April 05, 2004

One Week Later, A Rally For Life

Late in the afternoon and early evening Sunday, hundreds of Portlanders gathered downtown in Terry Shrunk Plaza for what was billed as a "Rally for Life." Originally intended for Pioneer Park directly across from the Justice Center, organizers moved one block south in order to better accomodate the expected crowd and take advantage of Shrunk Plaza's mini-amphitheater.

We only discovered this move when Charles McGee (increasingly active on the local political activist scene, McGee might be remembered by readers here as the student who once spoke very wisely about a controversy over the racial language in a certain Mark Twain book) saw us sitting on a park bench, and asked if I was waiting for the rally. We approached SW Main Street together and stopped at the red light, as two bicycle cops were perched across the way. We joked (with that edge of the serious which make perfect sense) about not wanting to cross against the light in that partiular circumstance.

There was only a small crowd fifteen or so minutes before the rally was scheduled to begin. Somehow, without us even noticing where everyone had come from, the amphitheater was filled with people. More found there way onto the surrounding grass in the minutes to come.

Today's rally began with the singing of the Black National Anthem (also called, we just learned, "Lift Every Voice and Sing"), the man leading the crowd calling upon them to "make it sound like 10,000 people." If you didn't know the words, you were asked to do your best at lip syncing.

The crowd was further warmed up with a pair of chants (you might have seen one of them on KGW's late-night newscast): "We demand accountability now!" and "No more killings, no more lies!"

A man from the Coalition of Black Men (the rally's sponsors) opened by saying to the crowd, "Good evening." As we've come to learn from various events, the proper response to this is a hearty return of the same. Invariably for crowds which include a fair number of white people, it took a second "Good evening" from the speaker before they got the idea.

(It should be noted that we are notoriously poor at managed to capture people's names. Readers might have noticed that in our reent coverage of public hearings before the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners as well.)

He turned it over to one of the many ministers present to give a prayer because "we need to put God in this."

"But Lord you know we are tired," the chosen minister said. "You know how long we have suffered." He criticized the police union "and its effort to forestall the righteous" solutions which he said the people deserve.

"Our community is the only community being policed," he said. "Our community is the only community being prosecuted."

He prayed that God "be with us as we rise against the evil" and to "give us clear vision, give us clear thoughts." He added: "We need the attitudes of this force to be changed."

The podium was returned to the man in charge of keeping the event running, who said: "This is not a black issue. This is a Portland issue, you understand what I'm saying?" He added: "The one thing we have in common is we don't like being shot at."

Morgan Dickerson of the Coalition of Black Men (yes, we caught his name) said: "Thirty-six years ago today we were asking for accountability. We were asking for responsibility. And in his name we are asking for non-violence." Everyone was there, he said, "to see that the Perez family gets accountability, responsibility, and justice."

"I come before you today as a young man who is afraid," said the aforementioned Charles McGee. "But though I am afraid, I stand before you for justice."

"No longer can we complain without action," he said. And he said people need to make sure that "no officer who shoots unarmed citizens is ever palced back on the streets." He asked the crowd to "turn anger and fright into an enduring passion for change."

(Keep a close eye on McGee. We have no idea what his plans for the future are, but we hope he stays in Portland. What he says matters to him, and he's got the fire and the intelligence to make people understand him.)

"We must all come together," he said. "One city, one goal." He also said: "I may not trust the system. But I do believe in the theory of due process."

A white Lutheran pastor (named Mark something) opened by referencing a letter from the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon to the City of Portland stating that they were "deeply concerned about this shooting."

"May we cry out today," he said, "that no citizen, no matter his profession, is above the law."

As the rally's manager said next: "We're going to go from Lutheran to the Nation of Islam. The latter was also helping to provide security services for the event. In fact, there were very few visible officers from the Portland Police Bureau, who had worked it out with event organizers for them to police the event themselves. At one point during the rally, we saw one rally security person chase off a local masked "anarchist" who would not remove his mask.

The minister from the Nation of Islam received very loud applause when he said: "We demand that ... Jason Sery be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Senator Avel Gordly spoke of the plans for an inquest, the issue of police training, and the need for leadership.

"At present, we do not have a process for civilian review of the use of deadly force," she said. "In its absence, the inquest is the best tool for finding out publicly of why and how Mr. Perez died the way he did." That demand for such an inquest, she said, has been met.

"[You get] more training to become a licesned hairdresser or barber then to become a police officer in Oregon," she said. The national average for police training is twenty-two weeks. Portland police officers receive ten. But, she warned: "We're going to have to pay for it."

"I'm fifty-seven years old," she said. "I've been out here for thirty years. It stops now. It stops now."

On the matter of leadership, Gordly reminded the crowd that we've already seen the PARC report, the Albina Ministerial Alliance report, and the CPORT report. "We don't need any more studies. ... All the recommendations we could possibly want have been made."

Do not give your vote to anyone who does not support your interests and is not willing to deal with your agenda. ... If they cannot tell you today how they will fund it [and how quickly] then don't give them your vote.

