Daily Mail, Thursday, August 8, 2019 Page 17T
he photo has evoked horror
and disgust around the world.
Flanked by two mounted white
police officers leading him by
a rope, the African-Americanman walks wearily but obediently
down a busy street, hands cuffed
behind his back.
The rope, gripped by one of the officers,
is clipped to his handcuffs.
Donald Neely, dishevelled, unshaven,
homeless and mentally ill, cut a pitiful
figure against the two officers, wearing
white stetson hats like the ‘good guys’ in
cowboy films when the picture was taken
last Saturday.
his alleged offence was trivial: criminal
trespass in a commercial area of the island
city of Galveston, Texas.
Police say he had been repeatedly
warned not to trespass, the last time only
two weeks previously, before they
apprehended him.
however, they would also have known
that Mr Neely suffers from bipolar disorder
and schizophrenia, and regularly sleeps on
the streets.
More to the point, says his lawyer, they
knew he was compliant and would hardly
need to be tethered with a rope.
even leaving aside Galveston’s long and
ugly history of slavery, the sight evoked
grim parallels.
As some noted in dismay, fugitive slaves
used to be marched publicly back to their
owners by rope or chain.
The tableau also had echoes of the
dreaded Ku Klux Klan, whose members
originally rode out on horseback to lynch
black people. Texas has long been a hotbed
of the race-hate group, whose enduring
grip on the Deep South was laid bare in
the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, starring
Gene hackman and Willem Dafoe.
Mr Neely’s family, lawyer and local
activists all insist a white suspect would
never have been treated in such a way.
E
veN if, as seems unlikely, the two
officers weren’t aware of Galveston’s
history of slavery, what were they
thinking in pulling a black man down
a street by a rope, like an animal?
‘They should have never did what they
did, put a black man in between two
horsemen that are white,’ said Mr Neely’s
sister, Taranette.
In a jarring irony, the outcry coincided
with news of the death of Toni Morrison,
the African-American author who wrote so
compellingly about racism and her
country’s toxic legacy of slavery.
In her most acclaimed book,
Beloved, an escaped slave kills her
young daughter to save the child
from a life in bondage.
Morrison would have had some-
thing to say about Galveston
police’s insistence that the
so-called ‘rope escort’ is ‘a trained
technique and considered best
practice in certain scenarios such
as during crowd control’.
There was, of course, no ‘crowd’
to control here — just a 43-year-old
father-of-seven whose mental
illness worsened after the death of
his grandmother in 2006.
Galveston’s black police chief,
vernon hale, has apologised for
the two officers’ ‘poor judgment’
and vowed that the rope-escort
practice would stop immediately.
Mr Neely has been released on
bail and is back on the streets. his
lawyer, Melissa Morris, said he had
walked along with the officers
because he did not want to be
kicked or dragged by the horse.
‘he doesn’t think he was violated.
he said they [the officers] were
nice and he doesn’t feel like
anything is wrong,’ she said.
But Mr Neely is mentally ill and
hardly the greatest judge. his
family is considering legal action.
Many Americans, however, will
almost certainly sympathise with
the arresting officers, who,
according to police chief hale,
‘want people to understand that
they were using tools they were
provided with to perform a job they
were asked to do’.
Yet it must still be asked whether
the police would ever have used
such a ‘tool’ on a white man.
even as Toni Morrison is feted for
bridging the racial divide (she was
the first African-American woman
to be awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature), the case has high-
lighted how America, more than
150 years after it outlawed slavery,
remains a country riven by race.
Yesterday, that divide was exposed
once again as Donald Trump visited
el Paso, a mainly Latino city also in
Texas, as it mourned the massacre
of 22 people in a shopping complex
last Saturday.
The alleged killer, Patrick Crusius,
21, published a white-nationalist,
anti-immigrant ‘manifesto’ on
social media before the atrocity.
Democrats were quick to note
that Crusius’s words echoed Mr
Trump’s own attacks on Latino
immigrants, including his
description of them as an ‘inva-
sion’ and his various references to
them as drug-traffickers, rapists,
thugs and animals.
