A mother's plea

By Fred Gaboury

CINCINNATI, Ohio - An anxious calm has settled over this city as residents of the African-American community await the outcome of a grand jury investigation into the murder of Timothy Thomas, an 19-year-old unarmed African American killed by Police Officer Steven Roach on April 7. Thomas' death brought the number of African-American men murdered by Cincinnati police to 15 since 1995, four since November.

"I'm waiting as calmly as I possibly can," Angela Leisure, Thomas' mother, told the World. "If they don't deliver, I don't know what I'll do. We're sitting on a powder keg."

Leisure was emphatic in her condemnation of the behavior of the Cincinnati police.

"They have to make some changes and quite a few of them should be fired - and so should their superiors." She accused the local media of overplaying the protests in order to take people's mind off the shooting of her son.

Since the protests began after Thomas' murder, Cincinnati police have made more than 800 arrests, most for violation of an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew imposed April 12.

"The youth that took to the streets are acting out the way I feel," Leisure said. Later, in a speech before an audience of 700 mostly young people crowded into the Freedom Baptist Church, Leisure said the protesters insisted on being heard.

"I will never hear my son again and I will never see him hold his son. And I wonder - what kind of a world will his son grow into. Let my son be the last to die," she said as the audience responded by slowly counting from one to 15.

When asked on April 16 about the status of the investigation into the Thomas shooting, Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen would say only that a grand jury will be convened "soon." Allen, a former Cincinnati police officer, said public opinion cannot be allowed to affect the outcome of the investigation.

"We have to be fair to any potential defendant," he said.

Francy Irons, whose son, Jeffrey, was killed by Cincinnati police Nov. 7, doesn't have much confidence in the outcome of the grand jury proceedings - and for good reason.

"They tell us the matter is still under investigation," she said. "We have never gotten a police report or a death certificate. They say he was trying to grab an officer's gun - but where's the gun? Were his fingerprints on it?"

In his remarks at Thomas' funeral, Martin Luther King III called on President Bush to make Cincinnati a national example for ending racial profiling.

"Racial profiling is one of the many things the bully pulpit of the presidency can affect," King said. "Cincinnati should be the example of how to bring it to an end."

In seconding King's call for presidential action to end racial profiling, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said the Thomas murder placed Cincinnati at "ground zero" in race relations. He charged the Cincinnati Police Department with targeting African-Americans, adding that the NAACP would conduct a voter registration campaign in the Black community prior to the 2002 election.

The Rev. Damon Lynch III, president of the Cincinnati Black United Front and pastor of the New Baptist Church, called the murder of Thomas one of the city's "darkest moments."

Lynch told reporters the rage following the shooting had succeeded in bringing international attention "to something we in the African-American community have been feeling for years." He said city officials were waking to that fact after "having their heads in the sand for 15 deaths."

Police violence continued even as mourners were leaving funeral services for Thomas on Saturday, April 14. In one incident police fired several beanbags - witnesses say 15 to 20 fired at point blank range - into a group.

Christine Jones, a teacher from Louisville, Ky., suffered a fractured rib, bruised lung and a bruised spleen. Two young girls and a 50-year-old man were also wounded.

Those interviewed for this story said the anger expressed by the African-American community, and especially African-American youth, were the consequence of years of racial tensions and inequities that two generations of Cincinnati's leaders have been ineffectual in alleviating.

Most, like Rev. James W. Jones, vice president of the Baptist Ministerial Association, and Art Slater, long-time community activist, wonder if anything has changed.

Slater pointed to the role played by the several multinational corporations headquartered in Cincinnati, beginning with Proctor and Gamble. "We call it 'Proctor and God,'" he said. "They run the city and nothing will change until that changes."

Six reports on race relations in Cincinnati have been produced since 1968. All found problems with the city's police department and many warned of dire consequences unless city officials took swift action to correct problems.

"It is clear ... that a problem does exist between the police and the community," concluded the Mayor's Community Relations Panel in 1979. "For certain segments of the community, an atmosphere of fear and distrust exists."

Another report, sent to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1993, found that "racial and cultural isolation is a perennial problem."

Two years ago, the Sentinel Police Association, which represents the city's African-American police officers, warned that something must be done to "quell the very tense and volatile atmosphere that currently exists between the police and the community."

Forty-three percent of Cincinnati's 330,000 residents are African American, as are 78 percent of the city's public school population. About 250 of Cincinnati's 1,026 police officers are Black.

Daniel Radford, president of the Cincinnati Labor Council, was not surprised at what he called the "unfortunate incidents" of the previous week. "The cause was not the shooting of Timothy Thomas. It's the despair and hopelessness that comes when young people grow up in a community where unemployment is near 20 percent and where half of the residents live in poverty," he said.

Radford, who has headed the 85,000-member council for 15 years, said the path to improving of these conditions and the anger they foster is good jobs, good housing and the opportunity to climb the economic ladder.