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Caught in a Legal Drama that Started Before He was Born

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No one wants to be the poster child for a Supreme Court challenge. However, finding his case before the Supreme Court could not only help Urbana, IL, resident Shamar Betts resolve his own situation, but it could redraw the legal lines designed to limit opposition voices since 1968. Betts is a very young man caught up in a legal drama that started long before he was born.

Betts is currently in the Champaign County Jail awaiting sentencing on the charge of having incited the wave of anger that swept through the Urbana/Champaign area the night of May 31, 2020, causing more than $100,000 of property damage. The damage happened, the anger was certainly real, but Shamar's placement at the crosshairs of the federal government's campaign to attribute the outrage that followed Floyd's murder to shadowy "violent radicals" is not so simple. Betts' situation is an unfortunate product of two colliding timelines: a new civil rights struggle and election-year demonization of the opposition.

"The Poorest Town in the Poorest State"

Shamar Betts, born in 2000, is a child of the new millennium, but it hasn't helped him very much. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his mother worked at a hospital. At St. Ethelreda, a private Catholic school, he learned to play chess with the award-winning school club. When his mother died of a heart condition 11-year-old Shamar was sent to live with relatives in Tchula, Mississippi.

Today Amtrak trains bound for New Orleans fly through the town of 2000 without stopping, but in 1964 Tchula was ground zero for Freedom-Summer activism. Civil rights activist Micky Schwerner had worked in Tchula just a few weeks before he and two other activists were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, with the participation of local law enforcement, in nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi. By the time Betts came to live in Tchula, the town's challenges were such that they were summed up in a 2015 Guardian article entitled "The Poorest Town in the Poorest State." The median household income ($14,000) and the life expectancy (67) are among the lowest in the nation.

Far away from Tchula, however, a new civil rights era was brewing, thanks to phone cameras and social media. In 2012, 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin was shot by a community-watch member who found Trayvon's hoodie (and race) suspicious. When the shooter was acquitted in 2013, a new hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, provided a place for African Americans to share their feelings of injustice. In 2014, African American Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by New York City police. A video shared online spurred protests, but also an inquiry. One month later unarmed 18-year-old African American Michael Brown died after being shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Again, social media posts and nightly protests drew attention to the local history of racialized policing. In 2015, 25-year-old African American Freddie Carlos Gray died after suffering a spinal-cord injury while being taken for a "rough ride" in a Baltimore police van. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, yet none of the six officers charged were found guilty. This time social media posts spurred national protests but also a federal review of Baltimore police practices.

The same year Shamar Betts graduated from middle school in Mississippi.

In 2017 Betts moved to Urbana, to join his older brother. He graduated from high school in 2019 and found a job with the Urbana Park District. His favorite part of the job was teaching chess in an after-school program. Betts started thinking about college and maybe a future as a teacher, but then the pandemic shut down his workplace. Betts waited at home, watching newsfeeds filled with reports on the racial inequities in COVID outcomes across the country.

And then in May Betts' Facebook feed brought him the video of a police officer kneeling on an African American man's neck, for eight long minutes, in Minneapolis.

Eight Long Minutes and the Misplaced Federal Response

Betts saw the video of George Floyd's May 25 death and wanted to cry. "I didn't know him, but everyone I knew was like him." The video, combined with the inadequate response of the Minneapolis Police Department and the governor, fed the anger that had been building for years. Protests grew and multiplied across the country. In Champaign-Urbana, Betts joined a local BLM march, but it didn't seem like enough.

Across the country in Washington, DC, Attorney General William Barr finally took the podium to issue a statement on the Floyd case on May 30. Barr insisted that the "regular process" of the justice system was moving forward in response to Floyd's death, but spent the majority of the speech discrediting the demonstrators. He characterized the protests as "planned, organized, and driven by anarchistic and far-left extremists ... many of whom travel from out of state to promote the violence." He accused the violent anarchists of "hijacking peaceful protests" and warned them that it was a "federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting."

The following day, Sunday the May 31, Barr issued a new press release, repeating the claim that radicals had "hijacked" peaceful protest for their "extremist agenda," and pledging assistance from the 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Barr set out the federal position succinctly: "The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly." In September Barr telephoned federal prosecutors and escalated the rhetoric, encouraging them to consider sedition charges against those involved in summer protests.

In laying out the government strategy of a domestic-terrorism response, Barr was not only drawing a line in the sand for the protesters, he was burnishing Trump's reputation as a law-and-order president. The Department of Justice (DOJ) claim that "Antifa" represented an actual organization that could be held responsible for the protests dismissed the authentic grief and rage of Americans in the face of continued police violence. However, it fit particularly well within the Trump reelection campaign's pandering to right-wing conspiracy theories of shadowy secret forces threatening American values. So well, in fact, that Barr was summoned in July to testify before Congress on the DOJ response to the protests. Barr denied that the election season had had any effect on his handling of the Floyd demonstrations. Yet in September Barr again echoed Trump's campaign themes when he warned that a Democratic victory in November could lead the country down the socialist path, and accused the Democrats of being the party of "violent protest" and "mob rule." To make their case of sinister forces, though, the administration needed culprits.

"Let's Get Busy"

The same day Barr threatened to treat protesters as domestic terrorists Shamar Betts lost his patience with American police violence, and added his own cry of outrage to the social media storm.

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Janice Jayes teaches history at the Illinois State University. She is interested in how culture shapes understanding of national security issues and options. She previously taught at Al Akhawayn in Morocco, American University of Cairo, and American (more...)
 
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