Stones and Roses in North Richmond

Back in late 1996, poor neighborhoods on the West Coast--South Central LA, for example, and North Richmond in the Bay Area--seethed at the disclosure that at the precise moment the government's Drug War had been putting their people away in prison, often for life terms, the government's CIA had been complicit with Nicaraguan contras in shipping cocaine into the United States, where it ended up for sale in these same neighborhoods. John Deutch, then director of the CIA, traveled to South Central to protest the innocence of his agency to 1,500 angry locals. He pledged that the CIA's Inspector General would review all charges of Agency complicity in drug smuggling and present his findings to the American people. In due course, the IG, Fred Hitz, delivered his report which, in censored form, effectively substantiated the original charges.

This spring attorneys Bill Simpich and Katya Komisaruk of Oakland filed class-action lawsuits against the CIA on behalf of those who suffered as a result of the crack cocaine explosion. Each lawsuit concerns two classes of people who were affected: plaintiffs who endured injuries imposed on the community in the form of emergency rooms overloaded and business areas ravaged.

Since the suit was filed, there have been meetings in Oakland and North Richmond. One session in Oakland was particularly intense, as people broke off into small groups to review individual experiences, and indeed individual degrees of culpability, in the worst of the crack years. The meeting in North Richmond took place on Saturday, June 26, at North Richmond Baptist Church. Linda Fullerton, a criminal defense attorney active in the neighborhood, also a member of the North Richmond Community Organizing Committee which co-sponsored the meeting, tells us that it was the first such effort in political education in North Richmond since the late 1960s. About a hundred local people showed up that hot Saturday afternoon, to listen to a panel including Simpich, attorney Sarah Chester, plus the two of us, being authors of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.

North Richmond, home to some 2,300, mostly black people, lies across the bay from San Quentin prison. It's poor and drug-ridden. The meeting attracted neighborhood activists and organizers, a group from the Nation of Islam (natty, in suits and bow-ties). There were ministers, Barbara Becnel of North Richmond Neighborhood House, Henry Clark from the West County Toxics Coalition and a fierce orator in the form of writer/organizer Fred Jackson. He was tired, Jackson thundered--amid cries of "Tell it, brother!"--of watching black people end up with their brains splattered all over the sidewalk. People are busy saving the Spotted Owl, as an endangered species. "What about us?" Jackson shouted. "Black people are an endangered species!"

The Organizing Committee's aim is far wider than castigation of the CIA as one precipitating agent of the community's torments since the mid-eighties. It is to inspire energy and purpose in a community that had almost lost it.

"The CIA suit is important as a vehicle to expose what the CIA is capable of doing," Linda Fullerton said to me later. "Bottom-line, everyone has to take responsibility for the drug-dealing here, but we can't look at drugs in a vacuum. First, we need to look at the politics of the Drug War and the law supporting it. Both target a false enemy: the individual black or latino street dealer. Second, we need to identify the victims of the Drug War which include the dealers for sure, along with all others crushed by poverty, addiction, disease, violence, incarceration, death. Third, we need to look at drugs and the big picture. Drugs not only support this community economically, they support the prison-industrial complex, the DEA, the ATF and others, all the way down to the local police."

Sarah Chester counted out some of the milestones in the War on Drugs: how funding was diverted from treatment to enforcement; how all the hysteria about "crack mothers" and "crack babies" disguised the fact that their real problem was malnutrition, with these mothers denied access to hospitals and prenatal care; how a "war" focusing on small hand-to-hand street sales became a war machine for law enforcement and filled the jails; how the Drug War became emblematic of a larger turn from social programs to punishment.

Chairing our meeting was Ricky Stokes, a 39-year-old former dealer who'd managed to haul himself back from the lip of either a lifetime sentence or death. "I contributed a lot to the distribution of drugs in this community," he told us. "I played a role in the destruction. I really didn't know how it felt--the effect of people losing their lives to violence or to drugs. Then I lost my eldest brother and his son and when I found out the perpetrator was my first cousin, I really felt the sting of death for the first time. I wanted revenge. But then I felt, how would this look to my mother, if I went out after my cousin? So I started to work at healing, first in my family, then in the community. The people have almost lost hope, but after our meeting they were smiling. They got hope."

Ricky, Linda, and the committee are now planning North Richmond's next event: a Stones and Roses march on July 17, leaving from Bethel Church, when each marcher will carry a stone, and sixty-eight roses will be laid, one-by-one, at the sites where sixty-eight members of the community died in the Drug War so horribly exploited and fueled by the state. A stone for sorrowful remembrance and the burden of knowledge, a rose for hope and affection.