Hattie Brazier Stands Up

November 30, 2015 4:55 AM

In 1958, James Brazier was beaten to death by sheriff's deputies and police officers in Dawson, Terrell County, Georgia.

James Brazier's death is officially unsolved, a cold case.

posted by the man of twists and turns (10 comments total)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
posted by fairmettle at 5:09 AM on November 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

I got halfway through this and thought "I can't finish this so early." And then I thought about all the people (and there are still very, very many) who wake up to this sort of thing every day, hold their heads high and work to succeed. Every day.

Brutal, disturbing, infuriating read. Thanks for posting.
posted by nevercalm at 5:52 AM on November 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm really appreciative of people who do reporting and recording of events in the civil rights movement that weren't victories. I can only imagine the emotional toll it takes.

I think it's very important to realize the amount of struggle and pain people went through just to be treated as people. And when we only present the victories, I think that helps further the "racism is over" narrative. This story in particular I think is particularly powerful due to recent events.

Terrell County, a county that even during the worst times of the civil rights movement was regarded as the one of the worse, was doing exactly the same things we see our police forces doing now: beating and killing unarmed black civilians and getting away with it.
posted by mayonnaises at 8:21 AM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile, about a month after James Brazier died, tensions between the Dawson African-American community and local law enforcement, already high since Brazier’s death, came to a head. On the night of May 23, Officer Cherry shot Tobe Latimer, a black man, in the buttocks at the local juke joint. Two nights later, Officer Cherry killed another black man, Willie Countryman, a thirty-two-year-old laborer. Cherry shot Countryman in the middle of the night in the victim’s own back yard. Cherry and Robert Hancock, another officer on the night patrol, said they had been investigating a loud noise when Countryman appeared from behind a tree, brandishing a knife.

However, black witnesses said there had been no noise outside that night aside from the ring of the lone bullet bursting from Cherry’s pistol, and that Countryman’s small yard did not have a tree thick enough to hide a man. There were further inconsistencies with the police officers’ version of events, but a coroner’s jury ruled that Cherry had acted in self-defense.

See, it's this type of thing - I don't think that these killings are a training issue in general. I think the cops kill because they want to kill and because they can get away with it. I don't believe that anyone is "trained" to fire into a crowd or to hold back a dying boy's sister or to shoot a mentally ill man to death in front of his family. They do these things because they want to, and then they describe the "training" in such a way that it seems to make these killings policy.

I can't imagine what it would be like to live in fear all the time like this, especially if you were well-off or a community leader or a civil rights activist and had caught the attention of the police and white supremacists. For me, just spending time at night at the 4th precinct in MPLS (where the protesters were shot by white supremacists) has been a bit scary (not that anything has happened, but then it doesn't...most of the time) and I keep thinking that this is just the least little shadow of the ghost of the fear you'd have to endure every day and everwhere you went - for me, realistically, nothing is going to happen and if I get too afraid I can stay home, but for for these people, they'd carry the danger with them everywhere they went. And yet they kept going. "Strong" doesn't even begin to describe it. Fierce, stony, implacable, unbreakable - that's what you'd need to be.
posted by Frowner at 9:05 AM on November 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

I have friends who honestly believe that police violence has gotten worse in recent years. I think that video technology is the only thing that's changed.
posted by domo at 9:59 AM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Me too, domo. I think was always bad, much worse than most of us will ever know, because the evidence was mostly covered up and unrecorded. I think it's only slightly better for black people now, and only in some places.

Power corrupts. The power to take life without consequences is one nobody should have. Every death involving police should be investigated, recorded and kept track of. Every single one. Even if they're acquitted of wrongdoing. Questions should be asked, data analyzed, those who kill the most need to be scrutinized much more closely.

This woman's fight did do some good; if she hadn't, chances are her husband would just be another forgotten casualty. We have as many records as we do about the perpetrators only because of that investigation and the media attention. Justice would be better, freedom from violence is best, but refusing to be erased is an act of heroism too.
posted by emjaybee at 10:43 AM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Why isn't this a movie you have to watch in 6th grade?
posted by valkane at 11:30 AM on November 30, 2015

Still, Verda had to walk through a barrage of taunts and rocks to get to school. “Nah nah nah nah nah, your daddy got killed, nah nah nah nah nah,” she would recall.

Wow.

I know that the repercussions would have been indiscriminate, grossly violent, and more horrible than I can (or want to) imagine but I am still continually surprised, when reading about the horrors inflicted on people of color in the south, that sheriff's deputies and others who openly committed these sorts of outrages with impunity didn't simply disappear into swamps without a trace or suffer unexplained house fires at a suspiciously high rate.

And that is my white privilege talking -- if I and others like me were systematically denied access to justice under the law I would be tempted to try to secure it some other way. It is horrifying that any community could be so deprived of justice that they wouldn't even expect to receive it. And it's monstrous that the primary force so depriving them should itself come cloaked in the power of the law.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:05 PM on November 30, 2015

Sometimes when I think about the vulnerability of folks of color in the U.S. before 1960, and it just takes my breath away. From the most brutal crime to the pettiest social insult, what happened to you is virtually always going to go unanswered. The police, the judiciary, the legislative bodies are all owned and run by white folk and white power. To whom could you turn for help? A man could be thrown into prison for no crime, then leased into slave labor, and not one person in authority would believe his story -- or even care -- if he managed to escape alive ... to say nothing of lynchings, serial sexual assault, and KKK terrorism against those who dared to vote.

And then I think how very little has changed.

Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and everyone we haven't heard of.

#BlackLivesMatter.
posted by allthinky at 1:49 PM on November 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

This story in particular I think is particularly powerful due to recent events.

It also helps redefine (or at least clarify) "recent events" as flat-out terrorism aimed at people of color. The message is very clear: Stay in line, because there will be consequences if we think (read: assume) you've crossed that line even a little.

The main difference, in addition to there being video evidence now, is that the whites back then felt comfortable just coming right out and saying it: "You know, Cap’, there ain’t nothing like fear to keep niggers in line," Terrell County Sheriff Zachary 'Z.T.' Taylor Mathews told Baker, as quoted in the Washington Post.

Nothing has changed, at all.

At least there's this, though: "Roughly half of Americans believe racism is 'a big problem,' according to a new poll conducted by CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation.... According to CNN, the percentage is also higher now than it was two decades ago, a time when the country was caught up in the O.J. Simpson trial, and just a few years after the brutal beating of Rodney King drew national attention, when 41 percent of Americans described racism as 'a big problem....'"

That's the upside. The downside is that white people have to be actively and randomly and famously killing black people in order for other white people to start to care.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:21 PM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]