Somerville 5 case: ‘Racism!’
Published Jun 8, 2005 8:01 PM
Dorchester, Mass., June 5.
|
“Are we going
backwards?”
This was the question asked at a June 5 news conference
in Dorchester, Mass., held to publicize the demand that five Somerville African
American youths be immediately reinstated as students at Somerville High School
near Boston and that trumped-up police charges against them be
dropped.
The Somerville 5—Calvin Belfon, 17, Cassius Belfon, 15,
Earl Guerra, 16, Isiah Anderson, 17, and Marquis Anderson, 16—were victims
of racial profiling and a brutal, unprovoked attack by Medford police on April
20. The five have been indefinitely suspended from school. And they face false
charges, including assault with a deadly weapon, assault and battery, and
disorderly conduct.
The news conference was held on the steps of the
Greater Love Tabernacle Church. Congregation and community members filled the
church steps and immediate sidewalk. Speakers included the Rev. William
Dickerson, pastor of the church; Leonard Alkins, president of the Boston NAACP;
Minister Rodney Muhammed, Nation of Islam; Robert Traynham of the International
Action Center; and a representative of the Massachusetts Association of Minority
Law Enforcement Officers.
Speakers put out a call for Somerville Public
Schools Superintendent Albert Argenziano to immediately reinstate the youths in
school; for Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley and Massachusetts
Attorney General Thomas Riley to thoroughly investigate the Medford Police
Department; for Gov. Mitt Romney to effectively respond to the police misconduct
charges; and for the U.S. Justice Department to conduct a thorough and impartial
investigation of the incident.
Various speakers compared this case to the
recent trial held in Milton, Mass., involving five white men at Milton Academy
who were charged with sexual assault. They were “sentenced” to 100
hours of community service, counseling, and two years of probation.
This
obvious slap on the wrist is the sort historically given to white men in the rac
ist, sexist criminal justice system. Pointing out this racial disparity,
Minister Muham med said, “Everything bad in society gets dumped on the
Black community.”
The Somerville 5 case is of national importance.
It exposes the ongoing crime of racial profiling by the police, and police
brutality—both faced every day by communities of color in the United
States. The question remaining, as asked at the news conference, is whether
there can be “a new day in this old town.”
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