Why Riot?

The Curious Case

On the morning of 12 April 2015, a man was arrested, by the time he arrived at the police station half an hour later, he was unable to breathe or talk. That Sunday, the 19th of April, 25 year old Freddie Gray passed away from injuries to his spinal cord as well as a crushed voice box.

“At 8:42 a.m., police requested a transport van at the scene.

At that point Gray, who had asthma, asked for an inhaler, but Moore said police ignored the request.

Batts has said Gray's trouble breathing was not given the proper attention at "one or two" of the van's subsequent stops.

As Gray screamed and word spread, residents began to pour out of nearby homes. Alethea Booze, 71, who has lived along Mount Street just north of Presbury all her life, said she was cooking in her kitchen when she heard Gray "hollering" outside. Booze, a retired Northrop Grumman production coordinator, had a stroke some years ago and moves slowly, but made it outside nonetheless.

A crowd had started to form, she said, and there was Gray, who used to call her "Mama" and run errands for her to the corner store, lying handcuffed on the ground.

Booze said she winced as police hoisted Gray. His legs appeared broken to her, though police have said Gray suffered no broken bones. Bystanders got more vocal. "Call the ambulance!" Booze remembers saying as police tried to disperse the crowd.”

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Fed up

Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Travon Martin, Tamir Rice, Bamarley Graham, Sean Bell, Freddie Gray, these are but a few victims of police brutality upon innocent African Americans. What happened to Freddie Gray was the tipping point for the people of Baltimore. Monday, April 27 was the day of Gray’s funeral, it was also the day when the already weeklong peaceful protests that were taking place in West Baltimore took a turn, a riot began which quickly became violent.

The rioters have reason to be angry, for how long are black people expected to watch their brothers and sisters die at the hands of senseless violence. News outlets refer to rioters as criminals and thugs and make sure to note the damage to properties around the West Baltimore area but fail to mention the ongoing loss of innocent lives. What’s a liquor store to lives lost?

American media and its personalities have been preaching non-violence, if that is the case then that should have been the American approach to 9/11, Libya, Syria, we can go on and on. The country was built off of war, murder and slavery.

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” –Martin Luther King

Every change in history has come on the heels of a radical violent exchange, the peaceful protests that had happened a week before were barely covered. African Americans want to be heard, they want justice, no more senseless killings, no more racism.

“The controlled press, the white press, inflames the white public against Negroes. The police are able to use it to paint the Negro community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the white public think that ninety percent or ninety-nine percent of the Negroes in the Negro community are criminals, and once the white public is convinced that most of the Negro community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the Negro community exercising Gestapo tactics, stopping any black man who is on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent, whether he is well-dressed or poorly dressed, whether he is educated or whether he is dumb, whether he’s a Christian or whether he’s a Muslim, as long as he is black and a member of the Negro community the white public thinks that the white policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights.” –Malcolm X

Martial Law Declared in Baltimore

Repeatedly condemning the rioters as “thugs”, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said a city-wide curfew between 10pm and 5am would be imposed for a week beginning on Tuesday night.

Unarmed male, Terrence Kellum, was shot ten times by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in the afternoon of the 27th of April on Detroit’s northwest side.

Black lives matter.