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"That's How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers Into Activists
"That's How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers Into Activists
By Esther Wang
Posted on July 24, 2016, at 10:01 a.m. ET
Surrounding her was a group of women who had traveled from as far
as Baltimore, Cleveland, and Oakland to be there with her, all mothers
whose own sons had been killed by police officers — Wanda Johnson,
the mother of Oscar Grant, who had his life cut short on New Year’s
Day in 2009 by a bullet to his back; Constance Malcolm, whose 18-
year-old son Ramarley Graham was shot and killed in the bathroom of
their Bronx apartment in 2012; Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of
Amadou Diallo, who in 1999 had 41 bullets fired at him as he reached
for his wallet; Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was gunned
down as he played with a toy gun in a Cleveland park; and Iris Baez,
the mother of Anthony Baez, who, like Garner, died as he was choked
by an NYPD officer, asphyxiating to death on the street outside his
childhood home in the Bronx on a winter night in 1994.
Decked out in buttons listing the dates of their sons’ births and deaths
as their “sunrise” and “sunset,” the sons who have become the suns
around which their lives now revolve, the mothers chanted as they
marched, using “I can’t breathe!” as their rallying cry.
“We’re not going to go away,” said Constance Malcolm, the lilt of her
native Jamaica in her voice. Four years after Ramarley’s death, Richard
Haste, the officer who killed her son, remains on the force, as does
Daniel Pantaleo. “There’s no accountability. Until we have
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
accountability, we’re going to keep having marches and going to
funerals.”
In the 1990s, Iris was one of the most well-known faces of that
decade’s anti–police brutality movement. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who
has known and worked with Iris for decades, still describes her as the
“ultimate activist mother.”
After her son Anthony’s death, Iris founded Parents Against Police
Brutality with Margarita Rosario, another Puerto Rican woman from
the Bronx whose son and nephew were gunned down by NYPD officers
three weeks after Iris’s son was killed. Parents Against Police Brutality
would become an important leader of the city’s dynamic grassroots
police reform movement, and a group that, in the words of Andrew
Hsiao, a journalist who wrote for the Village Voice in the late 1990s,
kept “direct-action politics alive while helping to make police brutality
one of the defining political issues of [the] time.”
More than 20 years later, the work she spearheaded has been largely
forgotten by the public
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but Iris Baez is continuing to organize with a group of women she
simply calls “the mothers,” a group that includes Gwen Carr,
Constance Malcolm, Kadiatou Diallo, and numerous others she’s
searched out over the years at funerals and rallies, in courtrooms, and
at their homes. Part recruiter, part therapist, part prophet, Iris tells
them is that justice is possible, or at the very least, a simulacrum of
justice. What they really want — for their children to be returned to
them — is an impossibility, but killer cops, she tells them, can go to
prison.
In New York, against huge odds, Iris and these women are leveraging
their power as grieving mothers to demand political reform. Together,
working closely with the city’s police reform advocates, they’ve won
important victories, just last year leading a campaign that compelled
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to appoint the state’s attorney general
as an independent prosecutor in cases where police officers use deadly
force, the first of its kind in the nation.
Now, in the days and weeks following the deaths of Alton Sterling and
Philando Castile, they’re mobilizing again, campaigning for the
passage of the Right to Know Act — a package of bills that would
require officers to, among other things, identify themselves during
police encounters — and attending the wake of Delrawn Small, a
Brooklyn man who was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in
a road rage incident on the 4th of July, a death that has flown under
the national radar.
Yet they’ve learned that these moments pass all too quickly. After the
initial furor over yet another death calms down, after the stories of
their sons’ deaths at the hands of the police become a footnote in our
shared history, after “That’s
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trickle away — these women, welded together by circumstance, are the
ones who remain, compelling us, as the poet Claudia Rankine has
written, to continue not only to mourn with them, but to resist the
impulse to forget the names of their children.
“In the beginning, you have a lot of people around you,” Iris said. “But
after a while, it calms down, everybody goes back to usual. And that’s
when you’re alone.”
A few weeks earlier, I had gone to see Iris at her home in the Bronx,
the same three-story brick building where she raised Anthony and her
other children, on a side street nestled next to the bustle of Jerome
Avenue.
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Iris moved to New York City with her
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glamorous career as a flight attendant, but her mother took her out of
school in the sixth grade to help care for her two younger sisters, and
she never went back. Instead, she married Ramon Baez and worked as
a teacher’s assistant and home care aide before eventually devoting
her life to her family and her church, and, after Anthony’s death, to
seeking justice for her son.
But Anthony and his three brothers had decided to road-trip back to
the neighborhood where they grew up, and on that night, they were
tossing a football through the cold December air, the street quiet but
for the gleeful shouts of the four brothers, empty of life except for
Iris’s sons and a couple of police cruisers idling on the curb.
