Mugged (18 page)

He reminded them that white people of Maryland had “clearly repudiated racism in the 1966 election” (when he had defeated Democratic segregationist George Mahoney) and said that “the overwhelming majority of
Maryland’s Negro citizens—responsible, hardworking, decent people” were “horrified” by the recent events and would be “unjustly victimized by a hardening of attitudes in the responsible, decent white community.” Agnew called on the black leaders “as Americans, to speak out against the violence and hatred of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. Otherwise, he said prophetically, “the heaviest losers will be the Negro citizens of America.”
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Unfortunately, most white politicians reacted like Leonard Bernstein greeting the Black Panthers. They cooed over the violence and arson of black criminals, even justified it as an understandable reaction. What about the majority of blacks who weren’t rioting? Did they feel Martin Luther King’s assassination less poignantly?

As long as they had a free hall pass, black leaders tended to respond by condoning the violence, too. In response to the destructive Baltimore riots, Homer Favor of the Urban Studies Institute at Morgan State University said: “I feel unclean that I didn’t burn down a building.”
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And that’s how we ended up with many happy decades of peace and prosperity in bustling black neighborhoods from Baltimore to Newark, Detroit and Oakland.

Agnew was passé; radical white lawyers like William Kunstler and Clark Kissinger got the fawning press notices. For Kissinger, black criminals were just foot soldiers in his larger war against America, which he described as an “oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves.” (This was later turned into a sermon by Reverend Jeremiah Wright.)

Contrast that with the words of the great African American mathematician and writer Kelly Miller, born in 1863, who astutely observed that the “capitalist has but one dominating motive, the production and sale of goods. The race or color of the producer counts but little.” The capitalist, he continued, “gives to every man the unhindered right to work according to his ability and skill. In this proposition the capitalist and the Negro are as one.”
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Naturally, Kissinger was a big defender of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, promoting the “call to justice” initiative which proposed a nationwide “Mumia Awareness Week.” He was joined in this effort by Robert Meeropol, another prototypical black man, who is the son of executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
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Illustrating the importance of Mumia to the black community, he was defended by a star-studded list of other
white liberals—Norman Mailer, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, Dean Ornish, Kerry Kennedy Mike Farrell, William Styron, Alec Baldwin, David Byrne, Nadine Strossen, Trudie Styler, Joanne Woodward and Peter Yarrow.

Charles Garry, the lawyer for the Black Panters and Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, was another great example of a white liberal playing with black lives to advance his own self-image as a rebel without regard to the consequences for blacks. His help with the settlement in Guyana ended in a disaster for black people that was just a little more direct than liberals’ standard methods.

Liberals put on shows trying to out bad-ass one another, but twenty years after the Harlem NAACP had been trying to tell us that blacks cared more about crime than understanding the criminal, things had only gotten worse. And black New Yorkers still cared more about crime than understanding the criminal.

After several decades of the media’s nonstop drumbeat about racism everywhere in America (except in the nation’s newsrooms), in December 1984, Bernhard (Bernie) Goetz shot four black men who were trying to mug him on the subway. Terror surged throughout Manhattan’s smart set, but everyone else gave a celebratory whoop.

The youths, Darrell Cabey, nineteen, Troy Canty, nineteen, James Ramseur, eighteen, and Barry Allen, nineteen, told the police they were merely panhandling and had simply
asked
Goetz for five dollars. “We wasn’t planning on robbing him,” Allen said. “We had no intention of robbing him…He had no reason to be scared.”
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Members of the press, who had apparently hermetically sealed themselves off from any contact with New York City’s streets and subways that decade, believed them.

