The Lynching of Eddie Irizarry

 

By Steve Halpern

On August 14 Eddie Irizarry was driving his car in the Kennington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Police Officers Mark Dial and Michael Morris believed that Irizarry was driving "erratically," and followed his car. Irizarry then drove the wrong way on a one-way street and parked his car, apparently waiting for a police interrogation. 

Then Officers Dial and Morris pulled their police car alongside of Irizarry's vehicle. Both Officers exited their car, immediately pulled out their guns, aimed their guns at Irizarry, and in about six seconds Officer Dial discharged his weapon six times at Irizarry. Immediately after firing his weapon Officer Dial reported on his radio that "shots were fired." Irizarry died as a result of those gunshot wounds.

Initially the police reported that Irizarry "lunged" at Officer Dial. According to that account, Dial would have shot Irizarry in self defense. What the police might have not known was that there were security cameras that had recorded the entire scene of the murder of Irizarry. Those videos showed that Irizarry never left his vehicle and the windows in his car were closed during the time that Dial murdered him.

We now know that Officer Dial was wearing a body cam video recorder. The police had access to that recorder and eventually released that recording to the press. In other words, when the police made the statement that Irizarry "lunged" at Dial, they lied.  

The community protests the murder

I participated in a demonstration of about 200 people protesting the murder of Irizarry. We held a rally at the cultural center the Taller Puertorriqueño. Then we marched to the family home of Irizarry, and then for about two miles to the Police Station. At the Police Station, we were met by about thirty police officers who were lined up. Apparently they were attempting to defend the station from some of the people who pay the taxes that create the funds for their salaries.

Demonstrations and rebellions protesting murders and brutality of the police are nothing new. Elizabeth Hinton wrote her book America On Fire—The untold history of police violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s. At the end of her book, Hinton gives a list 75 pages long of the the rebellions against police brutality and discrimination between the years 1964 and 1989. Hinton gave the following summary of what was happening.

“Between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars have tended to overlook.” “Over these four years, nearly 40,000 people were arrested, more than 10,000 were injured, and at least 220 people were killed.”

These numbers do not include prison rebellions, including the one at Attica, and the murder of George Jackson during this same period. Today the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Black and Latino prisoners are grossly over-represented in that population.

Then there was the 2023 article in the Guardian newspaper by Lois Beckett with the headline, One in 20 US homicides are committed by police—and the numbers aren't falling. This article reported that in the year 2022 the police in this country murdered 1,192 people. This was an increase from 2021 when there were 1,100 murders by the police. The article went on to report that since 1980 the police murdered 32,000 people in this country.

We might also consider that today there is a memorial museum in Montgomery, Alabama of 4,400 lynchings that took place in the United States. The federal government refused to prosecute the overwhelming majority of those murders and, in effect, became accomplices with those murderers.

In the year 2020, I participated in another demonstration that began in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum. About 100,000 people came out to protest the police murder of George Floyd and many others. This demonstration was one of many, consisting of millions of people held around the world protesting murders by the police.

These demonstrations created an atmosphere where Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd. He is now serving a 21 year prison sentence. However, the above information is clear evidence of how the case against former officer Chauvin is the exception and not the rule. It is vary rare for police officers to go to prison when they murder tax payers in this country.

The verdict

The District Attorney's office headed by Larry Krasner, charged Mark Dial with First Degree Murder, along with several other charges. Before Dial would face a jury on those charges, he faced Common Pleas Court Judge Wendy L. Pew.

Judge Pew had access to the videos the public had already seen. Yet Judge Pew argued that Officer Dial was justified when he shot Irizarry. As a result all charges against Dial were dropped and he was free to go. Apparently Judge Pew felt the tree videos of the murder and the fact that Dial lied about what happened was insufficient evidence for this case to go to trial.

One of the arguments made by the lawyer who defended Dial was that Irizarry had a knife in his car. The lawyer argued that this knife looked like a gun. Well, I know of elementary school students who can tell the difference between a knife and a gun. Apparently Judge Pew doesn't have that same insight as those elementary school students.

We might place this verdict in the context of the above history of police violence in this country.

The District Attorney's office will appeal Judge Pew's decision.

Rebellions in Philadelphia

After Judge Pew's decision, several stores in the downtown area were looted. The next day more stores were looted in the NorthEast area of the city. These so-called "lootings" were similar to the rebellions reported by Elizabeth Hinton in her book America on Fire.

Jenice Armstrong wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, Philly looting, riots are wrong. But so is ignoring what is driving the behavior.

While Armstrong made it clear that she opposed the looting of stores, she also had this to say. "But here's the thing. It's possible to condemn the looters' behavior while also understanding where their rage comes from. They are fed up—with the city, with its politics as usual, with its soul-crushing poverty. Even if many of the looters weren't aware of Irizarry, they feel the effects of police brutality, they see that the promises made in 2020 have gone unfulfilled. They're fed up with watching a company like Apple make $400 billion in 2022, while they work all day but can't afford a new iPhone."

