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Published April 26 - May 2, 2000
We left the Latin
Quarter nightclub that night laughing that Red, my cousin, had finally found
someone shorter than his five-foot-five frame to dance with him. My younger
brother, K, was fiending for a turkey sandwich, so we all walked over to the
bodega around the corner, just one block west of Broadway. We had no idea
that class was about to be in session. The lesson for the day was that there
is a special Bill of Rights for nonwhite people in the United States—one that
applies with particular severity to Black men. It has never had to be
ratified by Congress because—in the hearts of those with the power to enforce
it—the Black Bill of Rights is held to be self-evident. As we left the store,
armed only with sandwiches and Snapples, the three of us saw a group of young
men standing around a car parked on the corner in front of the store. As
music blasted by the wide-open doors of their car, the men around the car
appeared to be arguing with someone in an apartment above the store. The
argument escalated when one of the young men began throwing bottles at the
apartment window. Several other people who had just left the club, as well as
a number of random passersby, witnessed the altercation and began scattering
to avoid the raining shards of glass. Amendment I: My brother, cousin, and
I abruptly began to walk up the street toward the subway to avoid the chaos
that was unfolding. Another bottle was hurled. This time, the apartment
window cracked, and more glass shattered onto the pavement. We were halfway
up the block when we looked back at the guys who had been hanging outside the
store. They had jumped in the car, turned off their music, and slammed the
doors, and were getting away from the scene as quickly as possible. As we
continued to walk toward the subway, about six or seven bouncers came running
down the street to see who had caused all the noise. "Where do you BOYS
think you're going?!" yelled the biggest of this muscle-bound band of
bullies in black shirts. They came at my family and me with outstretched arms
to corral us back down the block. "To the 2 train," I answered.
Just then I remembered that there are constitutional restrictions on
physically restraining people against their will. Common sense told me that
the bouncers' authority couldn't possibly extend into the middle of the
street around the corner from their club. "You have absolutely no
authority to put your hands on any of us!" I insisted, with a sense of
newly found conviction. We kept going. This clearly pissed off the
bouncers—especially the big, bald, white bouncer who seemed to be the head
honcho. Amendment II: The fact that the
bouncers' efforts at intimidation were being disregarded by three young Black
men much smaller than they were only made matters worse for their egos (each
of us is under five-foot-ten and no more than 180 pounds). The bouncer who
appeared to be in charge warned us we would regret having ignored him.
"You BOYS better stay right where you are!" barked the now seething
bouncer. I told my brother and cousin to ignore him. We were not in their
club. In fact, we were among the many people dispersing from the site of the
disturbance, which had occurred an entire block away from their
"territory." They were clearly beyond their jurisdiction (we spent
weeks on the subject in Civil Procedure!). Furthermore, the bouncers had not
bothered to ask anyone among the many witnesses what had happened before they
attempted to apprehend us. They certainly had not asked us. A crime had been
committed, and someone Black was going to be apprehended—whether the Black
person was a crack addict, a corrections officer, a preacher, a professional
entertainer of white people, or a student at a prestigious law school. Less than 10 minutes
after we had walked by the bouncers, I was staring at badge 1727. We were
screamed at and shoved around by Officer Ronald Connelly and his cronies.
"That's them, officer!" the head bouncer said, indicting us with a
single sentence. Amendment III: "You boys out here
throwin' bottles at people?!" shouted the officer. Asking any of the
witnesses would have easily cleared up the issue of who had thrown the
bottles. But the officer could not have cared less about that. My family and
I were now being punished for the crime of thwarting the bouncers'
unauthorized attempt to apprehend us. We were going to be guilty unless we
could prove ourselves innocent. Amendment IV: Having failed to
convince Connelly, the chubby, gray-haired officer in charge, we were up
against the wall in a matter of minutes. Each of us had the legs of our
dignity spread apart, was publicly frisked down from shirt to socks, and then
had our pockets rummaged through. All while Officer Connelly insisted that we
shut up and keep facing the wall or, as he told Red, he would treat us like
we "were trying to fight back." The officers next searched through
my backpack and seemed surprised to find my laptop and a casebook I had
brought to the club so that I could get some studying done on the bus ride
back to school. We were shoved into the
squad car in front of a crowd composed of friends and acquaintances who had
been in the club with us and had by now learned of our situation. I tried
with little success to play back the facts of the famous Miranda case in my
mind. I was fairly certain these cops were in the wrong for failing to read
us our rights. Amendment V: We were never told that
we had a right to remain silent. We were never told that we had the right to
an attorney. We were never informed that anything we said could and would be
used against us in a court of law. Amendment VI: After my mug shot was
taken at the precinct, Officer Connelly chuckled to himself as he took a
little blue-and-white pin out of my wallet. "This is too sharp for you
to take into the cell. We can't have you slitting somebody's wrist in
there!" he said facetiously. I was handed that pin the day before at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. . . . I wanted to be transported back there,
where I had seen the ancient Egyptian art exhibit that afternoon. The relics
of each dynastic period pulled a proud grin across my face as I stood in awe
at the magnificence of this enduring legacy of my Black African ancestors. This legacy has been
denied for so long that my skin now signals to many that I must be at least
an accomplice to any crime that occurs somewhere within the vicinity of my
person . . . this legacy has been denied so long that it was unfathomable for
the cops that we were innocent bystanders in this situation . . . this legacy
lay locked all night long for no good reason in a filthy cell barely bigger
than the bathroom in my tiny basement apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts .
