Two Shots Fired
On June 23rd, just two days before what would have been Tamir Rice’s 17th Birthday, Rebuild Foundation formally dedicated the Tamir Rice Memorial Gazebo on the Stony Island Arts Bank Lawn. The Arts Bank is one of several places that are part of Chicago Arts + Industry, which connects civic assets with untapped potential on the city’s South and West sides.
The deconstructed gazebo where 12-year old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a Cleveland Police Officer was brought to the Stony Island Arts Bank in 2016 at the request of Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice. Since its arrival at the Arts Bank, the gazebo materials have served as a site of community reflection, healing, and a call to action for legislators to enact everlasting change that protects our country’s black and brown youth. The gazebo, in its full, reconstructed form, creates the unique opportunity for communities affected by police violence to grieve, reflect and heal.
Professor Adam Green at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture uniquely understands the challenges and injustices faced by black and brown youth throughout the country, but especially in Chicago. Since the deconstructed gazebo was first brought to the Stony Island Arts Bank in 2016, Professor Green has been an integral part of illuminating the gazebo’s importance for communities impacted by racially-motivated police violence throughout history and throughout our country. At the public dedication ceremony on June 23rd, Professor Adam Green delivered a call to action that reflected on the inequality that black and brown youth in this country have faced for centuries and urged our leaders to recognize, respect and fight for the humanity of Black life.
Below is a transcript of Professor Adam Green’s June 23rd dedication:
Two shots fired. Two, three, maybe four seconds — the time elapsed from pulling up to the Cudell Recreation Center and this gazebo in Cleveland, until Officer Timothy Loehmann fired those two shots — not enough time to accurately ID a real weapon, not enough time to determine whether twelve-year old Tamir Rice, son of Samaria Rice, posed a threat to public safety. Seven — the number of Cleveland Police officers, including Loehmann and his partner Frank Gamback, who refused to cooperate with a Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office investigation into Tamir’s death in 2015, enabling Loehman to avoid indictment by a grand jury later that same year. Two shots, taking the life of Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014. Six bullets from a Ferguson MO officer that took the life of eighteen-year old Michael Brown, also in 2014. Ten bullets that took the life of seventeen-year old Jordan Russell Davis in Jacksonville FL, from a self-styled vigilante’s gun in 2012, similar to the one bullet from another vigilante’s gun that killed seventeen-year old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford FL that same year. Sixteen shots fired by Chicago police killing seventeen-year old Laquan MacDonald in 2014. Twenty bullets fired by police ending the life of twenty-two-year old Stephon Clark in Sacramento CA in 2018. Fifty shots fired by a tactical police squad to kill twenty-one-year old Fred Hampton and twenty-two year old Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969. One bullet used to kill fourteen-year old Emmett Till, in Money MI in 1955. One bullet, from the gun of an off-duty officer, used to kill twenty-two year old Rekia Boyd in Chicago in 2012.
The arithmetic of devastating and unwarranted death that steals our youth away, Tamir and too many others, hounds memory and conscience, the wholeness of our love, and the trust we hazard in the very premise of justice. What replaces the presence of those taken so wrongly? How to reckon with the demonizing of one’s son or daughter as threatening, violent, and thus expendable, in the eyes of too many in society? What manner of rebuilding, inside the heart and without in the world, could recall the beauty of those who lived as laughing boys and girls before? What must be done to prevent still more mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends, from undergoing this loss, this trauma, in the future?
The gazebo that we rededicate today is but a stage, a prospect, from which to reckon with, argue over, and jointly heal in the face of such questions. Yet we might take guidance from the architectural role of the gazebo, to provide an elevated and climate prospect from which to regard the bounty of landscape. What would yield an acceptable garden from these bitter seeds? What could restore and redeem a soil watered with blood? What vistas or prospects do justice to those once loved, now lost, never forgotten?
To recover this garden worth tending, viewing and sharing from this prospect, we must commit to tell the truth. The braiding of care and life among crops, trees and flowers, is little different from the threading of love that holds others to us — those present, those gone, those taken. Each of these weavings requires unsparing detail and honesty. This means sharing, when and where possible, what made those boys and girls radiant, unique, and alive. Not only how they laughed and played, but what they were bothered by, what frustrated them. Not only how dearly they were loved, but how dear a gift they knew it was to be capable of loving others, and loving oneself.
Recovering this garden also means telling broader, harder truths. It means telling the truth that our boys and girls are not extended the same opportunities to grow, to dream — or to make mistakes, like playing with a toy gun — that other children take for granted. It means calling out a society whose books too often are balanced by reducing resources that serve our children and concentrating them among others — whether related to education, mental health, skills training, or social networking and expansive human exchange. It means retraining that same society not to cite introversion, resentment or even anger among our youth as a probable cause for execution, for surely anger outside our community, especially among young white men, routinely affords opportunity to indulge, enable, and even celebrate, without sparking fatal encounters as a rule. Look no further that Timothy Loehmann, the officer who shot Tamir. Twenty-eight years old at the time of the shooting, Loehmann, despite previously falsifying his application to become a Cleveland police officer was hired back as an officer in Bellaire Ohio in late 2018. The Sheriff supervising that department considered Loehmann to be fully exonerated, fully redeemed, and therefore fully qualified to resume wearing a badge and carrying a gun. He would be working there today had not others, led by Samaria Rice, made clear their objections for reasons of personal conscience and human decency. Recovering this garden would mean noting that here in Chicago, only 8% of Black boys enrolled in CPS (Chicago Public Schools) eventually earn college degrees. Black people in nearby Englewood barely survive to 60, while those living in Streeterville live past 90.
Whether Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir Rice at this gazebo in Cleveland on November 22, 2014 because of racism, anxiety exacerbated by withheld or faulty dispatcher information, or a constitution incapable to deal with the stress of patrol work is but part of the story. Equally important is what gave rise to a society where again and again, Black people find their wellbeing, their contributions, and their security discounted to the point of dehumanization. In that sense the changes needed are not the targeted reforms of body or dash cams, sensitivity training, or even civilian review boards. So long as this society abides different destinies for Black and white, it will produce police who enforce that difference, too often to the point of death. This is the garden too familiar, one we know too well by now, one we wish to till over and restart, for we care for no more of its strange fruit, with blood on its leaves, and blood at its root.
When the theologian Howard Thurman preached on April 6th, 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he concluded those brutal and terrible events demonstrated that American society, for all its power and pride, was “not yet human.” By gathering today to embrace, to heal, to remember and to resolve to demand better for our children, we call up a measure of that still absent humanity, and bequeath it to this nation. But there is so much more to do — requiring truth, solidarity and courage, as well as memory, creativity and love.
May this stage and prospect look upon a garden that celebrates all our children, living and gone. May that garden remind us, and charge us to remind others, that our children have abundant humanity, inestimable value, everlasting love, and the same right as all children to have their triumphs celebrated, and their missteps and imperfections forgiven. May we tend to that garden in a way that honors Tamir, his mother Samaria, all those who knew and loved Tamir, and all those who love our children as if they are the most important source of value in our shared lives. We must do that as both example and challenge to a society yet to prove its humanity — which it must, if it stands any chance to survive.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