Then, about a year later, one of the victims admitted to Jimmy Breslin, one of the columnists who had fallen for it, that, in fact, they “were goin’ to rob him. They thought he looked like easy bait.”
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Journalists might have surmised that had they not been brain-dead liberals. Together, Goetz’s victims already had nineteen arrests and two convictions among them. Canty and Ramseur had served time in Rikers Island jail. Canty had been arrested four times since he was sixteen for criminal possession of stolen property, petty larceny, possession of burglar tools and criminal mischief. Cabey had been arrested for holding up three men with a shotgun, taking their money and jewelry and was charged with robbery, use of a firearm and possession of stolen property.

Allen had been arrested for attempted assault and a couple of larcenies for stealing money from video machines. He was on probation. Less than a year after the Goetz encounter, Allen was arrested for mugging an acquaintance in the elevator of their own apartment building.
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Ramseur had been arrested four times for petty larceny, criminal trespass, fare-beating, smoking marijuana in the subway and possession of marijuana. Five months after encountering Goetz, Ramseur viciously beat, raped, sodomized and robbed a young pregnant woman on the roof of his public-housing complex. He was in prison, serving a twenty-five-year sentence for this by the time of Goetz’s trial.
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They had been carrying screwdrivers the night they mugged Goetz because, as they admitted, they were on their way to steal money from machines at a video arcade.

Within sixteen months of the subway shooting, the only Goetz victim who was not in prison or under court supervision for committing other crimes, was the one who was paralyzed by the shooting, Darrell Cabey. The earlier armed robbery charges against Cabey were dismissed as a result of his condition.
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As with the Trayvon Martin case in the era of Obama, the New York press relentlessly showed pictures of the subway “youths” as little kids. A message was being sent. We don’t see Hitler’s baby pictures. We don’t see the Duke lacrosse players’ baby pictures. When publishing these first-communion photos of politically correct victims/criminals, the media should be required to run disclaimers:
“Full disclosure: These kids were actually nineteen years old at the time of the shooting”
or
“Photo of spokesperson model, not Goetz’s actual victim.”

Polls taken in the month immediately following the shooting showed that half of all New Yorkers enthusiastically supported what Goetz had done—and black people supported him every bit as much as whites did.

In a January 1985
Daily News
(New York) poll of New York City residents, 52 percent of blacks approved of Goetz’s shooting the muggers, compared to 49 percent of all New Yorkers.
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A Gallup poll the same month showed that 52 percent of whites approved of the shooting compared to 49 percent of blacks.
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Georgetown professor Daniel Robinson raised doubts about the poll results, saying that if Goetz “had simply scared the devil out of the four, I think most people would be just as happy.”
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Unfortunately, there were no poll questions on whether Goetz should have “scared the devil” out of the muggers.

Talk radio shows were overwhelmed with callers praising Goetz. When the police set up a hotline for tips about the incident, it was bombarded with callers expressing their support for the shooter and offering to pay his defense costs.
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The Guardian Angels, a voluntary patrol made up predominantly of black and Hispanic youths, supported Goetz a hundred percent and began collecting money at the subway for his defense. Roy Innis’s Congress of Racial Equality supported Goetz, saying, “We applaud this kind of public spirit against crime.”
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Commenting on the enthusiastic response to Goetz’s self-defense, eminent political science professor Walter F. Berns said: “I am encouraged by what I see as a greater disposition to regard punishment of criminals as not only necessary but moral as well. There is a move by highly respected criminologists to, in effect, rehabilitate the idea of punishment. In a sense, the intellectuals are coming around to where the public has been all the time.”
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The experiment with “root causes” was over. The world only needed Rudy Giuliani to come in and make it official. (The government official who decided there would be no federal civil rights prosecution of Goetz? U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.)

But the media kept trying to refocus the public’s attention on Goetz’s possible racism. Days after the shooting, a
New York Times
article on the incident warned: “Just beneath the surface of last week’s debate was the question of whether the shooting may have been racially motivated. The four teenagers were black, the gunman was white.”
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Newsweek
sneered that the “reality” of the shooting “was never very heroic” and called Goetz “a distressingly ordinary man.”
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Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen blamed Goetz for getting mugged, demanding to know why he didn’t sit on the other side of the car from the trouble-making black youths. He hypothesized that Goetz “went looking for young blacks.” Fear of crime, Cohen noted, “is a code for fear of young blacks.”
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Meanwhile one of the shooting victims himself said, “I heard he had been robbed by some black guys before, so in a way I can understand why he might have been afraid.”
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The mugger grasped crime statistics better than Cohen did.