Conclusion

Thinking about the murder of Eddie Irizarry, as well as the murders of thousands of people by the police, I thought about the definition of the word lynch. This is the definition of the word in my dictionary.

"What are lynchings? A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice."

Then, I thought of Nikole Hanna-Jones book The 1919 Project. This is what she had to say, “The effort of Black Americans to seek freedom through resistance and rebellion against violations of their rights have always been one of this nation’s defining traditions.”

We might consider that the United States was created as a result of a political revolution. Another bloody war took place to free this country from the rule of slave owners. As Jenice Armstrong argued, people are "fed up." Sooner or later the rage people are feeling will express itself in a political movement that works to bring about fundamental change.

I will conclude with the word of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

“The struggle may be a moral one,

or it may be a physical one,

and it may be both moral and physical,

but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never did and it never will.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to

and you have found out the exact measure

of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them,

and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

      

Coco Gauff and a history of Black women’s tennis

By Steve Halpern

 

Yesterday I watched Coco Gauff defeat Aryna Sabalenka to become the 2023 Champion of the United States Tennis Open. Sabalenka proved to be a persistent opponent, and Gauff needed three sets to win her title. Thinking about that, when we look at the background to some of the Black women who became tennis champions, we are looking at a history of families overcoming tremendous obstacles. 

We can start this story by looking at Coco Gauff’s grandmother Yvonne Lee Odom when she was fifteen-years-old in 1961. Back in the year 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregated educational facilities were illegal. However, the states where Jim Crow segregation was the law refused to desegregate their schools. 

Then in 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bridges was escorted to school by federal agents. 

Then, in 1961, Coco Gauff’s grandmother, 15-year-old Yvonne Lee Odom, became the first Black student at Seacreast High School located in Delray Beach, Florida. Odom had been the captain of the all-Black Carver High School basketball team. 

Odom and her family understood the importance for her education as well as for all Black people to attend the better funded schools that white students when to. However, when Yvonne Lee Odom attended Seacreast High for three years, she wasn’t allowed to compete in sports. 

One of Odom’s children is Coco Gauff’s mother Candi Odom Gauff. Candi Gauff was a star track athlete in high school and at Florida State University. 

Candi Gauff was of the same generation as Arthur Ash who wasn’t allowed to play tennis at many of the segregated courts in Virginia. In spite of these obstacles, Ash became in international tennis star and the stadium at the U.S. Open is named for him. 

 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eliminates Black Studies course. 

Today Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is running for the President of the United States. DeSantis has also worked to eliminate a Black studies course from the Florida Schools curriculum. He also argued that Black people developed “useful skills” during slavery. DeSantis neglected to mention if he would like to become a chattel slave so that he could develop some useful skills. 

However, today Coco Gauff is the Champion of the United States Open Tennis Tournament. Gauff and her family live in Florida. This family has been battling discrimination throughout their history. Today the Governor of the state argues that a course that might discuss that history will not be allowed to be taught in the Florida schools system. So, today when we see Coco Gauff holding the winning trophy of the U.S. Open, we are seeing that moment blowing up right in Governor Ron DeSantis’ face. 

Venus and Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka 

When we look at the family histories of other Black women who became tennis superstars, we see more stories about overcoming tremendous obstacles. The grandmother of Venus and Serena Williams was Julia Metcalf Williams. She lived in a shack in Shreveport, Louisiana and made a living picking cotton and taking in laundry. Living in the atmosphere of Jim Crow segregation meant that she needed to go to a segregated hospital to deliver the Williams sisters’ father Richard Williams. Three of Richard Williams’s friends were lynched by racist mobs. 

Naomi Osaka’s father Leonard François was born in Haiti. Haiti is the only nation in the world that had a successful revolution of slaves. The most powerful nations in the world retaliated to Haiti because of their heroic revolution. Because Haiti was transformed from the most affluent place in the world, to one of the poorest nations in the world, Leonard François left his homeland for an education in the United States and then in Japan. 

It was in Japan that he met Naomi’s mother Tamika Osaka. Naomi’s parents decided that she would take the mother’s name so she wouldn’t be teased in the Japanese schools. 

We might also consider that Naomi Osaka lived with her parents for a time in Osaka, Japan. During the Second World War, the United States Air Force fire-bombed 67 Japanese cities in a six-month campaign before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About 37% of the city of Osaka was destroyed in that campaign. You can see more information about the histories of the families of the Williams sisters and Naomi Osaka at this link. 

So, when we look at these family histories, we see stories that are just as compelling as the tennis matches that made these Black women international tennis champions. Seeing how those obstacles have been overcome gives us a vision of how it is indeed possible to overcome the institutionalized racist discrimination that has been a part of the history of this country since its founding.