Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was a leader of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He would have turned 90 years ago the other day had he not been assassinated. A Baptist minister, Dr. King championed nonviolence and civil disobedience as means to make society welcome to all instead of a tiered system that relegated African-Americans to second class. If Dr. King was alive today, I am confident he would have marched in Chicago today, following Friday’s sentencing of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for assassinating 17 year old LaQuan McDonald on Pulaski Avenue in cold blood. I previously wrote about this tragedy on EPB: https://www.eastportlandblog.com/2015/11/29/chi-raq-as-in-chicago-and-iraq-by-mark-erickson/
Van Dyke got tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty of second-degree murder AND 16 counts of aggravated battery (one for each bullet). The six shots in the back were treated equally to the other shots when LaQuan laid bloody in the street while Van Dyke pumped more bullets into LaQuan’s body. Van Dyke became the first Chicago police officer in 50 years to be convicted of murder in an on-duty shooting. He could have faced 86 years in prison. Instead, a white judge gave Van Dyke a jail sentence of only 81 months, which can be reduced to approximately 36 for good behavior! This extremely light sentence is not right and cannot be justified, in my opinion, but this is Chicago. Aerosmith got it right, “When the judge’s constipation goes to his head.” By contrast, the African-American male who killed Hadiyah Pendleton in a drive-by shooting in Chicago one week after she performed at President Obama’s second inauguration received a jail sentence of 86 years only two weeks ago..
21st century injustices against African-Americans have taken a different, strange fruit, insidious forms nonetheless, as compared to older history.
In this connection, Billie Holiday sang:
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the rootBlack bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar treesPastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning fleshHere is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
(See also, Chicago: A Third World City)
