Did the prospect of dealing with Al Sharpton prove to be the catalyst that propelled the Cambridge Police Department, the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates into full Kumbaya mode quicker than you can say “media circus?”
Any way you slice it, the curious arrest of Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies and one of the world’s leading scholars of African-American history and culture, was a no-win situation for a police department already groaning under the weight of bad press coast-to-coast and beyond.
On Monday Al Sharpton announced that he planned to attend Gates’s arraignment, which had been scheduled for late August. Early this afternoon, the district attorney’s office announced that the disorderly conduct charge against Gates would be dropped.
“There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them,” Gates said in an interview with The Washington Post today. “This is outrageous and this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It’s one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it.”
Gates was arrested on Thursday after Cambridge police responded to a reported break-in in progress on Ware Street. The break-in turned out to be the professor forcing open a door to his own residence (with the help of his driver, also African-American) after returning from an overseas trip.
As the white police officer explained why he was there, Gates reportedly responded, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?”
Gates’s version of events as relayed by his attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, is here.(Contine to scroll down to read the police report.) Ironically, the call to police came from a white woman affiliated with Harvard.
Black men and white police officers are a volatile mix even in the best of circumstances. If you are African-American, Gates’s observation is right on target. That said, giving lip to a white police officer is a risky gambit for any black man, even if you are a world-renowned scholar.
Yet once Gates established who he was and why he was breaking into his own home, the question remains why the police officer didn’t let the ticked-off 58-year-old professor retreat into his sanctum sanctorum and shoo away the curious onlookers before elevating the episode into an international incident that belies the media fantasy of a post-racial America.