. . this legacy was forced to listen that night to some white guy who was
there because he had beaten up his girlfriend the way the cops frisking my
cousin had threatened to beat him down if he kept trying to explain to them
what had really happened . . . this legacy is negated by the lily-white
institutions where many Blacks are trained to think that they are somehow
different from the type of Negro this kind of thing happens to because in
their minds White Supremacy is essentially an ideology of the past. Yet White Supremacy was
alive and well enough to handcuff three innocent young men and bend them over
the hood of a squad car with cops cackling on in front of the crowd,
"These BOYS think they can come up here from Brooklyn, cause all kinds
of trouble, and get away with it!" Amendment VII: Indeed, I had come from
Brooklyn with my younger brother and cousin that evening to get our dance on
at the Latin Quarter. However, having gone to college in the same
neighborhood, I consider it more of a second home than a place where I
journey to escape the eyes of my community and unleash the kind of juvenile
mischief to which the officers were alluding. At 25 years old, after leaving
college five years ago and completing both a master's degree and my first
year of law school, this kind of adolescent escapism is now far behind me.
But that didn't matter. The bouncers and the
cops didn't give a damn who we were or what we were about. While doing our
paperwork several hours later, another officer, who realized how absurd our
ordeal was and treated us with the utmost respect, explained to us why he
believed we had been arrested. Amendment VIII: After repeated
incidents calling for police intervention during the last few months, the
24th Precinct and the Latin Quarter have joined forces to help deal with the
club's "less desirable element." To prevent the club from being
shut down, they needed to set an example for potential wrongdoers. We were
just unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time—and to fit
the description of that "element." To make matters worse from the
bouncers' point of view, we had the audacity to demonstrate our understanding
that for them to touch us without our consent constituted a battery. As Officer Connelly
joked on about how this was the kind of thing that would keep us from ever
going anywhere in life, the situation grew increasingly unbelievable.
"You go to Harvard Law School?" he inquired with a sarcastic smirk.
"You must be on a Ball scholarship or somethin', huh?" I wanted to
hit him upside his uninformed head with one of my casebooks. I wanted to
water torture him with the sweat and tears that have fallen from my mother's
face for the last 20 years, during which she has held down three nursing jobs
to send six children to school. I wanted to tell everyone watching just how
hard she has worked to give us more control over our own destinies than she
had while growing up in her rural village in Trinidad. I still haven't told
my mom what happened. Seeing the look on her face when I do will be the worst
thing to come out of this experience. I can already hear the sound of her
crying when she thinks to herself that none of her years of laboring in
hospitals through sleepless nights mattered on this particular evening. Amendment IX: It did not matter to
the officers or the bouncers that my brother is going to graduate from
Brooklyn College in June after working and going to school full-time for the
last six years. It did not matter that he has worked for the criminal justice
system in the Department of Corrections of New Jersey for almost a year now.
They didn't give a damn that I was the president of my class for each of the
four years that I was at Columbia University. It did not matter that I am now
in my second year at Harvard Law School. And in a fair and just society, none
of that should matter. Our basic civil rights should have been
respected irrespective of who we are or the institutions with which we are
affiliated. What should have mattered was that we were innocent. Officer
Connelly checked all three of our licenses and found none of us had ever been
convicted of a crime. Amendment X: It should have mattered
that we had no record. But it didn't. What mattered was that we were Black
and we were there. That was enough for everyone involved to draw the
conclusion that we were guilty until we could be proved innocent. After our overnight
crash course in the true criminal law of this country, I know now from
firsthand experience that the Bill of Rights for Blacks in America completely
contradicts the one that was ratified for the society at large. The afternoon
before we were arrested, I overheard an elderly white woman on the bus as she
remarked to the man beside her how much safer Mayor Giuliani has made New
York City feel. I remember thinking to myself then, "Not if you look like
Diallo or Louima!" It's about as safe as L.A. was for Rodney King. About
as safe as Texas was for James Byrd Jr. . . . and this list could go on for
days. Although the Ku Klux Klan may feel safe enough to march in Manhattan,
the rights of Black men are increasingly violated by the police of this and
other cities around the country every day. In the context of some of these
atrocities, we were rather lucky to have been only abducted, degraded, pushed
around, and publicly humiliated. Nevertheless, Black people from all walks of
life can have little security in a nation where police officers are free to
grab Black bodies off the street at random and do with them whatever they
please. ADDENDUM: On Wednesday, February 23,
2000, after four court appearances over five months, the D.A.'s case against
Bryonn Bain, Kristofer Bain, and Kyle Vazquez was dismissed. No affidavits or
other evidence were produced to support the charges against them. After five months
and four court appearances with the assistance of Professor Kellis Parker of
Columbia Law School, Bryonn Bain wrote this article for a Harvard Law School
class called "Critical Perspectives on the Law." He submitted it
for publication at the suggestion of his professor, Lani Guinier. View "Walk Black Live," the reader response to this article.
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fter hundreds
of hours and thousands of pages of legal theory in law school, I have finally
had my first real lesson in the Law. On Sunday, October 18, 1999, I was taken
from the corner of 96th Street and Broadway by the NYPD and held overnight in
a cell at the 24th Precinct in New York City. While home from school for the
weekend, I was arrested for a crime I witnessed someone else commit. 