polarized over race in the 1960s than it is now. What has changed in race relations since that tumultuous era? What hasn’t? Consider the radically differing reactions to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show. In October 1968 African-American Olympic track medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos shocked observers around the globe with an emphatic civil rights gesture during their awards ceremony — each raising a black-gloved fist in a classic “Power to the People” salute. They were promptly banned from the Olympics for life.7
In 2016, during halftime at Super Bowl 50, more than 110 million viewers witnessed megastar Beyoncé’s dance troupe perform a similar raised-fist tribute to the Black Panthers, whose own fiftieth anniversary year coincided with that of the Super Bowl. Just a day earlier Beyoncé released a new video, “Formation,” which paid homage to the Black Lives Matter movement. Beyoncé’s polarizing halftime message triggered a barrage of negative tweets and blogs as well as calls from conservative politicians, talk show hosts and police to boycott her performances, all of them unlikely to diminish the entertainer’s enormous fan base.8
The Super Bowl incident is just one illustration of hot-button race issues that have recently dominated the airwaves. In the last few years — unlike prior eras in American history — deaths of unarmed blacks at the hands of police have garnered as much news coverage as killings of officers. Technology advances are the primary reason race issues today take place in a particularly volatile context: the near-constant presence of smart phone cameras has turned millions of Americans into potential on-the-spot documentarians.
In 2013 director Ryan Coogler made the acclaimed film Fruitvale Station about the last 24 hours of the life of Oscar Grant III, which ended violently on New Year’s Day 2009. Cell phone videos captured a white Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer shooting Grant while he was handcuffed and lying face down on the platform of an Oakland BART station. Like the onlooker’s video seventeen years before of Los Angeles police viciously clubbing black cab driver Rodney King after King was stopped for speeding, the clip of officer Johannes Mehserle killing Grant was replayed over and over to a shocked public. The outraged reaction to Grant’s death was immediate. Although the rioting and looting in downtown Oakland never came close to the scale and impact of the devastation following the acquittal of white policemen who had thrashed Rodney King, vandals in 2010 caused extensive damage to hundreds of Oakland businesses and parked cars. Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, then in his early seventies, was among those who spoke out to restrain the senseless violence.
Mehserle claimed he only meant to use his Taser, but the Alameda County District Attorney concluded that Mehserle’s behavior was reckless and charged him with murder — making him the first California law enforcement officer to face such accusations in decades. Mehserle’s lawyer won a change of venue to Los Angeles after an opinion poll showed a sharp racial divide between whites and blacks in Alameda County over the presumption of Mehserle’s guilt and the likelihood of violence if he were to be acquitted. In 2010, a Southern California jury with no black members convicted Mehserle only of involuntary manslaughter; he served less than two years for that crime.
On March 21, 2009, Oakland again made grim national headlines when two policemen stopped an ex-felon in broad daylight for a routine traffic violation in a crime-ridden section of East Oakland’s flatlands. Lovelle Mixon was armed with a semi-automatic hand gun and an AK-47. Desperate to avoid returning to prison for parole violations, the 26-year-old Mixon opened fire on the surprised motorcycle cops and fled the scene. Cornered soon afterward, Mixon killed two members of a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team before being gunned down himself. It set a chilling record — the worst single day of police fatalities in the violence-plagued city’s history, adding an ironic and bitter coda to a year in which the number of police officers killed nationwide by gunfire in the line of duty had reached a fifty-year low.9
President Obama sent his and his wife Michelle’s somber thoughts and prayers to the policemen’s families and the community, expressing the nation’s gratitude “for the men and women in law enforcement who . . . risk their lives each day on our behalf” and condemning “the senseless violence that claimed so many of them.”10 Three days after the shootings, Oakland’s then mayor, former Congressman Ron Dellums, expressed the city’s grief at an evening vigil. Many police officers still despised Dellums for identifying with the Panthers as a young Berkeley politician in the ’60s and early ’70s when the Panthers were at war with the police. In that earlier time, in February 1968, Dellums had stood on the Oakland Auditorium stage in solidarity with revolutionary black leaders who pledged vengeance if Huey Newton were executed for killing Oakland Police Officer John Frey.
In 2009, a much more somber and reflective Mayor Dellums expressed the city’s “shock and sadness” at officers who paid the ultimate price in service to community: “We come to thank them. We come here to mourn them. We come here to embrace them as community.”11 In the view of law enforcement, Officer Frey’s death was in the same category as the four officers killed in 2009 — men who heroically gave their lives for public protection. The names of the four officers killed by Mixon and their date of death have since been chiseled into the memorial at Oakland Police headquarters where John Frey’s name also appears among other Oakland officers killed in the line of duty since the city’s founding. Every year local officials join members of the department and surviving family of the officers in a formal ceremony to honor their sacrifice.
Such tributes to fallen officers reflect enormous societal appreciation for their dedication to public protection, as we saw again with the outpouring of support for the five Dallas officers murdered on July 7, 2016, and their wounded colleagues — the most casualties for law enforcement in a single incident since September 11, 2001. Before he died, sniper Micah Johnson claimed he targeted policemen on duty at the Dallas protest in retaliation for deaths elsewhere of black arrestees.
The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 triggered renewed attention to allegations of abusive police conduct, intensified by more recent deaths of unarmed arrestees elsewhere across country. Months later a passerby’s cell phone in North Charleston, South Carolina, shocked Americans with footage of a policeman shooting African-American Walter Scott in the back as Scott started to run away following a routine traffic stop. The officer has been charged with murder. That same month in Baltimore, a cell phone caught police handcuffing Freddie Gray. When the 25-year-old African-American died of injuries after bouncing around the back of the police van en route to being booked, the incident sparked the worst riots in that city in almost five decades.
Unlike the police force in Ferguson, the officers in Baltimore were racially diverse and operated under a black police chief and mayor. The dysfunction in Baltimore has been traced all the way back to riots in 1967 and 1968 from which the impoverished city never recovered.12 Baltimore still lacks resources for sufficient beat cops and suffers from high crime, drug addiction, joblessness, underfunded schools and urban blight. While Baltimore quickly replaced its police chief and undertook a new approach to police training, the Ferguson city council only agreed to sweeping reforms proposed by the Department of Justice when threatened with a civil rights suit in federal court. Federal District Judge Catherine Perry approved the Ferguson settlement “in everyone’s best interest and . . . in the interest of justice.” The mayor of Ferguson promised swift progress under the agreement as “an important step in bringing this community together and moving us forward.”13 The settlement agreement requires police officers to undergo diversity training, to track arrest records and use of force, to wear body cams and to be monitored for compliance on an ongoing basis. In other cities across the country, accusations of racist policing are also moving from protests in the streets to resolution in court.
Ultimately, the Department of Justice reinvestigation of Michael Brown’s death agreed with the Ferguson Grand Jury’s decision not to indict the officer who killed him. All charges against the six Baltimore peace officers who faced prosecution for Freddie Gray’s death were also dismissed, but the mayor requested a Justice Department review that resulted in a highly critical report documenting systemic racism. Major reforms have been promised. Investigations into several other highly publicized incidents are ongoing. Inflammatory clips widely circulated at the outset may or may not reflect the whole