“I don’t know what happened. I just know that I wanted to find out
who killed him, and whoever killed him was going to go to jail. That’s
it,” Iris said, reflecting on the days after Anthony died. We’re sitting in
her battered blue minivan, parked in front of her house, and her eyes
are fixed straight ahead, her mouth a grim line. “Somebody had to pay
for the murder of my son.”
Her house, which the family bought in 1968, is falling apart. The roof
needs to be patched up, she’s behind on her property taxes and her
water bill, and the entire building has an air of neglect. She lives with
her son David as well as her 13-year-old son Erwin, whom she adopted
in 2006 and who’s been recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. To
help take care of the bills and to supplement her monthly Social
Security checks, she’s resorted to raffling off copies of Every Mother’s
Son, a 2004 documentary by Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson that she
was featured in. “Everything needs fixing!” she says as she labors up
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A mural painted in honor of Anthony Baez on the side of his mother's home in the Bronx.
Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News
Yet lately, she’s put her personal life on the back burner. In May, she
and a group of activists went to Cuba, on the invitation of the
country’s federation of women. She then went to Miami for a retreat
for mothers of gun violence victims led by Sybrina Fulton, the mother
of Trayvon Martin, and then it was off to Martha’s Vineyard for a
weekend to take part in a series of events with an artist who has
painted larger-than-life portraits of her and other mothers.
Iris tells me she’s tired, but she’s found the time on this day to meet
with Hawa Bah, the mother of Mohamed Bah, a Guinean immigrant
who was shot and killed in his Harlem apartment in 2012 after officers
responded to a 911 call
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She’s come to Iris this morning for advice on how to pressure the
Department of Justice to file charges against the officers involved in
Mohamed’s death, and they’re talking strategy amid the din of the
elevated subway that rumbles by every few minutes and the shrieking
of two of Iris’s grandchildren, who are running from room to room
playing a game of cops and robbers, one of them clasping a neon green
fake gun in his hands.
Iris ignores all of this; her focus is on Hawa, who’s sitting on the worn
black leather sofa in the living room. “You have to get on the DOJ, send
faxes to him,” Iris counsels her, referring to Preet Bharara, the US
attorney for the Southern District of New York.
For Hawa, it’s reassuring to have Iris as a guide. “She knows more than
I know. She’s been in this for 21 years,” Hawa says of Iris. “I’m just in
this for four years.”
Hawa is not the only woman Iris is counseling — the previous day, she
traveled to New Jersey to meet with Cecilia Diaz, whose son Elvin was
shot and killed by Hackensack police officers last May. And the day
before that, she made sure to attend a vigil held by Constance
Malcolm.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
For many of these women, Iris is an inspiration. “This is my support.
This is who I stand with. This is who stands with me,” said Gwen Carr
of Iris. “Even though her case has been settled, she knows how
important this fight is.” Constance, who met Iris in the courthouse on
May 15, 2013, the day that Richard Haste walked away a free man, has
described her in the past as the woman who keeps her moving.
Iris has become used to the tears of grieving mothers over the years.
She sits silently and then, after a moment, slowly pushes herself up,
grabs a tissue, and wordlessly hands it to Hawa.
Iris still watches the local news every day at 4 p.m. on the television in
her bedroom, keeping an eye out for stories about new victims of
police shootings. That’s how she heard about Richard Gonzalez, who
died while in police custody in March of this year. She went to his
family's apartment in the Bronx and slipped a note under Gonzalez’s
door with her phone number, and recently, his wife, Hafiza, called her
to meet.
She describes her work as her calling, but it can be just as easily read
as a form of therapy. “It keeps my sanity, to hear what they go
through,” she said of the other women.
The mother in pain has long been a prophetic voice — in other words,
a political figure whose jeremiads help shame a nation into action.
“Having family members, having mothers that can talk about what
their loved ones have meant to them” moves the issue of police
brutality beyond statistics, said Rashad Robinson, the executive
director of Color of Change, a national online civil rights organization
that has worked with Constance Malcolm as well as Samaria Rice.
“We’ve had a history in this country of family members and mothers
being able to help Americans understand issues better,” Robinson said.
“I think about the role that Judy Shepard [the mother of Matthew
Shepard] played in helping to pass hate-crimes protections for gays
and lesbians. These mothers can tell stories and give us a perspective
that makes people, even oftentimes some of the most cynical of
political folks, sit up and listen.”
Many of these women have made the choice, much like Till-Mobley, to
demand that we join them in their public mourning, starting
foundations in their children’s honor and using their platform to call
for legislative change.
They are, even if they don’t know it, continuing the work that Iris and
others began in the 1990s, building off the groundwork laid by Parents
Against Police Brutality. Coupled with the propulsive force of the Black
Lives Matter movement, they have created an opening for reform. Not
content to merely be symbols, they’re determined, as Gwen Carr often
puts it, to turn their sorrow into strategy. If no concrete policy change
occurs, then the deaths of their children have been in vain. And that is
a reality none of them can accept.
