After hearing about the dragging of Anthony Hill that occurred in Newberry, I started to do some research. If you read my editorial last week, then you know that in my research I discovered that our state of South Carolina has no hate crime legislation. However, whether or not Mr. Hill’s death was a hate crime, by the legal definition, is still up for debate.
With so many unanswered questions, I decided to go down to Newberry and find answers to the unknowns nagging at my soul. Having never visited Newberry before, my plan was to get a sense of the place, the people, the culture – I wanted to get a feeling about the community climate of Newberry. So I booked myself a room at the Hampton, packed my suitcase, gathered up my laptop and headed south on what I like to call my Nancy Drew adventure.
Prior to my trip, I contact Major Todd Johnson at the Newberry County Sheriff’s Office. If I was going to investigate this story, I wanted to read arrest warrants and incident reports. Major Johnson was kind enough to share these documents with me, but more than that, he was willing to meet with me in Newberry so I could conduct my own face-to-face interview. Because I border on OCD as a researcher, I read countless articles about the dragging, the New Black Panther Party rallies in Newberry, and explanations of hate crime legislation. I couldn’t have been more prepared for my trip or less prepared for the fact that I ended up coming home with more questions than answers.
After spending my first morning wandering in and out of the quaint little shops that comprise Downtown Newberry, I readied myself for my afternoon appointment with Major Johnson. I drove out to the sheriff’s office with mind-racing and my handy-dandy notebook containing all the carefully written out the questions I wanted to ask. Nancy Drew, investigative reporter, ready to tackle the case.
Major Johnson met me in the reception are with a warm smile and a firm handshake (something my mother taught me to look for and a gesture I sincerely appreciate). Keep in mind that there must have been some apprehension on his part. Ever since Hill’s body was discovered and Collins was arrested and jailed for the murder, normalcy in Newberry has been largely disrupted by a slew of television news crews and journalists thirsty for bloody details, FBI agents called in to assist in the investigation, the New Black Panther Party inciting immediate and riotous justice (if necessary), the ACLU, the NAACP – all people, like me, like so many, who need to understand what happened.
Of course, any time one member of a community is dragged for 11 miles, behind a truck, by another member living in the same community, how can life in that community ever be normal again? Perhaps the better question is should life return to “normal” if an event such as this occurred in the course of “normal” everyday life?
This is how my conversation with Major Johnson began. I was curious to know what life was like in Newberry after the murder and dragging of Anthony Hill – specifically race relations. Johnson confirmed my suspicions: race relations are not great. But not merely for the obvious reasons I had added up in my mind. My inquiries into the murder of Hill and the arrest of Collins morphed into more profound, philosophical questions that expand beyond the borders of Newberry County.
Fear, ignorance, suspicion, paranoia and, ultimately, hatred, have existed between racial groups since the beginning of mankind. The atrocities committed by one group of humans against another group of humans, based solely on race, ethnicity, culture, gender or religion saturated history in the South, across America and throughout the world. Racism is a global problem. Perhaps it is more insidious in the 21st Century South than it was blatant prior to and for some time after the Civil Rights movement, however, be it subtle or obvious, racism is alive and well every day in every nation.
It would seem, as Major Johnson and I continued our conversation, that poor race relations have continued to smolder, much like a camp fire, and recent political and economic changes have been fodder causing the fire to, once again, erupt into flames.
Johnson and I did not discuss politics. My keen observations, attendance at various local government meetings, coupled with the fact that I do not live in a cave, tells me that many people are not too happy about the fact that we have a Democratic President. Moreover, Obama is not just a democrat; he is a black man, the first African American, to ever take up residence in a historically WHITE House. On the surface the acrid battle is between elephants and donkeys, but my gut tells me that what it all boils down to is that many people are angry (and I don’t use this word lightly) that there is a “colored man” in the presidential office running our country – making powerful decisions – and for the first time in our nation’s history, there is a black man telling a lot of white men what they can and cannot do.
On a local level, consider this – at present there are no African Americans sitting on Pickens County Council, Liberty City Council, Clemson City Council, Central City Council or the School Board of Pickens County. Only one African American man holds a council seat in the city of Easley. What does this say about issue of race in Pickens County?
Add to this an economy in the proverbial toilet, and the racism fire rages. Everyone has suffered from our economic crisis. Unemployment rates have been horrendous and people are struggling to find jobs so they can support their families, pay their bills, and not end up living in a cardboard box on the street. The frantic competition for jobs that appear few and far between has created tension so thick that, forget the knife, we need a chainsaw to cut through it.
When there aren’t jobs to be had, people become desperate and look for any option possible. Crime rates escalate. Major Johnson told me that there have been several shootings in Newberry, just in the last month or so, that are quite the exception for this area. There have also been changes in South Carolina legislation, he told me, like nothing he has seen in his 20 plus years in law enforcement. Criminal statutes have changed so drastically that people who commit crimes are going to be able to do so with very little consequence.
Why? It costs money to house people in jails. State budget cuts have impacted law enforcement like they have affected the schools. If there isn’t money to house criminals in jail, what is the alternative? Construct a system with lesser penalties for the crimes committed, and, Voilà! kids – Crime Pays! Crime rates are typically higher among minority groups, but this can be traced to other issues like poverty or discrepancies in educational opportunities. Crime is not about color.
Certainly I could go on and on, but I am only allotted so much space per paper. Rest assured that this is a subject I will continue to research and write about because it is so overwhelmingly important. I would be interested to know what our readers out there think, and I welcome emails, letters and the like. The thing is, racism, race relations, discrimination – these are all topics about which people tends to develop an ostrich mentality. If we bury our heads in the sand and pretend the problem does not exist, it just grows stronger and more powerful like a wildfire left to rage out of control.
I would like to offer a special thanks to Major Todd Johnson down in Newberry. The short amount of time I was able to spend with him made me realize that, however unspeakably heinous the dragging of Anthony Hill was, and as much hate has to exist in order for this to have happened, it is going to be very difficult to prove that this was, by legal definitions, a hate crime. Because race cannot be ignored in this case at some level, this is a prime opportunity for communities to start talking about a problem that continues to plague us no matter how much “progress” we have made. Above all else, Major Johnson reminded me that the problem of race is not, ironically, a black and white issue. Cocooning the heart of the problem, wherein I also believe lies the solution, is a labyrinth of grey that must be navigated with open minds and open hearts.
