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“We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some police brutality!”
Those were the words of civil rights activist Wyatt Walker in 1963, after Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., ordered police to sic German shepherds on crowds of protesting children.
You’ve seen the photos in your high school history books. Black kids. Angry policemen. Snarling dogs.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about the moment in “David and Goliath.” He reveals to us that “Walker and Martin Luther King were trying to set up that picture — the German shepherd lunging at the boy.
“But we shouldn’t be shocked by this,” Gladwell writes. “What other options did Walker and King have?
Two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.”
Fast-forward 63 years, and you could be forgiven for doubting King’s advice.
We’re drowning in photos. And videos. There’s no need to manufacture a photograph-ready event anymore — the events come to us. Renee Good’s bloodied airbag. Our neighbors disappeared into the gaping mouths of anonymous minivans.
TikTok, Instagram and Twitter hold all the horrors we could ever need.
These images pierce us. They send us howling into the streets. We march. We chant. We honk horns and blow whistles into the face of Fascism. Racism. Authoritarianism.
Don’t like those words? Call it whatever you want. As long as you call it what it is: a deliberate campaign to make us afraid. To remind us that even in this literate, liberal city, our values alone may not save us.
A colleague sent me a video yesterday. A federal agent is berating a young woman at the intersection of Highway 7 and Blake Road in Hopkins. She’s observing ICE operations.
“Shame on you,” she says.
The agent squares up to her. Incredulous: “Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?” he demands. “Have you not learned?”
But she’s not having it.
“Learned what?” she asks.“What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?
You can see the agent tumble to the logical conclusion as he looks away from the camera. To be afraid. That’s the lesson. But just as quickly as the thought approaches consciousness, he shakes it off and tries to snatch the phone from her hands.
Likely, I’m giving him too much credit. Maybe he wasn’t momentarily ashamed. Maybe he was just tired. Just wanted to get back to his quiet life, work on his car on the weekend in his garage under a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, never connecting the cognitive dissonance dots between “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Just Comply.”
That’s the banality of evil. Sometimes it doesn’t look like a monster. Sometimes it looks like your forty-five-year-old uncle cosplaying as G.I. Joe at an intersection in Hopkins.
So what levers of resistance do we have that don’t require our children, our neighbors and our loved ones to serve as cannon fodder in a peaceful confrontation with the federal government?
When civil rights activists in Alabama marched from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, they were beaten and brutalized by state police. In response, President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized roughly 1,800 Alabama National Guardsmen. Alongside 2,000 Army soldiers, they escorted the marchers the full 50 miles to Montgomery.
Will the Army come to save us now? Of course not.
But I was almost heartened to hear Gov. Tim Walz say the Minnesota National Guard is “staged and ready.”
“Minnesotans have met this moment,” Walz said. “Thousands of people have peacefully made their voices heard. Minnesota: Thank you. We saw powerful peace. We have every reason to believe that peace will hold. Yesterday, I directed the National Guard to be ready should they be needed. They remain ready in the event they are needed to help keep the peace, ensure public safety, and allow for peaceful demonstrations.”
Peace. Peacefully. The governor says the word five times.
But I don’t feel it.
You have to adopt a deeply perverse definition of “holding the peace” to survey this city and still conclude that intervention isn’t warranted. A governor can deploy the National Guard whenever a breakdown of public safety exceeds the capacity of civilian authorities.
So let’s do the math.
The Minneapolis Police Department has 600 sworn officers. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there are 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 2,000 Immigration Customs Enforcement agents crashing through our streets.
So send in the Guard, Gov. Walz.
Send them to protect brown and Black children as they enter and leave school.
Send them to protect peaceful protesters.
Send in the Guard, the sons and daughters of Minnesota, to give witness to the violence against the sons and daughters of Minnesota.
Send in the Guard.
Dominic Saucedo is a faculty member at Minneapolis College.
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