Susan Karten, an attorney for the Baez family, remembers the first
time she met Iris, a few days after Anthony was killed. She was “a
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turnaround.”
“I represent a lot of people who’ve lost children, and it can go a lot of
different ways,” Karten says. “But with Iris, she just went full-fledged
into this.”
“That’s when it hit me, like, oh my god, this is really happening,” Iris
said of meeting Margarita. The problem, she realized, was bigger than
just her son, and a few months later, the two would birth Parents
Against Police Brutality. “I grew up watching Martin Luther King on
TV, so I knew that I was going to have to take that kind of action,”
Margarita recalled. She asked a longtime organizer what she needed to
do to get justice for her son, and he told her that she had to make her
son’s name a household name. “And I said, 'How do you do that?' And
he said, 'Speak everywhere, wherever you get invited, you go and talk
about your son.'”
Iris took those words to heart. She started a foundation in her son’s
name and turned the basement of her home into a command center.
She ordered thousands of business cards and began pounding the
pavement, passing out fliers and meeting with anyone who could help
her, from the city’s established black and Latino leaders to street
gangs like the Latin Kings and organizers and activists from far-left
groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party, always with a large
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
button — the size of a small dinner plate — of her son’s face pinned to
her chest. As she met more women and more families whose loved
ones had been killed by police, her mission broadened, to get justice
not only for her son, but for the children of other women like her.
By the time Livoti went on trial in the summer of 1998 (he had been
acquitted in a criminal trial in 1996, and the DOJ had filed civil rights
charges against Livoti shortly after), Iris and Margarita had built not
only a local movement of families, but a national one, launching the
Stolen Lives Project in 1996 and traveling the country teaching
families how to push for accountability. In an interview from 1997, Iris
described her work in this way: “Maybe me going out in the street, me
hollering and carrying on is to help other people to the light, to bring
them to the light that we have a big problem in this city.” Dozens had
joined Parents Against Police Brutality, and families from all corners
of the United States had begun mailing her photos of their dead
children and the stories of how they died, and asking for her help.
Getting to that day had taken almost four years of rallies and protests
(at one point, Iris, Margarita, and a handful of others had even
occupied the Office of the Bronx District Attorney, refusing to leave
until he met their demands) and had required the will to confront the
NYPD, whose commissioner, William Bratton, had, at one particularly
heated town hall meeting, called Parents Against Police Brutality “a
bunch of fools.”
It should have felt like a victory, and a rare one. A recent Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review analysis found that in the 21-year period between 1995
and 2016, the DOJ rejected 96% of all complaints brought against law
enforcement officials, and since Livoti, no other NYPD officer has had
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
federal civil rights charges filed against them for the killing of a
civilian.
But for Iris, it was a bitter, partial one, and still is today. “We never got
justice. Because he went to jail for violating [Anthony’s] rights, but he
didn’t go to jail for murdering my son. So I can’t stop. Because he
never went to jail for murdering my son!” Iris said emphatically.
“That’s why I have to keep it alive. I have to keep it in the newspaper.”
What would justice feel like? “When they get justice, I get justice,” Iris
said, referring to the mothers, women like Gwen Carr, Hawa Bah, and
Constance Malcolm.
Constance still lived in the apartment where her son was killed, as do
her youngest son Chinnor and her mother, Patricia Hartley. Her home
was cluttered with markers of her new life — in her bedroom, there
was a bullhorn stacked on top of neat towers of her shoes, as well as
the large speakers she uses for rallies. Protest signs were propped
against the wall of her living room. There’s little trace of Ramarley,
beyond a framed photo of him with Chinnor and a stack of his clothes,
still neatly folded in his grandmother Patricia’s bedroom, where
Constance has left them untouched for the past four years. She’s also
kept, for reasons she can’t explain, the blood-stained bath mat from
her son’s deadly encounter with Richard Haste.
In her apartment, she got ready for the day ahead, putting on her
makeup with the precision of a soldier preparing for battle and pulling
together everything she needed into a Zara bag, including the scrubs
she would wear to work the next morning. Despite how packed her
schedule is, Constance had recently taken on another job in addition
to her work as a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in
Ossining, New York. “I need to stay busy,” she said.
How to hold police officers accountable when they kill the people
they’re charged with protecting? This question was at the heart of the
campaign — led by families of victims, including Constance, Iris, and
Gwen Carr — that forced New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign
an executive order in July 2015 authorizing the state’s attorney general
to investigate cases in which police officers use deadly force, and, if
warranted, bring officers to trial. On that day, New York became the
first state in the country with a special prosecutor charged with
prosecuting police killings independently of local district attorneys.
