To the south-east lies Miami. Last May, four white policemen were acquitted there after the fatal beating of a black suspect, Arthur McDuffie. It happened on the street, after a chase. The medical examiner said that McDuffie’s injuries were consistent with ‘falling four storeys and landing between your eyes’. When the acquittal was announced there were three days of rioting: 16 dead, 400 injured, $ioo million worth of damage.
In Buffalo, New York, last September, four random blacks were shot in the head by the same white man. A fortnight later, two black cabbies were found with their hearts ripped out. In Oklahoma City, a black man and a white woman were shot to death in a parking lot. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, black leader Vernon Jordan was shot in the back while climbing out of a white woman’s car. In Johnstown, Philadelphia, a mixed couple were murdered as they walked across the street. In Salt Lake City, Utah, two black men were shot while out jogging with white wortien.
In Birmingham, Alabama, there is a Ku Klux Klan military training camp, called My Lai in honour of the war criminal William Galley. In Greensboro, North Carolina, last November, an all-white jury acquitted six Klansmen and Nazis of the murder of five black and white Communists. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, acquittals and dropped charges have released five Klansmen accused of killing five black women on the streets.
Are these things connected? Are the Killings in Atlanta connected, to these killings or to each other? It is very tempting to see patterns here, or simply a change in the emphasis of murder in America.
Atlanta looks peaceful enough in the mild winter light. Atlanta in August will be a different proposition from Atlanta in January. The killings will not have been solved; and by then, too, President Reagan’s passive attitude to pro-black legislation will have begun to hurt. Anyway, the summer is the time for racial anger and despair. In summer, the ghettos always heat up. They will expand and swell in the sun. Some will burst.
Observer 1981
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Postscript Early in 1982, an irregularly employed black disc-jockey called Wayne Williams was convicted of two of the Atlanta child murders and, by implication, some or all of the remaining twenty-seven. There was much that was unsatisfactory about the trial. The evidence for the prosecution centred on the (circumstantial but compelling) fact that ‘fibres’ found on the victims matched the Williams family carpet. Williams’s defence was agreed to be feeble verging on incompetent. The trial raised all sorts of questions about the exertion of public — and media — pressure to effect a palliative outcome. It seemed to me weirdly characteristic that the first thing Williams did, on his arrest, was call a press conference. Meanwhile, serving his life sentence, Williams ponders the legal options, his hand occasionally strengthened by such things as Abby Mann’s five-hour drama-documentary for CBS, The Atlanta Child Murders, which was very partial, very anti-establishment and very pro-Williams (the killer, Mann implies, was probably white). Have the murders come to an end? The violent death of poor American blacks, unless given urgency by politics, has never much exercised the American judiciary; and some observers suggest, most depress-ingly, that the Atlanta murders continue, as they always have and always will. Perhaps, then, the Killings in Atlanta are over, while the killings in Atlanta go on.
Truman Capote: Knowing Everybody
It was, I hope and trust, a radically below-par Truman Capote who received me at his UN Plaza apartment on an equatorial New York afternoon.
‘Truman’s sort of sick,’ said the lady from Random House who answered the door.
‘Oh dear. Would you rather I… ?’
‘No, he can talk. So long as he can rest at the same time.’
I was led past a couple of reception rooms, beyond whose jungly curios and foliage you could glimpse the burnished leagues of the East River. Then, from the gloom at the end of the passage, emerged the helpless, tottering figure of Mr Capote, who let out a soft wail of greeting and extended a tiny hand.
For pity’s sake, I wanted to say — never mind the interview. Let’s call an ambulance. Or I can take him there in my briefcase, I thought, as I contemplated the childish, barefoot, night-shirted figure, sixty-three inches tall and barely a hundred pounds. But Truman clutched me dramatically by the hand and urged me towards the bedside chair. The lady from Random House then took her leave with a calming smile.