fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
I opened the Oakland Tribune the other day and found a most shocking headline: “Mehserle asks appeals court for new trial.” I swear I thought it was a typo. Mr. Mehserle, as you may recall, is the former BART officer who feared Oscar Grant as a big scary black man and shot him at point blank range. Mr. Grant…
April 29, 1991. I was at work in Berkeley. There was no World Wide Web in those days. I checked. The Mosaic browser wouldn’t come out until the following January, over a half-year later. No, I got the news on the telephone when a friend and former roommate from LA called me while I was…
March 3, 1991. Rodney King led officers on a high speed chase that ended in Simi Valley, California. When he finally surrendered, police took him out of the car, tasered him, and, as the now infamous video shows, kicked and beat him repeatedly as he laid on the ground. The officers claimed he resisted arrest…