While outcry over the lack of indictments of the officers who killed
Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland played a
large role in the ousters of the district attorneys who prosecuted those
cases, and while special prosecutors are often appointed to look into
individual instances of police brutality, no other state since has
created a similar position.
If the protests that were roiling New York City created the
opportunity, it was these mothers who pushed it through, leading a
campaign that relied on their stories of being let down by district
attorneys who they felt had only halfheartedly called for the
indictment of the officers who killed their sons. They told the stories
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
of how their children had died over and over again, to news outlets, to
elected officials, and to Gov. Cuomo himself, holding rallies and press
conferences at the state capitol and in front of his office. “They were
the ones that made the compelling argument that the government
couldn’t turn down,” said Rev. Al Sharpton — a truth seemingly echoed
by the fact that in Cuomo’s speech on the day he signed the order,
flanked by Constance Malcolm to his left and with Iris and the
mothers who had held his feet to the fire watching from the audience,
he repeatedly referenced the women and their organizing as critical to
his decision, calling Constance in particular a “spirited,” “opinionated,”
and “informed" woman.
Her thoughts then turned to the upcoming day and the vigil for her
son. “I hope a thousand people show up,” she said.
The turnout would be much less than that. One month later,
Constance and Frank, Ramarley’s father, were told the news: The DOJ
would not be pursuing federal charges against the man who killed
their son. Richard Haste would never face prison time for killing
Ramarley. This news wasn’t greeted with the rioting in the streets that
some local elected officials had predicted. Beyond a core of dedicated
activists and anti–police violence organizations, the general public
had moved on.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
Yet Constance, just a few weeks later, threw herself back into the work,
speaking at events and going to rallies held by other families. Much
like Iris two decades before her, Constance has embraced her role.
“This is how I give back to other new mothers. I call it this boat that no
one wants to be in,” said Constance. “A lot of times, mothers get thrust
in this. We didn't ask for this. [But] we become this tiger, we come out
swinging.”
Constance Malcolm, left, comforts Valerie Bell, whose son was also killed by police, during a
remembrance rally for Malcolm's son Ramarley Graham on April 24, 2016.
Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News
What often goes unacknowledged is the toll that the death of their
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
loved ones and the organizing work has had on these women and their
families. The Baez family fractured after Anthony’s death, a fissure
that has only widened over time. Iris blames herself, and the fact that
for years, she spent more time pursuing justice for her dead son than
with the living. “When they kill somebody in your family, they kill the
whole family,” Iris said. Anthony, she recalls, was the one who made
holidays special, the son who would dress up as Santa Claus every
Christmas. With him gone, she said, “there’s no Christmas, there’s no
Thanksgiving.”
According to Iris, many families make the choice to fade away from
the spotlight. “It’s the repeat, repeat, repeat,” she said. “You get tired
after a while.”
The filmmaker Tami Gold, who grew close to Iris after including her in
the documentary Every Mother’s Son, has a theory of what compels
her. “I think that being in the struggle for so long, that she gets a lot
from it,” Gold said. “I think she receives an enormous amount of
validation.”
Despite the victories Iris has been part of — the special prosecutor
campaign, sending Livoti to prison — she’s not planning on stopping,
frustrated by the ebb and flow of outrage. “When they killed Diallo,
people rised up. When they molested [Abner] Louima, the people rised
up. But then they go back to their normal selves. And that’s what I
don’t understand,” she said. Her voice got indignant, rising to a new
register. “I say no. I can’t live like that,” she said. “I don’t know why. I
can’t accept it. I want to accept it, but I can’t.”
“People are tired, that's what I think. A lot of people feel that we're not
gonna get nothing. Nothing's gonna change,” she continued. “But I've
seen the change.”
We were in the basement of her house, and her son Erwin was
sprawled on a couch playing a video game. The only decoration in the
room, other than tacked-up photos of her family, was her mantel,
which dominated a wall and was crowded with framed photographs
not only of her son Anthony, but of the sons of the mothers and
parents of the movement: Amadou Diallo, Kimani Gray, Trayvon
Martin, Mohamed Bah, Nicholas Heyward Jr., Oscar Grant, Ramarley
Graham.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
I asked her about them, and she told me that she had taken the photos
from a rally last year, where they had been displayed on the ground as
a makeshift altar. Once the rally ended, everyone left, leaving them on
the ground. It was raining, she remembered, and she felt she couldn’t
just leave them there. “I grabbed my son, I grabbed Diallo. Then I said,
I know this one. And this one and this one and this one,” she said of
the portraits. “There were a lot more, but I couldn’t carry them.” •
Esther Wang is a freelance writer based in New York City. In 2016, she
was a BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellow, and in 2013, she was an Open
City Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.
Esther Wang is an emerging writers fellow for BuzzFeed and is based in New York.