Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 1 November 2002 — Page 3

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1,2002

THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

PAGE A3

Do Black suspected snipers stigmatize the entire race?

Continued from A1

“When I saw the snipers’ pictures, I yelled out loud, ‘No, no, dear Lord, why did they have to be Black?’” Dale Brown, an administrative assistant at a consulting firm in Washington also was at home when she first heard the news. “I received a call from someone who works in a company where there are very few Blacks out of several hundred people,” Brown says. “This person was dreading going into work because of the race of the sniper. I told this person that they can’t be ashamed because of the choices that this person made. It ultimately does not reflect on you.” Still, many African Americans see it that way. “It shocked the hell out of me that he’s Black because you don't see Black folk doing anything like that,” says Terone B. Green, chairman of the Urban League of Greater Richmond, Va. “When I look at his picture when they flash it — and they’re going to. flash it over and over again — he looks no different than me, who wears a suit. And we’re going to be stereotyped for it ... The standards are always different for us.” Bill Retcher Jr., president of TransAfrica Forum in the nation’s capital, agrees. “If the sniper had been a white person, no one would draw any generalized conclusions about white people,” Retcher explains. “The case in point is Timothy McVeigh. White men were not examined strangely or carefully following the Oklahoma City bombing. Nevertheless, when a suspect or culprit is someone of color, the larger white establishment infers or is explicit that general conclusions can be reached about the behavior of other people of color based on this incident.” Though not common, African Americans have been engaged in mass killing sprees in the past. In 1972, Mark Essex, a 23-year-old Navy veteran from Emporia, Kan., killed a grocer and a police cadet before driving to the downtown Howard Johnson Hotel, killing guests along the way as he ascended to the roof of the hotel. When he was killed by police marksmen riding in helicopters 12 hours later, Essex had killed nine people—five of them police officers — wounded 19 others and had caused more than $1 million in damage. Wayne Williams was labeled the “Atlanta Child Murderer” and linked to almost two dozen deaths that occurred over a two-year-pe-riod that began in 1979, though he was only convicted of killing two adults. He is imprisoned in Sparta, Ga., serving a double life sentence. On Dec. 7,1993, Colin Ferguson entered a Long Island railroad commuter train during rush hour and opened fire, killing six people and injuring 19 others. He is serving six consecutive life sentences. But it has been whites, in large measure, who have committed the most heinous crimes: • Ted Bundy was arrested in 1975 and eventually admitted to murdering 23 women. Police believe the actual number was more like 100. He was put to death in Rorida’s electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989. • Beginning in the summer of 1976, David Berkowitz, better known as the “Son of Sam” murderer, went on a 13-month killing spree. He killed six people and injured seven others, claiming he heard voices ordering him to kill. He is serving six consecutive life terms in an upstate New York facility. • John Wayne Gacy Jr. was arrested by Chicago police in 1978. He had killed dozens of boys. Investigators found 28 bodies in his house and another five in a nearby river. He was killed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994. • Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing 17 people, dismembering many of them and eating their flesh. In 1992, he was sentenced to 957 years in prison. Two years later, an inmate killed him in prison. • Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty in 1998to mailing bombs that killed

three people and injured 23 others. The “Unabomber” was on a rampage against technology. • In what was the worst act of domestic terrorism until Sept. 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh planted a 7,000-pound truck bomb that killed 168 people, 19 of them children, on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, Okla. McVeigh, who admitted blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building but never expressed remorse, was killed by le-

thal injection June 11.2001, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. It was the first federal execution in 38 years. Just as whites did not express racial guilt when those notorious crimes were committed. Glenda M. Ochman. an administrative assistant in Durham. N.C., says she doesn’t feel badly because the prime suspects in the Washington serial killings are Black. “I never thought of it that way.

maybe it’s how I look at life,” she says. “My first concern was the people killed, not who the sniper was — Black, white, grizzly or gray. I never thought of it in racial terms.” It’s not that African Americans see it in racial terms. Their fear is that others will view it that way. “The history of lynching weighs on our shoulders,” says Retcher of TransAfrica. "We, as a people, are always held responsible for the

actions of others among us (whether real actions, perceived actions or invented actions). For that reason, we always cringe when events such as the sniping unfold.” Julia Hare, a psychologist in San Francisco, agrees. “When Blacks perpetuate these crimes, we are all held accountable for this,” she says. “No Black man, middle-aged, will be safe. But when Timothy McVeigh hit the federal building, young white

malesdidn’t have tohave that feeling. There was no profiling of white males at all. Now with this, they look upon as as a monolithic people. If one has done something, we've all done something." (NNPA Managing Editor Florestine Purnell. Washington Correspondent Hazel Trice Ednex and National Correspondent Artelia C. Covington contributed to this report.)

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