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Critics of the emergency manager law protest Thursday at City Hall in Detroit.
Too often these days, when black Americans protest a particular issue -- say, the shooting of a black kid by a police officer or public policies seen as biased -- it has become almost de rigueur for some opposing commentator to automatically accuse them of choosing to grandstand rather than undertaking some other course of action that the commentator insists would serve their communities much better than simply waving signs and chanting slogans.
For example, during the protests around the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, blogs and opinion pages were filled with pieces from critics asking why it seems that blacks become outraged to the point of protest when white gunmen shoot down black teens but never seem to as upset and vocal when the perpetrator and victim are both black.
In a more recent example, the Detroit Free Press's Stephen Henderson ponders aloud as to why so many Metro Detroit activists would take to the streets to express outrage over the appointment of an emergency manager for Detroit while seemingly failing to do so little of the hands-on work necessary to combat the social ills that have plagued their communities for so long:
It strikes me that the best way to protest the state’s intervention (and to make a strong point about city government’s dysfunction, to boot) is to do things that make the need for state help less dire. Show how dedicated Detroiters, working together, can actually make things better. Take control of the city’s trajectory. Make a difference.
A protest that slows traffic? That just shows disrespect for metro Detroiters commuting to work, people paying what little taxes the city still has the ability to collect. Not to mention that if an ambulance gets stuck behind the wall of slow-moving cars, the protest could turn destructively embarrassing.
A human chain around City Hall? It’s a bit inane, and focused on the idea of power, rather than results.
This is more than a nitpicking criticism, too.
Demagoguing, or playing on people’s worst instincts and fears for one’s own political gain, has long been a problem here in Detroit, and its prevalence among leadership has helped lead the city to this low point.
The protests of the emergency financial manager in Detroit appeal to the most base and craven instincts, seeking to tell a people who can’t count on the most basic services that their biggest problem is the outsiders tasked with restoring order.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s was successful precisely because it avoided that kind of indulgence. Demonstrations were effective because they focused attention on the problems that needed changing, not just on the people staging them.
Henderson, who was also among those wondering why Detroiters upset about the Martin shooting didn't seem to care nearly as much about black children gunned down locally, would have a great point here but for one small problem: Many of those same people protesting the EM do indeed do more than simply give lip service at protest rallies.
Unnoticed and mostly unreported
A cursory glance at some of the crowds of protestors (black, brown and white) reveals the presence of several activists who lead or participate in numerous volunteer efforts in the city. Unlike loudmouthed gatherings in front of City Hall, these efforts tend go largely unnoticed and mostly unreported by the Free Press and the rest of the city's mainstream media.
At the center of the video the Freep posts with Henderson's piece is Sandra Hines, the raspy-voiced, plain-spoken Detroit activist who's something akin to a local Fannie Lou Hamer.
Even though she's hampered by physical ailments and age, her work continues to be plentiful -- suich as fighting teen violence through conflict resolution efforts in schools to working to find shelter for families who've lost their homes to foreclosure. Rarely, though, have I seen reports about Hines's involvement in any of those actions, or about her work with the families of slain children, her legal challenges to corrupt preachers and politicians or her book giveaways to deprived school kids.
Also present at some of these demonstrations have been the men and women who've patrolled city streets with groups like Detroit 300, wielding little more than flashlights and resolve against the creeps and crooks who put the menace into darkened Detroit alleyways and abandoned houses. There also have been those who volunteer in reading programs and at the handful of community centers left open, those who take blankets to the homeless and feed the hungry, those who work with addicts to get clean, those who attempt to hold police officers accountable for brutality against residents including the poor.
In fact, chances are, if someone is taking the time to protest just about anything serious in Detroit, they're probably connected in some way to a larger network of activists and volunteers who do toil to make things better in their little slices of the city. And they don't do it to protest state intervention. They do it because their neighborhoods need them to.
Off-target cracks
Could Detroit use many more people like this? Absolutely. Are there really those who talk loud but do little to make Detroit a better place? Without question.
And I also agree with Henderson that demagogues have hurt Detroit (although I'd be inclined to give the longest look to political hacks outside the city for the most damaging examples.) But to make blanket cracks about those who do take the time to engage in protest misses the point that many of them are also the ones who usually do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of community work.
In that regard, the criticism rings as hollow as false complaints that black outrage over intracommunity violence and dysfunction is in curiously short supply.
Walk the streets of even the worst neighborhoods in this city and you'll see all sorts of "protest signs" and examples of grief and anger at the tragedies that claim so many of our kids' lives. Hit the back streets around Chalmers and Harper, for instance, and you'll see gaggles of soggy stuffed animals and deflated balloons affixed to lamp posts and the porches of old homes, 'hood homages to the little ones lost to bullets and house fires. Look at some of the T-shirts that adorn the students near schools like Denby and Central and you'll see the faces of murdered teenagers and dead babies, each accompanied by some mournful variation of "rest in peace."
Likewise, I've seen marches up Mack Avenue, down Woodward and all along other major thoroughfares to protest violence in the city over the years. Last year, funeral home directors, led by noted black undertaker O'Neill Swanson, drove a motorcade of hearses through the city to declare their unhappiness with the bloodshed that has made business boom for so many of them. This wasn't about white racist violence either. They were specifically angry about the fact that too many young black men are dying at each other's hands.
So let's stop with this vile mischaracterization that suggests that black people will protest racist violence but don't care or don't get upset enough or don't try to take action to stem violence by and among black Americans. That's simply not true.
On the flip side, neither do blacks protest when whites who kill blacks are dealt with swiftly and justly. When a white man allegedly murdered a 17-year-old black kid named Jordan Davis in Florida last year -- because Jordan was playing loud music -- the streets weren't alive with angry black protesters from across the country, even though the killing came during heightened attention from the Martin case. Why? Because, unlike George Zimmerman, the man accused of killing Davis was arrested and charged immediately.
Without irony, Henderson's piece contrasts the "demagoguing" demonstrations over the EM with the successes of the civil-rights protests of the 1960s, arguing that the actions fifty years ago were "effective because they focused attention on the problems that needed changing, not just on the people staging them."
Overlooked or forgotten?
I wonder, though, whether he's forgotten the newspaper editorials that characterized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an attention-seeking "agitator" stirring up trouble, as an "extremist" whose protests were only worsening the race problems he claimed he was seeking to ameliorate.
I wonder if he's overlooked pieces by the likes of folks such as Jackson Daily News editor Jimmy Ward, who decried the Freedom Riders fighting for integration as "irresponsible" and urged them to go back to the North and focus on hands-on action to solve "their own" problems, like "race-mixing."
I wonder how well he understands that black protest -- today, yes, but especially as witnessed during the 1960s civil-rights movement -- has always been regarded as too loud, too angry, too extreme, too misdirected, too embarrassing for even some African-Americans to embrace. Black protest has always been followed by those urging demonstrators to go elsewhere, to do something "more positive," to stop grandstanding for attention.
It's easy to sit back a half-century later and idealize the outrage and indignation of a bygone era, to wonder why contemporary African-American protestors can't be more like Rosa Parks and Dr. King and the movements they helmed.
And while I'm not equating local anti-EM demonstrations with the civil-rights movements of the '60s, the truth is, King, Parks and their colleagues in protest were almost always greeted in much the same way that the Freep column greets those who are vocally opposing the undemocratic imposition of emergency managers on their cities — with disdain and a sincere wish that they would go away and find better things to do.
And I firmly believe that now, as then, black protest is best served by paying those sentiments no mind.
