Black Lives Matter! “No Big Deal!”

BY Rev. William R. Freeman, (M.Div’01)

While driving to church on Sunday morning, May 19, 2019 my wife and I were listening to the radio and having a discussion about what’s going on at our home church in the village of Harlem, New York City, when the host of the program began to discuss the police disciplinary hearing on the 2014 death of Mr. Eric Garner some five years earlier.

You may remember the case.  In 2014 police, in attempting to arrest Mr. Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on the street, tackled and wrestled him to the ground.  As one of the officers, a Mr. Daniel Pantaleo put Mr. Garner in a choke hold, Mr. Garner was gasping, “I can’t breathe,” I can’t breathe” over and over again, some eleven times.  Mr. Garner subsequently died.

This is just one of many murders of young, and in this case, not so young, un-armed Black men and women by armed white police officers  in New York, in Ohio, in Florida, in California, in Oklahoma, to name a few states. What made this case so egregious is that the reporter on the radio said that when one of the other policemen involved in the attempt to arrest Mr. Garner texted his lieutenant at the police station about what had happened; and said that Mr. Garner had no pulse and was probably dead, the text came back “NO BIG DEAL!”

As a Black boy born in a small town in the backwoods of Alabama in the late 1930’s, I was taken by one of my uncles to see a tree where Negroes were lynched.  As I was later raised in Harlem, New York, that statement by the police lieutenant brought back memories of that tree in Alabama.
To this preacher, who participated in the Civil Rights movement; who was a follower of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; and who listened to, and bought albums by Brother Malcolm X – el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, that statement “NO BIG DEAL” is one of the most racist things a person can say when a man has just been murdered.  It shows just why the phrase, “Black Lives Matter” is appropriate.

Sure, we know and believe, All Lives Matter: black, brown, white, red, and yellow.  But, because many white people still believe they are the chosen and privileged people, we want to say loud and clear, “Black Lives Matter, TOO!”

When a police lieutenant, is told that a 350 pound Black man with asthma, has been choked to death can say, “NO BIG DEAL” it shows that white racism is still alive in America.

Lastly, I wonder if: when Trevon Martin was murdered; when Tamir Rice was murdered; when all the other Black men and women were murdered, was the underlying response by those police officers, “NO BIG DEAL! I wonder!

P.S. As of July, 2019 officer Pantaleo was declared “NOT GUILTY” by the United Stated Department of Justice.