Last Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. I had promised myself long before last Friday that I would write about it, that I would find a way to revisit that horror, to find flowers in those ashes.

If you are not from Philadelphia, or if you were not old enough to watch the news in 1985, you may not know what happened on Osage Avenue that Mother’s Day. If do know, you may understand why I missed my self-imposed deadline.

What happened in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985 made no sense. Then, the only response I could muster was tears. To speak now is an act of excavation.

The gist, for those who were not privy to this folie à famille, was this:

MOVE, a “radical back to nature” group, as the newspapers called them, had been clashing with the City of Philadelphia, the police and often their own neighbors since the early 1970s. There had been demos and blockades and routine police harassment of anyone in dreadlocks and routine MOVE hectoring of anyone whose politics was deemed unfit and in 1978, after a police siege and blockade that lasted for weeks, there was a gun battle at a house in West Philadelphia that left a police officer dead and then the police in a rage cornered a man named Delbert in the basement of the house and they kicked and stomped him in their rage and then Delbert had to be hospitalized and he and the eight other people in the house were imprisoned for the murder of the officer, James Ramp.

The MOVE members denied that they had fired on the police and there was little forensic evidence available at trial because the city had the house destroyed right after the gunfight — notwithstanding that it was a crime scene that would normally have been secured. And anyway MOVE said, did you see what they did to brother Delbert? Do you see how they treat us? 

And yes we all saw and many of us cared, but among journalists the one person who got entrée inside the world of MOVE was brother Mumia and he got in deep, so deep that he grew out his hair and got even more heavily into reporting on police brutality until he was convinced that the police were trying to finish him off in a way that they had not been able to do when he had been a Black Panther. He got so heavily into presenting MOVE’s point of view that his employers said he had lost his objectivity and they fired him, which is why he was out driving a cab on the night of Dec. 9, 1981 when he saw his brother Billy in a fight with a police officer and before it was over, the officer was shot dead, Mumia was bleeding half to death from his own belly wound and a chain of events had been set in motion that would land him on death row, where he sits to this day.

That is what happened, anyway, before 1985. What you should understand from it was that the city was really angry at MOVE and the police were really angry — so much so that to even have dreadlocks in Philadelphia between 1978 and 1985 was to invite police scrutiny and an occasional beatdown.

(This last is not hyperbole, even though a fact checker would be hard pressed to corroborate it. Here is a tip: See whether you can find news archives for WRTI-FM from late summer or fall, 1979 — there is an eyewitness account by a reporter named Nancy Lewis of a police attack on an unarmed dreadlocked man on Philadelphia subway train that escalated when riders on the train protested and a freelance newspaper photographer started taking pictures. According to Lewis’ report, the police officers took the man’s camera, exposed the film and beat him as well.) And yes, I believe the report. I know Nancy Lewis and the photographer, Jorge Shell. I will never forget that incident, even though it got scant attention in the newspaper, because I was listening to RTI’s jazz programming that night and I was shocked when Nancy’s voice broke into the music. But I digress.)

What happened on Osage Avenue in 1985 was that the neighbors were upset about the folks from MOVE who had moved in on their block. The MOVE folk were living a kind of farm life in the city and the neighbors on Osage weren’t having it. They had animals that they let roam free. It was said that they ate their meat raw and didn’t dispose of it properly. Some folk felt that their children were ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and unschooled. They were building something on top of the house — was it a bunker? — without the necessary permits.

And then there was the yelling from bullhorns. MOVE thought it was an effective way to spread their ideology, to challenge the status quo. The neighbors thought it was just foolishness and noise, and they wanted it to stop.

And truthfully, if you have ever been at an event that MOVE decided to disrupt, you might have understood why the neighbors were mad. MOVE yelled. MOVE cussed. MOVE would call you names and call you out for being a counterrevolutionary hypocrite without you having a clue what they were talking about. I had seen it for myself and I had heard it from others. They busted up Rev. Melvin Floyd’s anti-gangs rallies back in ’73, and I saw them picketing Julian Bond in 1975. 

We shook our heads and wondered why. We knew these were not stupid people. They were dreamers, and they were convinced of the rightness of her cause. Ramona Afrika was known to many of us from her days at Girls High. In quiet moments, it was sometimes possible to have a conversation, to find out why they thought it had to be this way, why they thought their beloved John Africa had the answers we had all been seeking, what with Malcolm and Martin dead, the Panthers destroyed, the Nation of Islam in turmoil and all the black united fronts in disarray.

