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 From The Desk Of
Ron Walters
Columnist Page
Friday, December 24, 2004; Page 22
“Eco-terrorism” Against Blacks in Maryland
When one Black man, James Byrd, was crushed to death by White racists, it caused an uproar of reaction; when Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of gun bullets in New York City, it was a national expose; in 1992 when Rodney King was beaten senseless by the LAPD, it caused a massive rebellion.
But at 5 am on December 6, fires broke out in the Hunters Brook neighborhood in Charles County, a new housing development in Southern Maryland, that gutted 12 homes and damaged 42 altogether in a $10 million holocaust and relatively little reaction has occurred. I wonder why a hate crime, using fire, that was so massive and so violent, the largest arson case in recent American history, has attracted so little attention.
I watched with interests as the media – cable news spots, some mention on the major networks and others – reported the incident, but then dropped it. And I wondered where were the Civil Rights organizations looking into the fires in a place where most of those who had purchased the new homes were Black. Little action has occurred raising questions about these fires; it has mostly been left to the local media, the local police and the Justice Department. Maybe we have been too fixated on the outcome of the recent elections to care about these brothers and sisters – and maybe they just want to have their homes built and get on with their lives, understanding clearly what happened.
Immediately the media posited two motives for the fires, one was something that I had never heard of called “eco-terrorism” which was an attempt to align this incident to the current fear that we are still under attack. And other reason was that some disgruntled, or deranged person had set them. How could one person have done this? Most importantly, how could people raised in America be so silent about the fact that this incident was squarely in the tradition of American terrorism against Blacks? Of course, no one began such speculation - which they do all the time - and all of the Black reporters were either asleep or on Christmas vacation.
Perhaps I was sensitive to this because I passed through Southern Maryland frequently going down to a summer place in Virginia on the banks of the Potomac River and on those trips, I noticed how the Black population was pushing south into the historic preserve of many rural Southern Whites. Many times, I wondered what would happen when the thunderous movement of the Black working class, some of whom were now affluent, pushed out of the adjacent Prince George’s County and on down further South where Blacks were in the minority, but where the echoes of Southern attitudes still distinct.
Working class Whites had moved out of Prince George’s County because of the influx of Blacks from the District of Columbia, making that County the largest collection of affluent Blacks in the world. Whites had pushed on to Calvert County and South into Charles County, a place where slavery was a widespread practice, and where they were making their last stand to preserve what many had sought was a majority White social and cultural geographical space. But here came the brothers and sisters, looking to build more decent housing and wanting to do without a long commute.
This movement set up the resentment that was the fuel for the combustion that led to the decision and the planning to torch Blacks out of their space. At this writing, the “eco-terrorism” theory has been scrapped and something more familiar has been instituted as a motive and a conspiracy of White males has begun to be unraveled.
This racial terrorism was the stuff that torched nearly 100 or so Black churches in the mid-1990s, so many that it led to an investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. And because they were still going on in 2000 and after, it touched off a discussion of having a serious hate crimes bill.
While we should respect the feelings of those who want to note the incident and move on, the problem is that moving on smacks of sweeping racism under the rug on the one hand, and on the other, buying into the conservative rhetoric of the Rush Limbaugh’s and more sophisticated conservatives such as Gerald Reynolds and Abigail Thernstrom, the new leaders of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and others that racism is dead that we don’t need a strong hate crimes laws. The FBI has taken an interest in the case and if things work out, it will be the first major test on racial issues of the new Hispanic Attorney General.
Let’s see how George Bush, the “compassionate conservative” treats this. Meanwhile, I don’t want to hear from my Black brothers and sisters either, that old time racism is dead, or that we don’t need to keep fighting it along with the newer forms.
Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute in the Academy of Leadership and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland-College Park. His latest book is “White Nationalism, Black Interests” (Wayne State University Press).
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