These Three Words
Part II
by ileta! A. Sumner 1
Author’s Preamble: This series tries to find an explanation for why BLM affects different sectors of our population differently. Accordingly, there is a deep look into policing of this country that can seemingly portray me as anti-cop. I am anything but. I truly understand that it is a small minority of police who have managed to smear the word “police” with the taint of their hatred or fear, and my research may seem as if I too am filled with bias based on hatred. It is quite the opposite. Instead, because two local police departments went over and above what was expected of them, keeping my family safe, their extra measures may be the only reason that we are alive. The majority of my active legal career involved the bilingual representation of homeless victims of family violence. In one instance, I procured a divorce for a client and sent her to one of five facilities around the country to guarantee her family’s safety. This was predicated upon the condition that she never contact me again. Why? I
knew from experience that once her ex-husband was released, he would haul me into court accusing me of hiding his wife. That scenario came to pass. After the case was dismissed, the adverse party began harassing me by phone at my place of employment. Soon, that segued into his stalking me. He would show up in the Presiding district court when I was working with other clients, and he sat facing me, no matter where I was located in the courtroom; moreover, his empty truck was seen in my neighborhood outside of San Antonio. One problem with “Orders of Protection” is that they provide no safety for the person representing the petitioner. Yet, in this case, the SAPD worked in conjunction with my local police department, and together they went the extra mile to serve this attorney and protect her family. The SAPD precinct that worked in my client’s neighborhood was familiar with the family. An officer from there first gave me the license plate number of the adverse party’s truck, just in case I saw an empty truck parked anywhere
I went. The officer knew the adverse party well for that was exactly what happened; often, it is used as a method of exerting power and control over a victim by instilling fear in the victim so that she becomes terrified to go anywhere. Most importantly, they explained everything to my local police department. One needs to understand that, when this happened, I begged my husband NOT to purchase any kind of weapon even though as a retired United State Air Force veteran, he had extensive knowledge about guns. We had two small boys in our home, and I was not going to be responsible for the death of ANY curious child. Thus, a different plan was developed: The police of my city would drive past my home, at regularly timed intervals, lights a-blazing, day and night, for months—long enough for the gentleman finally to get the memo that he was not going to get me. I have great respect for our public servants. It is one of the reasons that the growing numbers of acts of brutality perplex me . . . .
Black Lives Matter
as a casual glance or the failure to refer to a white person as “Mr.” or “Miss” and creating an entirely separate system for housing, recreation, dining, and working for black people, instituting a grossly inferior way of life for them and carrying over the vestiges of slavery long after the end of the Civil War. Time Goes By. The struggle for equality for black Americans from the time of slavery to today has been marked by slow milestones of progress followed by measures to thwart that progress. Consider that nine decades passed between a President proclaiming that slaves would be free and the Supreme Court’s holding unconstitutional the school segregation of descendants of those slaves. The advances won by black Americans in the decades following emancipation were mirrored by racist backlash. It is no accident that the Ku Klux Klan was formed during Reconstruction, in an effort to counteract the protection afforded blacks by federal troops
stationed in the South. In 1877, the federal government abandoned Reconstruction and withdrew its troops, leaving the former Confederate States free to implement laws that restored and reinforced the racial, social, and economic hierarchy of the antebellum period. These efforts were sanctioned in the Supreme Court’s 7-1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Even after the separate but equal doctrine was overturned by the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, black students integrating schools—from six-yearold Ruby Bridges to twenty-nine-year old college student James Meredith—needed protection from federal law enforcement. In the 1950s and 1960s, the efforts by black Americans to secure the rights guaranteed to them by law were met with violent resistance by white Americans. In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old, was lynched and his murderers were acquitted.2 In the summer of 1961, Freedom Riders (including future
Vestiges of Slavery. In Part I of this series, I discussed some of the history of policing blacks because the form and methodology used by those who police the United States in the twenty-first century go directly back to 1619, when Africans were first brought to this country. Slave Codes, that were used to control behavior as opposed to stopping crime, were the underpinning for the development of Slave Patrols. Once the slave population grew to greatly outnumber those in control, these slave patrols morphed into the bases for Police Departments. With the passage of time, Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws—though illegal by their very nature—continued to guarantee the dominance of the white population by criminalizing any and all behavior of black people that could be deemed as threatening to the dominance of white people. Again, this was a behavior-based system, enforcing serious repercussions for actions as simple
March–April 2022
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San Antonio Lawyer® 17