On May 13, 1985, the city blocked off the street and evacuated neighboring homes on order of the Mayor — the city’s first black mayor, W.Wilson Goode. Then the shooting began. 

The police commissioner and the fire commissioner decided that they needed to drop a small bomb on the roof of the MOVE house. Their goal was to knock the bunker off the roof, they later said. The Mayor approved it and the deed was done. Before long, the neighborhood was in flames. Even so, the Mayor and the police and fire commissioner waited before turning on a hose or spraying some foam. The fire would kill 11 people — six of them children — and destroy 61 homes. 

And when the fires finally cooled, the structures that remained were razed and the block was quickly cleared. Once again, any forensic evidence from the scene was lost.

Only Ramona Afrika, 29, and Michael “Birdie” Africa, 13, survived. 
A blue chip Commission deliberated and found the City mostly at fault. 

Ramona was treated and sent to prison, where she filed suit against the city and its officials and won a token settlement. She continues to speak out on behalf of the group’s remaining imprisoned members.

Birdie Africa went to live with his father, who won a $1.5 million settlement on his behalf and used it to change his name and help him start a new life. Birdie, it was said, was malnourished, below grade level in school, and understandably traumatized. Ten years later, Birdie, now Michael Ward, would tell interviewers that he and the other members of MOVE lived in terror of John Afrika and his deputy Frank, that the children were poorly cared for, and that his mother, Rhonda, wanted to leave, but never found a way out. His mother died in the flames that Mother’s Day. However, other young people raised by MOVE say they were never endangered by the adults in their lives.

I stood in my New Jersey living room that night, staring at my television with tears streaming down my face. I talked to my Philadelphia relatives, to my old friends. We cried together for what was disintegrating in front of us, and what was disintegrating inside of us. At work that Monday, friends confronted me. I had raised money for Wilson Goode’s election two years before, and they wanted to know what was wrong with my boy. How could he have allowed this? And I had no answer. Still, today, I have no answer.

I meant to write MOVE about last week. One is supposed to write about such things in a timely manner. Twenty years later, there is supposed to be some lesson in the ashes, in the still-boarded homes on Osage Avenue, the flimsy prefabs that were supposed to have replace the sturdy Victorian rowhomes that lined the streets of a once-proud neighborhood, mostly black.

Twenty years later, what happened on Osage, makes no sense. The remaining members of MOVE are still angry as are the neighbors. Twenty years later, MOVE members remained convinced of their cause. Some of their former neighbors are still fighting the city to get their homes restored. Their current neighbors say that everybody gets along much better now. The police force gets marks for improvement, too. But it’s said that the police officers who brought Ramona and Birdie out of the inferno still walk with ghosts, their lives forever changed.

Wilson Goode is in the ministry now, working with childrem. We have lost our innocence about the difference a black mayor can make. Goode had won his mayoralty because he seemed able to bring people together, but in the end, be became the instrument of an unspeakable cruelty. 

To those of us in or trying to be middle-class, the members of MOVE were like that one crazy cousin Cholly or Leroy that everybody has — the one that showed so much promise in childhood and then something happened that made him go bat fool and still nobody can figure it out, but you knew that when he showed out in front of the white folks, it was goin’ to be bad for everybody. And so it has been.

Twenty years later, I don’t know how I can write about this. The pain is duller now; layered below the many, many instances of senselessness that have happened from that day to this. There is no analysis that will bring order to this memory of madness. There is only the reminder that life is a choice, and love, an act of will in the face of absurdity. It may not seem like much to go on, but in the final analysis, it is all we have. Posted 16th May 2005 by Professor Kim

Postscript: This was originally published on my old blog, Professor Kim’s News Notes. (You can see the comments on the original post here.) I’m reposting here because it continues to feel relevant, and because the Blogger interface makes it difficult to edit typos I occasionally come across. Apart from those corrections, this is as I published it in 2005. It is also worth noting that in May, 2020, former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode apologized for his part in the 1985 MOVE bombing and called upon current and former city officials to do the same.

