Ishmael Reed: "Throughout my life, I have had frightening, maddening and absurd encounters with police officers."

By Ishmael Reed

From [HERE] Every black southern family that I’m aware of has a cold case. The murder of a family member by a white man about which records might have disappeared or been deleted. It’s family oral tradition that keeps the story alive.

My grandfather, Mack Hopkins, was stabbed by a white man on July 9, 1934. He told my mother that when he arrived at Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., he overheard a doctor say, “Let that nigger die.” My mother was 16 at the time. My grandfather did die, and his killer remained free.

His death was my first encounter with the criminal justice system. Now, I’m trying to gather details about the murder of his sister Ready, who died after being struck by a car in Anniston, Ala., in the 1960s, while walking down a road. The two young white men in the vehicle that killed her, who were probably drunk, told family witnesses that they thought that she was a telephone pole — as though she never existed.

What happened to Mack and Ready could have happened to any black person. Maybe a future Justice Department will reopen these files so the murderers no longer walk free.

Like many black men, I’ve had numerous encounters with the police. Growing up in public housing, I learned at an early age that the Fourth Amendment didn’t apply to my family or our neighbors. The police would burst into our apartments at any time they wished. I’ve had police draw guns on me. Once, in 1958, Buffalo police stopped a car in which my companions and I were riding and pointed guns at us. They’d mistaken us for some other blacks.

In 1972, my wife and I were living in the Berkeley Hills neighborhood of Berkeley, Calif., while I worked on a novel. We used an advance from Doubleday to pay our bills. A policeman entered our small apartment with a gun drawn. He said he was investigating a homicide. But he left without any further discussion. I believe I’d aroused suspicion from the neighbors because I was a black man working at home.

The same excuse was used when the police came to our apartment on St. Marks Place in Manhattan on more than one occasion in the summer of 1969. Perhaps it had something to with my association with an underground newspaper that reported on police brutality. Reading Natalie Robins’ “Alien Ink: The F.B.I’s War on Freedom of Expression,” I learned that I may have been monitored by the F.B.I. in that era. William J. Maxwell wrote in “F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African-American Literature,” that many black writers of my generation were.

In 1975, I was invited to do a reading of my poetry by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa at the University of Colorado Boulder. Those chosen to put me up that night were two white men. They were wearing sweaters and seemed to be mimicking a counterculture style, but I noticed that they were a little too clean cut. The next day, as I was departing for the airport, one of my hosts told me that he had a bag of “good grass” as a gift to me. I rejected it. When I arrived at the Boulder airport, I was taken into a room. Officers inspected my carry-on bag and found only pens and paper. (I was working on a review of a biography of Muhammad Ali for The New York Times.)

The scariest incident, which I’ve written about over the years, including in “Another Day at the Front: Dispatches From the Race War,” occurred in New York City. I was walking down the street in the company of two companions. Seeing two policeman exiting a restaurant holding bags, I quoted, in a voice loud enough that one of them heard me, from a recent report on police corruption that accused officers of accepting bribes. A few moments later, my friends and I were continuing our walk when suddenly a police car sped toward us. [MORE]