She asked the crowd to give their "full support to Chief Derrick Foxworth," calling him "the right man, with a conscience and integrity."

And then she turned her attention to Robert J. King, president of the Portland Police Association.

My message to Robert King, the president of the police union -- and I told him this on Friday when he called me -- is this: We need a different quality of leadership from you. ... Let's remember that you ... are part of this community, not separate from this community.

Mayoral candidate James Posey took to the podium as well. "You know what?" he asked. "You know what? I was upset before Perez was shot. You all should have seen this coming. ... We've been in a slumberland." He said people can either "continue to be oppressed by the system" or they can "stand up."

"I think," he added, "that this time the entire Portland community is outraged, and this time real change will come."

He also led the crowd in a chant of "No justice, no peace!" But he interspersed it with cries of, "Vote for me!"

Joe Smith -- recently appointed by the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners to fill the suddenly-vacant District 43 seat in the Oregon House -- began by announcing that event organizers had registered dozens of people to vote, including two felons who did not realize that in Oregon their right to vote was not taken away.

"If you are calling for strong leaders and you are not registered to vote," he said, "do not leave here without registering."

He spoke of his own anger at the Perez shooting, of how community leaders at Perez' funeral of called for reconciliation, and of how he does believe in such reconciliation. But then he read Robert King's article in the newspaper, and his anger returned. And, he said, he would not go as easy on King as did Senator Gordly.

"There can be no reconiliation based on falsehood," he said. "There can be no reconcilation based on irrelevancy. There can be no lasting reconciliation without justice."

And justice, he said, "begins with the facts," while injustice comes from "ignoring facts, or, worse yet, making them up."

(We should point out that while we viewed the King piece the telling of King's personal story, although told in such a way as to try to confuse it with the events surrounding Perez' death, Smith believed that King was directly lying about the Perez incident itself.)

"What we got from Mr. King today," Smith said, "was either clearly false or clearly irrelevant. And, he said, both the "men and women he claims to represent" and the communtiy at large "deserve better."

Smith said that Kind "vividly described a set of facts that would lead anyone" to believe the Perez shooting was justified.

"I acted out King's scenario," he said, "and there's no way it could have taken twenty-three seconds. There's no way it could have taken two times twenty-three seconds." There were two choices, Smith said. Either King wants people to believe he is telling the true story of the Perez shooting. Or, "he wants us to focus on some imaginary hypothetical which is irrelevant."

(Confession: After his speech, we gave Smith our business card, telling him he might find the item we had written earlier on Robert King's commentary interesting, in light of what he had just said. We also learned what we should have known already, which is that Smith is the father of Jefferson Smith, known to some as part of the Bus Project.)

Not long after Smith's speech, we began to fidn it difficult to concentrate on taking notes. We circled and wandered the crowd, sometimes listening to the speakers at the podium, sometimes just watching those gathered in the plaza, sometimes just standing amongst them.

At one point, the speaker of the moment said: "The blood of Jose Poot's blood cries from the grave. Kendra James' blood cries from the grave. Perez' blood cries from the grave."

That's the final note we made. We continued to circle, and wander, and stand among. Near the end, James Jahar Perez' aunt was speaking. And we think that what happened next happened because she made it happen. But it could have been someone else. Near the end, having stopped observing and started simply being there, we started to lose track.

But the woman at the podium, who might still have been aunt to James Jahar Perez, asked the people in the crowd to let their kids come stand in the center circle of the amphitheater. The center circle filled with children.

And the woman at the podium made the crowd promise that they would never disrespect these children. That they would never let anyone harm these children. That they would never let anyone abuse these children.

That they would never let anyone kill these children.

And she turned the crowd's attention to a number of older children in "white shirts" (which, we think, had "Keep your friends close, and your friendly's closer" written on their backs -- something we hope some more informed reader than ourselves will be able to explain to us) who for lack of a better term were more "militant" in their stance towards recent (and long-standing) events.

"We understand your anger," she said to them. But, she said, no one wanted them to do anything that would ultimately result in having to have another rally like this one. And she asked the crowd: "When you leave, find one of these kids, and tell them that you love them."

We wish the television newscasts would simply play this entire unfolding demonstration. Because that's what it was, in the purest sense of the term: A demonstration. Of what this is actually about.

At the root of all of this is not ideology (are you reading this, Mr. Lars Larson?), and certainly not reactionary unionism (are you reading this Mr. Robert J. King?). This is not an intellectual exercise in how we wedge a tragic event (one of many such events over all too many years) into our political worldviews.

At the root of all this is a community of Portlanders who far too often (and in a way with which we white Portlanders perhaps can empathize, but can never quite experientially understand) look at their kids and wonder when they will get the telephone call or the knock on the door telling them that their child has been shot and killed by a police officer.

And if you don't get that, or you care not to, then that is the true falsehood, and the true irrelevancy. And a tragedy in and of itself.

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