Martin Luther King holiday remarks to students at Lawrence High School, Lawrence, New Jersey, January 19, 2004

It is an honor to be with you this morning, particularly since I am here at the invitation of my esteemed colleague and former student, Ms. Patricia Pinelli.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday has been a holiday for 18 years now – long enough for an entire generation to have grown up with the mistaken notion that King’s dream has been widely acclaimed and adopted and admired for a long time.  Many of you have sat through speeches and ceremonies exhorting you to live up to the vision he laid out for this country roughly 40 years ago – to live in a nation where we can be judged, not by external and superficial traits, but by the content of our character. I don’t want to give you that kind of speech or exhortation. 

Instead, I want to speak to you from the experience of one whose parents were among the 250,000 in front of the Lincoln Memorial with King that hot August day. I speak as a beneficiary of the movement.

I want to speak to you as one who, nearly 20 years later, was one of hundreds who walked from that Memorial to the Capitol over ice and snow, to demand that King’s birthday be made a national holiday. It would take years of annual marches, petitions and some arrests to make today possible. I want to mention that because when a story is told from the vantage point of history, it often seems as if each development was inevitable. However, none of it was inevitable – not this holiday, not the partial successes of the Civil Rights Movement or the abolition of slavery, none of it. 

I want to talk to you as one who, as a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement, has been privileged to become a student and then a laborer in the hallowed halls of academia. It was while laboring in those hallowed halls one day that I first came across the microfilmed 1860 census records cataloguing my great-grandfather, Jordan Mitchell, and his parents, brothers and sisters as the property of one John Mitchell of Devereaux, Georgia. 

When you think about slavery and segregation as things that happened long ago, think about me and understand that my father, who is still living and working, lived with his grandfather, who was a slave. There are even a few people still living who the children of slaves.  There are many more of us who still have vivid memories of life under Jim Crow – American apartheid — which only officially ended during my childhood.

I want all of these things to be present in your consciousness as I speak with you today, and I promise not to take long, because I believe that I have a duty to bear witness to the changes I have seen and the struggles that made those changes possible. And I want it to be clearly understood that the kind of social change that makes it possible for you and me to be together in this room today is the result of deliberate and concerted action by many people over a sustained period of time. So I hope that what takes place between us today is not a lecture but a conversation.

In recognizing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we recognize not only the man, but the movement of which he was such an integral part. It is important not to make alabaster saints of either of them.  And if you really understand that movement, you understand that it did not begin with his birth in the middle bedroom on the second floor of his grandparents’ Atlanta home on January 15, 1929. 

No one knew that better than Michael King, who, along with his father, would change his name to Martin Luther King to show his solidarity with the founder of the Protestant faith. He knew that he stood on the shoulders of the generations before him – not only his preacher father and grandfather, but his other grandfather who was a sharecropper, and that man’s father, who had been a slave, his mentor, Dr. Benjamin Mays, and many others. My point is that if you read what Dr. King wrote, you know that he did not see himself as either the originator or the embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement. He saw himself as one among many.

If the movement did not begin with Dr. King, it did not end when he was blasted away from us on that infamous motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968. You understand that the Movement’s longevity and ultimate success depends not on one brilliant, visionary, charismatic leader, but on the character of the legions that followed him. And the content of that character is measured, not by the honorifics that we offer to the past, but by how we treat each other today.

You see, we have a tendency to commemorate King’s life simply by revisiting some highlights and lowlights of his personal history and projecting on him all of our beliefs and anxieties about race, war, economics or whatever else.  We make him an icon and an advertising symbol and we wrangle over who has the right to his legacy.

But Dr. King told us how he wanted us to remember him. Some of you, I’m sure, remember that in one of his final sermons, at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, he said that he wanted to be remembered as a “drum major for justice.” He said, “Say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness….” It’s a famous quotation; it was played at his funeral and has been recorded and broadcast many times. You can even hear it on the Stanford University website devoted to Dr. King. 

But if you read the whole paragraph, you’ll see that he’s saying that you can call him a drum major for justice if you feel you have to call him drum major for something. Because most of the sermon is a warning about the dangers of what he calls, “The Drum Major Instinct.” 

