That a 13-year-old black boy, riding his bike on the eastern edge of the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, would be attacked and nearly beaten to death by three young white men, is no surprise to blacks living in nearby neighborhoods, or anyone else in the city with a historical memory.
What is surprising is that this particular incident became news not just locally, and not just for 24 hours, but nationally and globally as well. Why did the media latch onto this one crime of racial hatred when they have ignored so many other hate crimes in the past?
To blacks, Bridgeport is still a part of Chicago where you just don't go after sundown. It used to be worse. You didn't cross on foot, even in broad daylight. You went around or rode through on the bus to somewhere else.
My aunt Marguerite lived at 47th and Indiana Avenue. Not far from Bridgeport and the stockyards. During the summer months, my cousin Cynthia and I were allowed to take the Greyhound bus from Milwaukee to Chicago to stay with Aunt Marguerite for a week, usually in August around the time of the Bud Billiken Day parade and picnic.
We heard stories about black people who were nearly killed in Bridgeport. Blacks were never to go there unless they knew somebody or worked in the stockyards. If they had to go through the area, they never walked alone. Always in twos and threes.
"I have an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow," Aunt Marguerite said one day.
"At 8:30 in the morning. Sharp. We have to leave early. The doctor says I must be on time. Okay?"
"Okay," I said. The doctor's office was in Bridgeport. It was the late Fifties, and I was maybe 10, maybe 12 years old.
So the next morning we took a bus to 35th Street, then transferred to the 35th Street bus and headed west. We got off near Halsted Street. "Don't dawdle," the driver said, and we didn't.
When we stepped down from the bus, I looked up at Aunt Marguerite. Her normally soft oval set jaw had a hard edge. She clutched my hand and said, "we have three blocks to walk," and set a pace requiring my short chubby legs to break into a trot.
As we passed a house, three men came out with lunch pails. "Niggers going to clean house? That's all yer good fer," one yelled. The other two laughed.
Aunt Marguerite squeezed my hand tighter, and made me pick up my pace. I struggled to keep up. I could feel eyes watching, heads turning, hear hissing.
When we reached the doctor's office, in a two-story brownstone, he was outside waiting on the front steps. He motioned wildly and pointed to the office door, telling us to get the hell inside, fast. Once inside he moved rapidly toward his desk, waiving my aunt to fill out the waiting forms while he checked the traffic from his window.
"Why here," my aunt asked?
Because I was assigned to cover this area for federal jobs," the doctor answered, "and I'm closest to your address."
Aunt Marguerite's job required her to get a physical. But her regular doctor was a black man, and in the Fifties, the credentials of black doctors were unacceptable to the white establishment.
It was the fastest physical exam I've ever seen. When the doctor finished, he looked out the window again and told my aunt it was time to leave. Before we left, he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a .45 caliber handgun, saying he needed it in this neighborhood. Always kept it handy. Later, I realized that what really worried him was his own safety, not ours.
He walked us to the door. Two squad cars were sitting outside. "Nigger day, huh doc?" one policeman chuckled. Aunt Marguerite glanced at the policeman, then at the doctor. She said nothing. The doctor told the officer she was a government employee and asked him to escort us back to the bus stop. "Okay," said the cop. "I don't like niggers running loose in the neighborhood.
Aunt Marguerite grabbed my hand and, with head held high, we marched back to the bus stop. One squad car slowly followed at a distance until we reached 35th Street, then made a U-turn and headed back up Halsted as if diving back into the heart of Bridgeport. Only when the bus pulled up, we were safely inside, and the bus had pulled away from the curb did Aunt Marguerite finally relax her grip on my hand.
"The acts of a few people must never become an excuse for blanket condemnation," President Clinton advised the listeners to one of his weekly radio addresses after the beating. Mayor Daley agreed. "We're talking about three individuals--three thugs," the Mayor remarked around the same time. "That's all they are. You cannot condemn a community."
Yeah. Right. There have been thousands of Lenard Clarks in hundreds of Bridgeports across this country. Lynchings, they were called. Private vigilantes acting outside the law to enforce their notion of blood, race, and land against a minority population. That's precisely how we should interpret the beating of Lenard Clark: the political equivalent of a good old-fashioned lynching -- without the rope.
One needed only to see the faces of the three young suspects as they were being paraded before the television cameras that Sunday evening, March 23, when they were arrested.
Cold, stony faces. Alien faces. Remorseless and indifferent faces.
The light-haired Frank Caruso spitting venom at one of the cameramen, telling him to get the camera out of his face. There was no remorse in that face. Only anger. Anger over his having been caught and exposed.
"We who still have tinges of racism in our hearts need to be forgiven," Bishop Raymond E. Goodert of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago said one week later, on Easter Sunday.
Tinges, father?