IN FERGUSON, Missouri, around 300 people had gathered outside the police station, listening on car radios as St Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the grand jury’s finding at 8.25pm. Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden and stepfather, Louis Head, became increasingly distraught as the decision became clear. As the crowd roared and surged towards barriers around the police station, they were met by lines of officers in riot gear who were pelted with objects including a loudhailer.Within minutes, people were pouring into surrounding streets in Ferguson and other parts of St Louis, smashing windows and taunting officers. Protected by armoured personnel carriers, police replied with tear gas and pepper spray, which made eyes and lungs burn. As for the black President elected on a tide of soaring rhetoric about how he would rescue the fortunes of America’s struggling racial minorities, Barack Obama never looked so impotent as when he appealed for calm while Ferguson burned.Speaking from the White House moments after the jury’s decision was announced, he said the resulting anger was ‘understandable’ and called on the police to show ‘care and restraint’ in handling any peaceful protests. This week, despite being bolstered by National Guard soldiers who had largely been deployed away from the trouble, overstretched police were unable to control the disorder, leaving streets lawless for long periods.Racial riots have occurred in the US from the pre Independence era. One of the deadliest white-black riots occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma in which whites attacked blacks and killed almost 800 of them, according to unofficial estimates – including shooting at them from planes and dropping incendiary bombs from planes. Whites used to kill African Americans through lynchings and even torture them and sell the recordings of their screams to the white public. Between 1889 and 1946 almost 3600 African Americans were lynched out of a total of 4800 – although they represented only around 10 percent of the population of the time they were the victims of 75 percent of such cases – in other words they were almost eight times more likely to be beaten up and killed compared to whites.While one simple paragraph is not sufficient to represent the deep seated suspicion between the races it serves to make us understand the frame of mind of African Americans who feel that they are still subjugated and racially and economically oppressed and that they will never get justice as long as it is administered by the white man. This frame of mind can’t be changed by mere rhetoric – even by the President, and healing the tensions will require more than just empty words and promises .We hope for better times for race relations between the races in the US.
