After Zimmerman: Maybe There’s A Reason Cities Are Enacting Curfews?
By Paul Kersey
07/16/2013
While America braces for more rioting in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal, and as Attorney General Eric (“my people”) Holder threatens a federal “hate crime” double jeopardy end run, this 17-month saga has obscured an accelerating phenomenon that may ultimately prove more significant.
As I noted in a March 26, 2012 VDARE.com column as the Main Stream Media narrative of the martyrdom of St. Martin was unraveling, cities across the country were being forced to enact emergency curfews to deal with rising racial anarchy since Obama’s election in 2008.
“Obama’s sons” were out of control:
- Columbia, South Carolina: Columbia curfew proposal faces opposition, September 30, 2010
- Newark, New Jersey: Newark seeks public’s help in stemming bloodshed, forms ’safe City Task Force', June 1, 2011
- Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore teens are getting a curfew, June 15, 2011
- Cleveland Heights, Ohio: Cleveland Heights' teen curfew brings questions in regard to legality, and whether it targets minorities, July 01, 2011.
- Louisville, Kentucky.: Police enforcing city-wide curfew for teens in Louisville, July 19, 2011
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (which was quickly deemed racist) Philadelphia City Council passes new youth curfew law, October 28, 2011.
- New Orleans (which has also been deemed racist) New Orleans City Council passes 8 p.m. curfew for anyone under 16 in French Quarter, January 18, 2012
- Gary, Indiana: Gary police set to enforce curfew law, April 14, 2012
- East St. Louis: East St. Louis officials institute youth curfew, put limits on clothing for males, September 27, 2012. (Limits on clothing means no “royal blue or bright red clothing commonly associated with gangs.”)
- Memphis, Tennessee.: Memphis Police Speak Out on Curfew, February 1, 2013
- Kansas City, Missouri (wasn’t spared from being labeled racist either, because all of the curfew violators cited with tickets have been black.). Kansas City plans to crack down on curfew violators in Northland, May 30, 2013
- Macon, Georgia: Macon police increase attention to curfew during summer, June 13, 2013
.Calls for the National Guard to patrol Chicago (where 11 were killed and 72 shot over the July 4 holiday this year) continue to go unheeded, although Al Sharpton is moving to the city to “help with youth violence” — which helps to identify the source of the problem immediately.
There’s a simple maxim few people seem to abide by anymore:nothing good happens after midnight. And if a population group that has lower impulse control and future time-orientation is out, unsupervised, after hours, it is bound to get into mischief.
One just-passed emergency curfew is particularly symbolic.
Back in 1960, four black students challenged the white-only policy at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
What began as an attempt to force the (privately-owned, libertarians please note) restaurant to serve the four morphed to 300 only three days later. Eventually, it grew to 1,000 people and sit-ins would spread nationwide.
An 8-foot section of this Woolworth restaurant lunch counter has been transported to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and the store site is now home to the Greensboro Civil Rights Museum, celebrating one of the triumphs of the Civil rights movement.
Now fast-forward to the summer of 2013. Not a stone’s-throw from this museum, a 400-person brawl broke out on June 29, a beautiful Greensboro Saturday night. Those engaging in combat were, needless to say, unidentified in media reports, but they were of course Obama’s sons:
Greensboro police arrested 11 ranging from 16 to 20 years old and had to use pepper spray and a stun gun to manage the crowd, the report said.
Some officers suffered minor injuries. Security cameras outside two nightclubs showed two groups of teens walking toward each other and several people running away into the streets.
Mike Carter, the owner of the club Syn and Sky, says it’s time to reenact the 11 p.m. curfew that was enforced in 2011.
Mayor Robbie Perkins told The News-Record that “this is a problem for the city of Greensboro. It’s a problem for youth. It’s a problem for parents.”
[Curfew considered after 400 teens in North Carolina street fight, FoxNews.com, July 2, 2013].
Subsequently, in an 8-1 vote, the city council of Greensboro (six whites, three blacks), voted on the eve of Independence Day, to reenact a curfew.
The only nay vote was cast by Councilwoman T. Dianne Bellamy-Small (who is anything but small), a black woman whose loyalty is apparently to race first, safety and prosperity of the city of Greensboro second:
Councilwoman Small said she heard from community members who felt the last curfew was race-inspired to keep young African-American men from downtown. She added, "We cannot legislate parenting [ … ] We need to figure out a way to get the input from the kids and their parents on this."
Small cautioned council members about their decision because she said they need to figure out the root of the problem and not create something worse.
[Greensboro City Council Approves Youth Curfew, WFMY, July 3, 2013]
No, you cannot legislate parenting, Councilwoman Small is right about that. But you can pass laws trying to protect private property, property values, and citizens of the city from those individuals parents have failed to properly educate on how to act in public.
Leftist sociologist James W. Loewen. wrote a whole book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, denouncing the quiet development of all-white neighborhoods and suburbs, often in the North, after 1890. But maybe, just maybe, these towns were onto something that the continued need for curfew laws and extra police/security at tax-revenue producing public venues also suggests?
Maybe Greensboro, North Carolina, home to one of the most important symbols of the Civil Rights struggle, is now also home to yet another symbolic reminder that many of those “racist” laws were actually enacted not simply out of “racism” but in an attempt to ensure economic and physical survival?
We are supposed to be color-blind in America and judge one another on the “content of our character.” But the explosion of racially-charged energy after Zimmerman acquittal has revealed that that America’s deep racial wounds are now not just deep but gangrenous.
I am an American who was born long after the Civil Rights struggle had been won. But the more we march into the future, the more it becomes apparent these special curfew laws now being passed nationwide are a response to exactly the same pathological behavior that sundown laws once protected against.
Colin Flaherty has documented what is really happening in America in his underground bestseller White Girl Bleed A Lot.
And there’s a reason “white girl bleed a lot.”
The law is no longer on her side.
Paul Kersey is the author of the blog SBPDL, and has published the books SBPDL Year One, Hollywood in Blackface and Escape From Detroit, Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White and Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland. His latest book is The Tragic City: Birmingham 1963-2013 .