Remembering The Black People Who Died In Jacksonville, Not The Nazi Who Killed Them
Remembering The Black People Who Died In Jacksonville, Not The Nazi Who Killed Them
Can't teach this.
Saturday, August 26, a racist coward gunned down three Black people at a Jacksonville, Florida, Dollar General. He should forever remain nameless but his victims should not. They were people with lives, loved ones, and dreams, and within 11 minutes, they were gone forever.
Authorities have identified the three victims as Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29, and 19-year-old Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., known as AJ, who worked at the store.
Democratic state Sen. Tracie Davis represents Jacksonville, whose Black residents Gov. Ron DeSantis has actively disenfranchised. Speaking at a Sunday morning vigil, she said, “We have three people who are dead because they are Black. Shopping. In our community. Gunned down. Because they were Black.”
After a white supremacist massacred nine Black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, some especially shameless Fox News pundits suggested it might’ve simply been an attack on Christians. However, the Jacksonville killer’s motivations were so blatant, Republicans and right-wing media couldn’t whitewash them.
Angela Carr was an Uber driver, and she’d just dropped her friend off at the store when the gunman fired into her Kia sedan 11 times, riddling her with bullets. Her son, Chayvaughn Payne, described his mother as someone who’d give people “her shirt off her back.” There were few strangers in her life, and she invited new friends to cookouts and family functions.
“This is really hard to process,” Payne said, still in shock. “To lose a mother for nothing.”
In addition to her son, Carr had two daughters and 14 granddaughters. All their future cookouts will bear the mark of this senseless violence.
When the killer entered the store, he killed AJ Laguerre and chased out some customers. The New York Times was uncertain why he did the latter, but it’s possible those customers weren’t the right hue for his massacre. Sheriff T.K. Waters confirms that most of the customers he deliberately spared were white.
Laguerre had just graduated high school and was working as a cashier. His distraught father, Anolt Laguerre, said, “He hasn’t even lived his life yet.” No, he hadn’t, and now he never will. As a father myself, I know that Anolt Laguerre will struggle for the rest of his life to understand why his son was murdered. Hate seems too simple an answer.
Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion was shot as soon as he entered the Dollar General with his girlfriend. He was going to spend the weekend with his four-year-old daughter.
Sabrina Rozier, Jerrald’s mother-in-law, said his daughter “was his world and he was her world.”
“And now we’re trying to figure out how to tell her, because we haven’t told her yet,” she added. “We don’t know yet.”
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to dismiss the killer as mentally disturbed, even insane, and although the killer had no prior criminal record, according to Sheriff Waters, authorities had held him for an involuntary 72-hour psychiatric evaluation in 2017, when he was just 15.
However, as Jack McCoy once argued in a classic “Law & Order,” holding racist views and even acting violently on them doesn’t make you crazy. After all, that would mean generations of white Americans during slavery and segregation shared a collective madness.
We have noted that Monday was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, but 63 years ago on Sunday, August 27, 200 white men wielding baseball bats and axe handles “chased, beat, and threatened” Black Jacksonville residents conducting peaceful lunch counter sit-ins. This was when my father was 12.
According to the Florida Historical Society:
The attack began with white people spitting on the protestors and yelling racial slurs at them. When the young demonstrators held their resolve, they were beaten with wooden handles that had not yet had metal ax heads attached.
While the violence was first aimed at the lunch counter demonstrators, it quickly escalated to include any African American in sight of the white mob. Police stood idly by watching the beatings until members of a Black street gang called “The Boomerangs” attempted to protect those being attacked. At that point, police night sticks joined the baseball bats and ax handles.
Bloodied and battered victims of the vicious beatings fled to a nearby church where they sought refuge and comfort from prayer and song. Eventually the white mob dispersed.
How many of those men are still alive? How many of them voted for Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump? Florida reportedly objected to an AP African American studies course because its slavery lesson “may lead to a viewpoint of an oppressor vs. oppressed based solely on race or ethnicity,” which was the reality of the time.
This “madness” is a choice. It’s a willful corruption of the soul, and it’s what cost Angela Michelle Carr, Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, and Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr. their lives.
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Excellent essay.
I have often said that the names of these horrible murderers are remembered better than their victims, which is worse than wrong. This has gone on from Jack the Ripper (an amateur by today's Brobdingnagian standards) to the present. We know Jack. We don't know who he killed.
This essay also discusses how someone so young -- or anyone -- be filled with so much hatred that they feel it necessary to just go out and kill total strangers.
A friend of mine asked this question in our living room, and I pondered his question for two days. I had an answer for him at last..."This guy is 21. Let's not look at what filled him with hatred, but what was MISSING in his life. Was he growing up in an abusive family? Amid domestic violence? Sexual molestation? Was he born with mental or physical disabilities? Quickly addicted to alcohol or drugs? Did the mistreatment he received get translated into him bullying other kids? Hurting animals? Disciplinary problems at school?"
My friend provided the answer. This killer had gone off his meds two weeks before. That explained a great deal.
Thanks so much, Stephen. I remember back in the 70s when a fellow poet at Nuyorican Poets' Cafe said that if he wasn't famous by 50 he'd kill a group of people. He was joking, but it wasn't funny.