut down temporarily on the busiest shopping day of the year. Ferguson’s mayor outlined a new initiative in an attempt to forge a better relationship between the city’s police department and the community. Mayor James Knowles announced a new civilian review board to provide input on police efforts as well as a scholarship program to try to recruit more African-American officers.
There’s not a person in America who has kept up with this story, who is not well aware of the fact that something is wrong. They cannot blame anyone for fanning the fire. District Attorney McCollum refused to do his job. When the grand jury failed to indict Officer Wilson, Robert McCulloch got what he wanted. After a review of the 5,675 pages of transcript released from the grand jury deliberations, it is becoming increasingly clear that McCulloch probably had little intentions to ever deliver an indictment of Officer Wilson. It looks as if he used the grand jury process as cover to avoid the political fallout of taking an unpopular stand.
He could have indicted Wilson on his own. It is a well-documented practice that when a prosecutor engages in a grand jury to seek an indictment against a criminal suspect, the prosecutor gets exactly what he seeks – an indictment. It happens in more than 99 percent of the cases. Rather than guide them toward a sure indictment he apparently made sure his team of deputies did everything possible to muddy the waters. Rather than present a streamlined case, he overwhelmed them with an avalanche of everything under the guise of “complete disclosure.”
There were three Blacks on the jury, and it will be revealed what happened in the grand jury sessions.
The president is between a rock and a hard place he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, but we must have the conversation about racism in America.
