‘One bad policeman can destroy a city,’ says filmmaker Kevin Willmott. KCK should listen
At a rally for racial justice in Olathe on Saturday night, the Oscar-winning filmmaker and KU professor Kevin Willmott asked how many of us in the crowd were familiar with the subject of his next film, the Houston Riot of 1917, in which 156 Black Buffalo soldiers, “brutalized until they couldn’t take it anymore,” marched on Houston and “went after the police.”
In the diverse crowd of some 220, only a couple of hands went up, and I’m sorry to say that mine wasn’t one of them. “The reason y’all don’t know about it is you aren’t supposed to know about it.”
No, we weren’t supposed to know about the 19 U.S. soldiers who were executed after military trials at which they were represented by a single lawyer. Not one civilian could identify a soldier who’d fired a fatal shot, and there was no way to appeal.
That’s just like we weren’t supposed to know about the white incineration of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” or even about the rights systematically stripped from Blacks during Reconstruction. The stories we were told instead, about noble Robert E. Lee and brutish Ulysses S. Grant, about states’ rights — only one of those rights was ever at issue — and God help us, about all of those happy and well-loved house slaves, were false top-to-bottom.
False on purpose, just like the charges that sent Darryl Burton, who also spoke at the rally, to prison for 24 years before he was finally exonerated in 2008.
What a canyon there is between the stories of men, women and children imprisoned and shot and stopped for nothing, like Willmott says he is every time he drives through St. Louis, and the fires of white grievance so determinedly tended by the Ivy-educated likes of Josh Hawley and Kris Kobach: The elites think this is flyover country! They think we’re stupid!
On the other side of the chasm are people who only wish their worst day was that time Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables” and they were so excited they had T-shirts made.
On his very first day of kindergarten, Willmott said, a little girl in his class called him the n-word. Fast forward 40 years, and he’s being recognized in their hometown of Junction City, Kansas. She’s a teacher now, and “giving me all the love in the world. And she has no memory of the fact that she called me a n-----. And I didn’t tell her about it, because I know it would have destroyed her. But I remember that like it was yesterday, and that’s how racism works. We never forget it, and they always forget it. And they forget it because they pay no personal consequence.”
I keep hearing from readers that people like me — aspiring anti-racists, I guess you’d say, though they have other words for it — are creating racism by mentioning it. (Shhh, say nothing, and racism will just keep walking?)
I keep hearing we want to erase history, but that’s wrong, too; we want to remember all that’s been forgotten and learn all we never knew. We want to fill in the gaps, not so we can hate America but so we can live up to the ideals that slavery compromised from the start.
If you watch Willmott’s next movie, “The 24th,” he said, you’ll “see in that film that one bad policeman can destroy a city.”
The Black women and men in Kansas City, Kansas, who have come forward to accuse former police detective Roger Golubski of decades of abuse know all about that.
We weren’t ever supposed to know anything about those accounts, either, and Kansas City, Kansas officials still feign ignorance.
But at the end of the rally on Saturday, Kansas state Rep. Cindy Holscher got up and said Golubski’s name. “Today, he is a free man. Despite numerous allegations, he is able to roam the streets.”
She and some other legislators are sending the Kansas Bureau of Investigation a letter this week, formally requesting that they investigate allegations against Golubski that “include charges of sexual abuse of women, malicious actions toward citizens, and framing of minorities for crimes they did not commit,” as in the well-known case of now exonerated Lamonte McIntyre, who served 23 years for two murders he had nothing to do with.
The lawmakers, Holscher said, will be “imploring them to please investigate Roger Golubski.”
Until that happens, and until every case Golubski ever touched gets a new look, nothing else Kansas City, Kansas, says or does to improve the relationship between the cops and the community will mean much.
Because as long as history isn’t acknowledged, it isn’t over.
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
