Black History is Every Month: Henry Louis Gates: ‘We Were Always Men’; A tale of two New Yorks: pandemic lays bare a city's shocking inequities; Uzo Aduba as feminist trailblazer Shirley Chisholm in the Hulu series 'Mrs. America'; ‘They Will Remember
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Thanks John and Gary
As much as I always knew that bad things can happen anywhere, I never dreamed my family would be involved in a situation like the one that occurred on April 12, 2015, when Freddie was arrested and suffered what would be a life-ending injury. I remember watching the news and seeing what happened to Trayvon Martin in Florida and Mike Brown in Ferguson, thinking how hard it must be to deal with that kind of tragedy; never imagining that my family would find ourselves on the front page and national news in the same position.By now everyone knows what happened and honestly, it’s too painful to talk about the incident that landed Freddie in a coma and ultimately ended his life on April 19. Instead, I try to focus on appreciating all the support that my family received that helped us get through the hardest time of our lives.A lot has happened since Freddie was taken from us. My family has been through so much trying to find normalcy, and it’s difficult. My stepfather, Richard Shipley, passed away in 2018, adding more grief for us to fight through. Not many people know but my other brother, Raymond, was murdered as well, making all of this so hard on my mother. She has had two sons murdered, buried a husband and every day it is a battle to move forward because no one has been held accountable for what happened to Freddie.There is no closure, and there is no way for Freddie to rest in peace without justice, and it doesn’t look like that will ever happen. Our attorney and our community fought hard to keep Freddie’s name alive, and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby did the right thing by charging the six officers who were responsible for his death, but justice has still never been served. That hurts."
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“Every nook and cranny of the emergency department was full of patients attached to portable oxygen tanks, people so sick they needed beds. The stretchers filled the room and spilled down the corridors, 10 patients in just one hallway,” he said.
The dreadful sounds of sickness filled the room. “It’s like a chorus, a cacophony of coughing.”
Petty, a pediatric emergency nurse who now spends much of his time caring for adults with coronavirus, could not help envisaging the thousands of contagious micro-droplets being expelled into the air with all that coughing. “I felt like I was walking into a cloud of poison,” he said.
Coronavirus has exposed New York’s two societies; one rich, one poor
Petty is on the frontline of the frontline: New York City. The metropolis has become the focus of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, just as in 2001 it became the focus of the worldwide al-Qaida terrorist threat on 9/11.
Day by day, the statistics tell their own grim story. On Tuesday, the New York City death toll overtook that of 9/11 and now stands at 3,602 (2,753 died in the city in the 2001 terrorist attacks). On Wednesday, it was announced that New York had suffered its highest number of fatalities in a 24-hour period – 806 lives snuffed out in just one day.
The attack is coming in waves – not just on one sunny morning in September as when the Twin Towers came down, but over days and relentless weeks. There are Ground Zeros dotted throughout the city, like Jacobi, one of 11 major public hospitals that are all now pushed to, and beyond, the limit.
As the crisis thickens, a picture of how the virus is ravaging the city has come into view carrying with it a sobering realization. Coronavirus may not in itself discriminate, but its outcomes certainly do. It has inflicted its terrible toll not so much on New York City, but on the two cities it contains.
“Coronavirus has exposed New York’s two societies,” Jumaane Williams, the public advocate who acts as the official watchdog for New Yorkers, told the Guardian. “One society was able to run away to the Hamptons or work from home and have food delivered to their door; the other society was deemed ‘essential workers’ and made to go out to work with no protection.”
Different boroughs, even different neighborhoods within each borough, are experiencing coronavirus almost as though it were two different contagions. In wealthier white areas the residential streets are empty; parking spots that are fought over in normal times now stand vacant following an exodus to out-of-town weekend homes or Airbnbs.
We have almost 100% people of color in our emergency room.
Sean Petty
In places like the Bronx – which is 84% black, Latino or mixed race – the sidewalks are still bustling with people making their way into work. There is still a rush hour. “We used to call them ‘service workers’,” Williams said. “Now they are ‘essential workers’ and we have left them to fend for themselves.”
The public advocate pointed out that 79% of New York’s frontline workers – nurses, subway staff, sanitation workers, van drivers, grocery cashiers – are African American or Latino. While those city dwellers who have the luxury to do so are in lockdown in their homes, these communities have no choice but to put themselves in harm’s way every day."
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Rutland Melton, a deacon in the same church, said that after three years of service in the military, including a year in Vietnam, a year working for Chevrolet in New York, and four years in Columbus, Ohio, working two jobs trying to make ends meet, he got a call from his mother back in Lynch saying that US Steel was paying $50 a day in the coal mines. He returned in 1972 and worked as a miner until he retired in 1998.
“Everybody knows everybody,” Melton said. “If one person is in trouble it means that everyone is in trouble. The first day I was scared. I had never been in a mine. But once you get in there, you don’t think about being scared. You think about the dollar. It was dangerous work. The twenty-three years that I was with the mines I am not going to say I was lucky I did not get hurt, I was blessed.”
Rutland, like many former miners, is suffering from symptoms associated with black lung. He uses supplemental oxygen for episodes of shortness of breath."
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