Fierce urgency may yet infuse fight for equality

Our problems with race and inequality are rooted deeply, but they can be dug out and replaced with something better. Light has been shining on those problems intensely for the past couple of years, since Michael Brown was shot and killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.

Tuesday was the second anniversary of that shooting. There was a Black Lives Matter march in downtown Seattle on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report on the Baltimore Police Department that made the depth of the problem in that city clear.

I’ve been writing about people who either support or question the Black Lives Matter movement. The difference is often between people who see a weed in the garden and those who don’t. I was glad to see the clarity and directness of the Baltimore report because we need more of that. Otherwise, the inequality we have today will still be here tomorrow, because so much of it is self-sustaining.

Seattle Police Department is in the midst of a transformation that began with the fatal shooting of John T. Williams, Aug. 30, 2010. That shooting by a Seattle police officer was the most notable of several incidents around that time that brought the Department of Justice to Seattle.

Williams, a Native American woodcarver, was crossing a street downtown with a piece of wood and a pocketknife in his hands when the officer saw him. The officer, Ian Birk, got out of his car, yelled for Williams to drop the knife and shot him four times in the side.

The Department of Justice’s broad investigation of SPD operations found evidence of excessive use of force and indications of bias. The department is now operating under a consent decree, which requires it change the way it operates to reduce or eliminate those problems.

Several cities are operating under similar decrees, and now DOJ has issued a report on Baltimore that found a level of bias against black residents that some reports said shocked even activists.

Last year, in its report on Ferguson, the city where Michael Brown was killed, DOJ found police were using black residents as a source of money for the city — ticketing, fining and extracting fees from black people at a rate far above that of other residents in ways unrelated to public safety.

In city after city, investigators have found bias and excessive use of force. And yet, too many Americans don’t see a problem, and maybe that’s partly because the country has a long history of using police to control populations that are thought of as dangerous.

One of the candidates running for president even says he’ll restore law and order, using a phrase long associated with white supremacy and the use of police power to suppress black people.

Remember the 1968 Kerner Report? It sought to explain the riots of the 1960s. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” it said. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

It went on to say most of the rioters “were furious about facing constant discrimination when seeking new employment, trying to find a place to live, or, worst of all, interacting with hostile law-enforcement officials.”

And here we are with high rates of black Americans living in communities of concentrated poverty. And all black people, rich, poor, criminal or not, subject to bias and discrimination.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech talked about the “fierce urgency of now.” He said black Americans had been waiting for true equality since the end of the Civil War, and that it was time for America to live up to its promise. The garden still needs weeding.

It’s fortunate that activists are keeping the issue of unequal treatment alive and that DOJ is forcing change.