After a few months of the media haranguing the public to view the shooting as a racial incident and Goetz as a racist nut, ABC bragged that its poll showed support for Goetz had dropped 12 percent among blacks.
Congratulations, media!

White liberals kept trying to turn the Goetz shooting into a racial incident, but black people apparently didn’t get that memo.

In Claremont Village, the South Bronx project where the four teenagers lived, there was no love lost for the victims. A
Washington Post
reporter interviewed people in Darryl Cabey’s building as the paralyzed boy remained in a coma and found surprising unanimity. Eighteen-year-old Yvette Green said “If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him.” Darryl Singleton, twenty-four years old, called Cabey, “a sweet person,” but said, “if I had a gun, I would have shot the guy.”
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One woman told the
New York Times
, “Maybe he shouldn’t have shot them, but I can’t feel bad if four kids up to no good got hurt.”
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A black man wrote to Cabey’s mother: “[Y]ou get no sympathy from us peace-loving, law-abiding blacks. We will even contribute to support the guy who taught you a lesson, every way we can…P.S. I hope your wheelchair has a flat tire.”
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One of the trial witnesses called by Goetz’s attorney was Andrea Reid, a young black woman, who had been in Goetz’s subway car with her husband and child during the shooting. As she assessed the situation, those “punks were bothering the white man,” adding “those punks got what they deserved.”
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(She testified reluctantly, explaining that she had met the mother and brother of one of the muggers at a party.
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)

Noticeably, defense lawyer Barry Slotnick did not try to keep blacks off the jury, nor did he need to. Three blacks and one Hispanic on the jury voted to acquit Goetz of all thirteen charges except for the minor charge of carrying an illegal firearm. Juror Robert Leach, a black bus driver from Harlem, was one of Goetz’s most vehement defenders, even persuading his fellow jurors not to convict Goetz for unlawful possession of the guns he had given to his neighbor, Myra Friedman. Leach said he didn’t believe Friedman’s testimony.
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But when the verdict was announced—attempted murder: not guilty, assault: not guilty, and reckless endangerment: not guilty—the usual racial agitators had their usual response.

Al Sharpton slammed the verdict, saying the jurors had “legalized the rampant opinion that if you see young blacks look menacing, then it’s okay to shoot them—and don’t worry about prosecution.”
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Don’t worry about prosecution? Au contraire! The district attorney had empaneled two grand juries just to get an indictment against Goetz on anything other than the illegal firearm possession charge, delaying the trial until April 1987, more than three years after the shooting.

New York Governor Mario Cuomo remonstrated that “some people”
would read the verdict as a “license now to carry a weapon and to shoot everyone who looks mean to you.”
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And, naturally, the
New York Times
ran an article titled, “Blacks See Goetz Verdict as Blow to Race Relations.”
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This included NAACP director Benjamin L. Hooks Jr., (“inexcusable,” “a terrible and grave miscarriage of justice”) and Representative Major Owens, Democrat of Brooklyn (“The hysteria in the white community will be, ‘Yeah, we were right, let’s go get ’em.’”)
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The
Times
had not requested comment from defense witness Andrea Reid, juror Robert Leach, CORE president Roy Innis, any of the Guardian Angels or the muggers’ South Bronx neighbors.

For decades, liberal elites rewarded the worst possible black behavior while ignoring amazing courage in the black community. Only a white liberal could think Al Sharpton has been a blessing to black people. As, again, McWhorter says: “Sharpton would be hard-pressed to point to one positive development in black New York, much less black America, that he could take credit for.”
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