‘how do you stop these people?
You can’t,’ the U.S. President
complained of ‘illegals’ at a May
rally in Florida.
Someone in the crowd shouted:
‘Shoot them!’ The audience ofthousands cheered and Trump
smiled, commenting: ‘Only in the
Panhandle [Florida’s conservative
north-west] can you get away with
that statement.’
On this occasion, Trump unre-
servedly condemned murderous
white supremacists. But he hasn’t
always done so, fuelling allegations
that he is a racist — whether his
target is Latino immigrants, Arab
Muslims or urban blacks.L
AST month, he rebuked four
ethnic-minority Congress-
women and said they should
‘go back’ to the countries
they came from, despite the fact
that three were born in the U.S.
and all four are American citizens.
A few days ago, he again caused
uproar when he turned on elijah
Cummings, a black Congressman,
calling his predominantly African-
American Baltimore district ‘a dis-
gusting, rat and rodent-infested
mess’ and claiming that ‘no human
being would want to live there’.
As America’s first black president,
Barack Obama liked to encourage
the idea that the U.S. had overcome
its racial demons. however, studiessuggest he was wrong and that
America remains deeply divided
along racial lines that are getting
more pronounced.
White and black Americans
disagree on the extent of racism, for
a start. Surveys have shown that
African-Americans are increasingly
concerned about racism, while
white voters are moving in the other
direction, ranking America’s racial
diversity as less important than its
embrace of capitalism, nationalism
and individual liberty.
A recent detailed poll conducted
by the Public Religion Research
Institute found that blacks and
whites disagree fundamentally on
many political issues, including
what it means to be American.
Nearly 60 per cent of white
Americans believe speaking
english is a very important part of
it. Blacks and hispanics say that
believing in God is far more
important to American identity.
Most blacks didn’t think you had
to support capitalism to be an
American, while whites strongly
disagreed. And so it went on.
Critics of the Republican Party
say it is becoming increasingly
hostile to blacks as it falls more
under the influence of Donald
Trump and the so-called alt-Right,
a loose and largely online grouping
of far-Right groups and individuals
who believe ‘white identity’ is
under attack from immigration
and multiculturalism.
The party’s share of the African-American vote continues to shrink
drastically. Last week, Will hurd,
the only black Republican in the
house of Representatives,
announced that he won’t be
standing again.
hurd, who has openly criticised
Trump, had become frustrated
with his party’s failure to
increase its popularity by
condemning racism, homophobia
and misogyny.
Studies show white Republicans
— a bloc of voters who may hold
the key to next year’s presidential
election — continue to believe that
America is a colour-blind society,
that affirmative action in favour of
blacks is not necessary and that
‘white privilege’ is a myth.
Meanwhile, even before the el
Paso killings, there had been warn-
ings that white supremacist
violence — whether by the Ku Klux
Klan, neo-Nazis or racist skinheads
— is on the rise again.
Inevitably, the polarising Presi-
dent has been blamed. A study of
75 far-Right leaders concluded
that many ‘credit his candidacy as
the start of their awakening’.
Toni Morrison harboured no
Obama-esque illusions about racial
harmony. Racism, she said, would
only disappear in the U.S. ‘when it’s
no longer profitable and no longer
psychologically useful’ to prop up
the egos of insecure whites.
‘If you can only be tall because
somebody is on their knees,
then you have a serious problem,’
she once said in a message to
white Americans.
The two Galveston police officers,
towering over their shuffling,
roped-up black prisoner, might like
to ponder that.Shocking: Donald Neely is led
on a rope by police in Texas.
Inset, white officers arrest
a man in Sixties DetroitA massacre on the
Mexican border. Black
politicians told to go
home by Trump. Now
an image with horrific
echoes of slavery...
from Tom Leonard
IN NEW YORKPicture: GETTY IPicture MAGES
that
begs the
question... is
America going
back in time?
1967
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