Somerville 5 case: ‘Racism!’

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.”