I want to spend some time on that theme today, on what it means to be a drum major, and why Dr. King warned us about the Drum Major Instinct. Of course, since this was a sermon, he was preaching the Christian Bible, specifically, a story in the 10^th chapter of Mark, beginning at verse 35.  He coined the phrase “Drum Major Instinct” as a way of describing the behavior motivating James and John, two of Jesus’ disciples in the story. 

What happens is that James and John think of Jesus as someone who is after political power, someone who, to put it in contemporary parlance, is going to be “living large” one day.  In the story, James and John ask Jesus to make them his top aides when he gets his new kingdom. James and John were like a lot of political operatives in the country right now, trying to figure out how to get a prominent place in the campaign and administration of whoever they think is most likely to win the presidency in November.

In the Biblical account, Jesus tells James and John, Be careful what you wish for. If you want to be my right and left hand, you are going to have to go through what I go through. And you have to understand that when you volunteer to be a leader, what you really are volunteering to be is a servant.

Dr. King went on to say that James and John were in the grips of the Drum Major Instinct – the drive for fame, the need to be the center of attention, at the head of the parade. It’s an instinct and a need that we all have, he said, as individuals, as members of groups and even as a nation.  He warned, however, that if we did not harness this instinct properly, a destructive chain of events can occur. 

We can become selfish, seeking to glorify ourselves at the expense of others. We can become compulsive and competitive, always looking for the new thing that will make us stand out and make us the object of other people’s admiration. We can even be manipulated into spending our money and time and energy on things that do us no good in our quest to be seen, to borrow an expression from the kids again, as “the hotness.”

I find King’s choice of this phrase interesting, because as a black Southerner who graduated from a historically black college, he would have been well aware of the role that drum majors play in black college marching bands. The drum major doesn’t just lead the band on the field. The drum major is part showman, part shaman.  They don’t just get people excited about the football game; they are a show in and of themselves. At King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, they call the drum majors the “House of Funk” as a way of touting their rhythmic and acrobatic abilities. 

But King would also have known that drum majors set an important example of leadership and discipline as well. They have to know the music, and they have to keep their band mates in line as they do their dances. They are the link between the band director and the band members, and in some ways they are the face of the band.  As Ronnie Chalmers a drum major at North Carolina Central University told a newspaper reporter a couple of years ago, “I mean, I know that I have to uphold a certain honor or maintain a solid reputation around campus because of who I am. Because I’m the drum major for the band, I have to set an example. It’s hard to do sometimes, but I accept the responsibility.”

By the way, fidelity to the dance routines is very important, and at some schools the basic steps have been handed down through the decades. A few years back, anthropologists studied those dance steps and found they matched steps from the dances done to honor some of the traditional West African gods. So the drum major on a black college campus may be preserving an ancient heritage without even knowing it.

My own daughter was a drum major at Ewing High School, and she, too felt that she had to set an example. One of the things she told me about the experience is that you can’t be an effective drum major unless the members of the band perceive you as someone worthy of respect. You have to demonstrate your ability and willingness to do what you’re asking them to do, for starters.

King knew most, if not all of this, and his reference to the drum major instinct is not a rejection or condemnation of that instinct. Rather, it is a call for us to harness that instinct for the social good.

We can certainly see plenty of examples of the drum major instinct gone awry.

The quest for fame and celebrity seems more important than ever in our contemporary culture, and it isn’t just in this country. There are spin-offs of American Idol and so-called “reality TV” all over the world.  It seems even more important now than in Dr. King’s day. When I was growing up, my peers had ambitions – but only a few people who aspired to careers in sports, entertainment or perhaps politics talked about wanting to be famous. Now, you have people who just want to be famous, and they are willing to do the most ridiculous, undignified things to make that happen. 

Then you have people with talent and ambition who have learned to equate celebrity with accomplishment, or even with being an admirable person. We have conferred a kind of priestly authority on “lifestyle experts” who promise to help us look and live and act like celebrities, if only for a day. 

Have you ever watched the way people on shows like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” act as if spending three days with the “Fab Five” is like having a divine visitation? I actually saw one man get practically weepy about how he let the show’s grooming expert talk him in to taking off his toupee.  He said something to the effect that he got rid of his hairpiece, “because I know Kyan loves me and he wouldn’t steer me the wrong way….” Excuse me? This man that you’ve known for three days who was doing his job loves you?”  Clearly, the drum major instinct has run amok in our culture.  

Understand me now, I’m as susceptible to this stuff as anyone. I love watching these shows. I wonder, however, what it will take for us to get back to a time when we can be as excited about people who accomplish things that have real social impact.

King warned that the drum major instinct can pervert our institutions and social processes. He talked about how churches and fraternal societies that were established to uplift the community can instead become bastions of classism – that’s the word he used. 

I think a lot about that problem as it manifests itself in the news media, because I am a writer and journalism educator.

Let me digress for a moment. You see, our free press is based on something called the libertarian theory. Those of you who have studied philosophy or political science know that libertarians believe that democracy is best served by a marketplace of ideas in which everyone gets to express an opinion. 

This belief  still dominates American journalism, but in the last several decades, it has been modified by the recognition that not all citizens have equal access to the marketplace of ideas. The effort was analogous to that of progressive and Keynesian economists who tried to use the public sector to counterbalance socially disruptive inequalities that arose from unfettered capitalism. 

Although there is supposed to be a wall of separation between the editorial and business functions of news operations, marketing assumptions affect the space devoted to news, the structure of editorial sections, and the slant of news and feature coverage. While there are stories that will run because editors believe their importance outweighs possible audience disinterest, the primary goal is to cater to perceived audience tastes, and editors’ are often expected to contribute to achieving circulation goals as part of  their performance evaluation.  

And that is because, more and more, newspapers are expected to meet profit targets that raise the stock price. The overarching ambition is to increase shareholder value. This is how the drum major instinct works in the press. So when editors say, “readers don’t care about this story,” the “readers” that editors have in mind are those deemed most attractive to advertisers.

One of the easiest ways to see this in daily news coverage is in stories about murders.  I want to tell you about what I was told as I looked into the coverage of two murder cases over the last few years.

The murders I’m going to talk about reflect the conventional wisdom among veteran cop reporters have for determining how much coverage a murder is likely to get. In their book, murders are small, medium and big. Small murders get a brief, episodic coverage, usually from the police reporter, and usually in the metro section of a local newspaper. The conventional wisdom is that the murder of a wealthy white man is big, especially if his killers aren’t wealthy, and if his killers aren’t white. Murders in poor neighborhoods are smaller than murders in wealthier neighborhoods, unless the victim is wealthier. At the other end of the spectrum, the murder of a poor black girl is a small murder, especially if her killer is also black, and also poor. 

A small murder will likely get a brief news item, usually done by a police reporter or perhaps a student intern on a smaller paper, and usually run in the metro section. A medium murder might get news and say, a little feature coverage, and may be picked up by the local and regional wires. A big murder will get sustained play as a lead story, with get news, feature and op-ed coverage, and will be done by the news operation’s veteran reporters. In the biggest murder cases, the news team will have its own reporters on location, and may even bring in experts or top freelancers.

This triage system of murder coverage reflects reporters’ assumptions about what their editors want, and editors’ assumptions about what their advertiser-attractive readers will care about. 

The first murder case I’m going to talk about is the September 3, 1991 fire at the Imperial Foods chicken plant in Hamlet, North Carolina that killed 25 workers and injured 56 more because their employer had locked them inside. The second is the murder of a15-year-old girl named Sakia Gunn in Newark, New Jersey on May 11 of this year. 

You all may have heard about these two stories. I find that people often remember the Hamlet, North Carolina fire because it seemed like something that wasn’t supposed to happen any more. We all learned in school that the workplace safety laws enacted after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was supposed to ensure that disasters like Hamlet didn’t happen.

Because the deaths in Hamlet were so shocking, the case was a big story for a while. There were congressional hearings and the voters in North Carolina elected a new labor commissioner. The plant’s owner, Emmett Roe, was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison, but actually served less than five years. 

Our database of 300-plus news stories, articles and documents accumulated etween 1991 and 2002 years indicates that coverage of the Hamlet story petered out in 1992, about the time that Roe was sentenced. Several national and regional news organizations, including The New York Times, USA Today, Time, 60 Minutes and the Washington Post did lengthy stories in the weeks after the fire, and at noteworthy moments during the investigations and criminal proceedings. 

One of the things that happens when you have a “big” murder is that the press and civic authorities start examining the precipitating factors that led up to the murder. They start asking whether similar things could happen in their own communities. They ask about The Meaning of It All. Think, for example about how the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman caused reporters and pundits to spend more time talking about domestic violence. Think about how school safety issues became so important after events such as the Columbine massacre.

However, we’ve found several angles on the Imperial Foods story that seem unexplored or under-explored, from Roe’s April, 1997 parole to the implications of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s 1998 determination that the Imperial Foods victims did not have the right to sue the government for its failure to carry out its oversight responsibilities. Think about that: this man was found responsible for the deaths of 25 people, injuring 56 more, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, and only one newspaper does a story when he gets out of jail, from what we could find out.

We didn’t find any stories that placed the fire in the larger context of the trend toward deregulation in labor practices, food safety, environmental protection and worker safety.

Getting the hulking remains of the plant torn down took 10 years of effort by residents, community leaders and politicians at the local, state and federal levels. While the ruins stood, they were more than a painful reminder – they were a site for drugs, vandalism and vagrancy, as well as an EPA Superfund site. 

Pollution remains a significant problem in Hamlet and all of Richmond County, according to the advocacy group, Environmental Defense. According to a March 2002 report generated by the organization’s Scorecard database, the remaining Superfund site is contaminating local drinking water. (Environmental Defense) 

Nationally, allegations of both continuing violations and lax enforcement persist. In his 1998 book, The Last True Populist, former Texas agriculture secretary Jim Hightower alleged that, even after the Imperial Foods fire,  “Assembly-line speedups continue to cause excessive injuries, stifling heat and oppressive working conditions remain, ill and injured employees are forced to stay on the line or be fired, and, yes, doors are still locked from the outside.” (Ivins) 

In fact, if you read the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, you might have seen a story about Walmart workers being locked inside at night.

And in 2001, the Bush administration rescinded the repetitive motion rules that targeted the principle source of poultry workers’ injuries – and the principle source of all workplace injuries.

Further, journalists failed to apprehend the implications of the Imperial story for our nation’s food supply. Imperial Foods made chicken nuggets and marinated chicken parts for major restaurant chains. Former Imperial workers say they were routinely forced to use spoiled chicken. “I’ve seen them use green chicken,” one former worker told me in an interview. He told me how they hid the rotten chicken from agriculture inspectors.  

Legal documents that surfaced after the fire showed that the year before, Imperial’s owner had been sued by one of its distributors, for shipping rotten chicken. However, because we weren’t paying attention g to these workers, we don’t know whether other plants were engaging in similar practices. 

Unfortunately, the end of Imperial Foods might not have been the end of such scurrilous practices. According to a December, 1999, news report on WSOC-TV in South Carolina, the USDA slapped a Perdue chicken plant in Lewiston, North Carolina with 959 citations for food-safety violations ranging from employees who failed to wash their hands to salmonella. The news report also charged the USDA with failure to enforce penalties for the violations. (Eyewitness News)  In 2002, a listeria outbreak struck a Wampler plant in Camden New Jersey.

And the problems may not stop there. That fall, my students and I  decided to find out where our local chicken comes from, and what the safety conditions are like along that food chain. It’s not something that most news organizations have the time or resources to do. 

Our independent investigation of USDA records found instances in which poultry was shipped by a local distributor with glass and “foreign substances” embedded in the ice.  It should be noted that the tainted boxes were found before they reached consumers according to the documents. We also found that in Ewing township, local restaurants aren’t being inspected as often as the law requires. Finally, we learned that because poultry processors are exempt from the Clean Water Act, we would not necessarily know if a company was discharging grease balls into the water supply, as Imperial did.

Why wasn’t the press paying more attention? I asked retired New York Times reporter and columnist, Tom Wicker about that. Wicker was actually born in Hamlet and was still writing his column at that time, but he didn’t pay much attention to the fire, and he wasn’t involved in the decision making. But he said that if the coverage of the story was “scanty” it could well have been the result of class bias. To quote Wicker, “Most of the workers were blacks, as I recall; if they had all been white college kids, or just mostly, coverage might well have been more extensive — in the Times as in any other paper.

(Wicker) 

Just a point of information: about half of the people who died in the Hamlet fire were white, but all of them were poor. Indeed, former labor reporter Phil Primack suggested in a 1992 Columbia Journalism Review article that college-educated reporters no longer identify with the working class, and are likely to have little visceral appreciation for the daily lives of $5.40-hour workers such as those at Imperial Foods.

King suggested that racism itself is perpetuated by a perversion of the drum major instinct.  He told this story about conversations that he had with his jailers during one of his arrest in Birmingham:

[T]he white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong. So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You’re just as poor as Negroes.” And I said, “You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.”

“The Drum Major Instinct.” From A Knock at Midnight: The Sermons of Martin Lusther King, Jr. http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/680204.000_Drum_Major_Instinct.html

That argument is worth thinking about today when so much of the conflict that’s going on in our communities, and around the globe has to do with people who are politicking or committing violence against on the basis of racial, religious or ethnic prejudice.  Many of those people erroneously believe that the only way they can feel good about themselves is by attacking members of another group. Often, they’ve been taught to use members of that other group as scapegoats for their own problems. 

We see it in the enduring problem of hate crimes, and globally, in the repugnant practice of ethnic cleansing. We see it in the practice of domestic violence and child abuse, and in the practice that some feminists are calling “corrective rape.” This is the practice of raping a woman who is presumed to be a lesbian in order to change her sexual orientation.  It happens in South Africa; it allegedly happened in Washington, D.C. this summer – along with the murders of five transgendered people. 

We saw it late last year, when police finally caught Gary Ridgway, the notorious Green River killer. Ridgway understood the concept of small murders. For 20 years he got away with killing 48 women because he reasoned, correctly, that if he picked the kind of women that our society looks down on, there would be little public outrage. Listen to what he said:

“I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

This kind of violence, based on class, gender and sexual orientation, might plausibly be seen as another example of the perversion of the drum major instinct. This brings me to the story of Sakia Gunn.

Gunn was stabbed to death because she and her friends rebuffed a man’s sexual advances by declaring themselves to be lesbians, according to police reports. A suspect was arrested on May 16, and the murder is being prosecuted as a hate crime. However, as I followed the story and talked to colleagues, my discomfort with traditional journalistic thinking grew deeper.

The murder set off anti-violence rallies in Newark, and more than 2500 people attended Gunn’s funeral. Since then there have been rallies in Boston and New York, and commemorations of Gunn in many of the gay pride parades that occured in June.
A new advocacy group, called the Newark Pride Alliance, formed to demand improved police protection, diversity and anti-violence education, and the establishment of a gay and lesbian community center. In the months since the murder, the Pride Alliance has joined forces with prominent writer and activist Amiri Baraka. Baraka is the father of Shani Baraka, the Newark schoolteacher who was murdered along with her girlfriend, Rayshon Holmes on August 12, apparently by a brother-in-law.
 
So, since June, I have been comparing the news coverage of Sakia Gunn’s murder to the coverage of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. I’ve been primarily using Lexis-Nexis, a service that archives newspaper and broadcast stories from around the world. 

I focused on Matthew Shepard because the media coverage of his murder has become a kind of gold standard that activists of varying stripes refer to when making arguments about news judgments concerning gay-related murders. The Sakia Gunn murder is being pursued as a hate crime prosecution, so the Shepard comparison is, in that sense, appropriate. 

The disparity in coverage has been striking: eight months after Shepard’s murder, there were 683 stories in the Lexis-Nexis database just from major newspapers. Eight months after Sakia’s death, there are 21 stories in the Lexis-Nexis database. Except for one story on CNN, most of the stories were for the local or metro editions of the newspapers or wire services. I have been posting the results each month on my weblog.

Why the disparity? Not wanting to leap to conclusions, I’ve queried several journalism lists to get opinions and perspective. I’ve only had a handful of responses. The responses that I got from black and gay journalists, in particular, surprised me.

One of my colleagues in the National Association of Black Journalists, and an officer from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association told me that Gunn’s murder got more attention than most murders in Newark, so there seemed little cause for complaint. The officer from the gay and lesbian journalists association told me that one of the organization’s committees did meet to discuss whether broader coverage was warranted, but they couldn’t think of a reason why an editor outside of the New York-New Jersey region would be interested. “So many kids die in the inner city,” he said at one point. After my conversation with him, I sent an e-mail suggesting story angles that might interest editors in other regions.

Gay City News reporter Mick Meenan offered this explanation for why Sakia Gunn’s did not incite gay activists or the gay press to greater action: “I think there’s racism in the LGBT community, and no doubt there’s classism.” Meenan has covered the Sakia Gunn story from the beginning,

While attention to the story from the gay and alternative media might well be characterized as anemic, it was stronger than the response from the black or feminist media, as far as I have been able to ascertain. 

What’s important to note is that the response from the NLGJA representative and the gentleman on the NABJ listserve are consistent with traditional mainstream news values.

Cathy Renna, a media relations manager for GLAAD, made a similar point in a column about her experiences of working with reporters on the Matthew Shepard story over the last five years: 

Whether I’m talking to a reporter or an auditorium of college students, one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Why did Matt¹s murder get so much attention?” Truth is, there¹s no simple answer to that question… I do know that there are some answers we don¹t explore enough.  For example, we know the people with privilege and power in our community stood up when Matt was killed, prompting the media to take notice.  People who identified with Matt leveraged their resources to pressure others into doing something. It is as simple and yet also more complex than that. However, my phone did not ring off the hook for other hate victims like Latina transgender teen Gwen Araujo or Sakia Gunn and J. R. Warren, both teens of African descent…..

Renna’s statement, for me, about “[P]eople who identify with Matt…” echoes Tom Wicker’s conjecture about the reason for the relative inattention to the Hamlet murders.

It’s also important to acknowledge that the response from NABJ and the NLGJA reflects the tightrope that the leaders of those organizations walk between perceived obligations to the marginalized communities they represent, and to professional norms that require independence from faction. 

And Marshall Mc Peek is right – so many kids do die in the inner-city. In fact, in Newark, in New York, in Columbus, Ohio where I watched Mr. Mc Peek do the weather on a local news show, death rates are up among poor, inner city youth. At a rally in October that was held on the spot where Sakia Gunn was stabbed, Newark deputy mayor Ras Baraka charged that if suburban kids were dying at the rate that kids are dying in Newark, there would be all kinds of attention from the press and politicians and community leaders. I leave it to you to decide whether that’s true. However, this failure to pay attention to the suffering of people on the margins is exactly the kind of thing that Dr. King was warning against.

Near the end of his sermon, Dr. King noted that James and John, and anyone following after their example, can achieve the kind of prominence they sought, if they were willing to follow the model of servant leadership. He called it a new definition of greatness.

And here’s where we encounter another famous quote from that sermon – my son has it on one of his T-shirts:

[E]verybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen) You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen) You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir, Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant.

The good news in all of this is that there are many people who understand and still try to live these values. For example, I know young people who have turned down potentially lucrative careers to become teachers, because they truly care about equal education.  There are investment bankers who come up with inventive ways to help people start businesses through microlending and the like, clergy who set up AIDS ministries that really welcome everyone, and so many more. We need them all, and we need more.

There are all sorts of examples of the responsible use of the drum major instinct. We could turn the whole world around by elevating those examples in our news coverage and public discourse. Sure, what I’m asking for can involve sacrifice. But the alternatives are even worse. And the prize to be won – a better world – seems well worth the cost.

I look forward to talking with you and hearing from you about how we can march forward – together—in that pursuit of justice and love for which Dr. King gave his life. Thank you. 

Endnotes

1. “This field belongs to Ronnie Chalmers Jr., NCCU drum major,” http://www.heraldsun.com/evergreen/93-152379.html
2.  “The Drum Major Instinct.” From A Knock at Midnight: The Sermons of Martin Lusther King, Jr. http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/680204.000_Drum_Major_Instinct.html
3. Talvi, Silvia. “The Truth About the Green River Killer.” http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17171
4.  . In a 2002 analysis I did for my students, I examined conservative media activists’ claims that the mainstream press’ coverage of Shepard’s murder betrayed a pro-gay bias, particularly when compared to the limited coverage of the murder of Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old Arkansas boy, at the hands of two gay men. In that study, I argued that it was more appropriate to compare Dirkhising murder coverage to the coverage of other rape and torture murders of children by sexual predators. 
5.  “The Sakia Gunn Monthly Story Count. Professor Kim’s News Notes. http://professorkim.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_professorkim_archive.html
6.  Renna, Cathy. “Learning From Laramie’s Legacy.” 365gay.com. http://www.365gay.com/opinion/Oped/oped.htm