All language subtitles for When Liberty Burns (2020)_en

(piano plays)

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- [MLK] It is as necessary for me to be as vigorous

in condemning the conditions which cause persons

to feel that they must engage in riotous activities

as it is for me to condemn riots.

I think America must see that riots

do not develop out of thin air.

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society,

which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.

In the final analysis,

a riot is the language of the unheard.

(police sirens)

- This is where the chase ended

and here is where the questions begin.

McDuffie crashed his motorcycle,

but some of the wounds he sustained

are not consistent with the accident.

- I think a lot of young people

have no idea what McDuffie was, no idea.

Matter of fact, I don't think, I know it.

The older people, it has a lasting effect, I think.

- McDuffie had been visiting a friend

and late that Saturday night was returning

from his visitation and was speeding.

And that drew the attention to the police,

who started chasing him.

- There was an eight minute,

eight and a half minute harrowing chase

that took place before they had contact with McDuffie.

- Some substantial use of force

was used at the scene after the chase.

And the subject died of critical injuries

resulting from the use of force.

- You had also evidence and testimony

that they had beaten this man

when he was handcuffed on the ground

with his hands behind his back.

- People just exploded.

It was almost like someone had come along

and struck a match and threw it on something and boom.

- I think this is one of the worst things

that has happened in Miami,

and I am very, very disappointed

that someone was not held responsible for it.

(crowds shouting)

- It scared us, it scared white and black people.

- I know we don't like to say

that race plays a part in this,

but I'm not going to say that it doesn't,

because I'm not convinced that it doesn't.

- We have mourned what has happened for so many years.

My family is still mourning.

Once you start to talk about my father passing,

my father being beaten by police,

you think about the days that he was in a hospital,

it just really hits nerves in my family.

And the emotion starts to flow

and it brings them right to that moment.

- I was eight years old, eight years old.

I definitely wouldn't be ready for what happened to me.

If I can shut my eyes and wake up and try it again,

I'd definitely want my daddy back.

I never would have wanted to go through that tragedy.

- His name was Arthur Lee McDuffie, but I call him brother.

I loved him so much and I miss him so much,

and he was just a busy person.

You know, he was, he was like the leader of the family.

And when he passed away, we didn't know what to do.

I can't even go back to Miami.

When I go back to Miami,

it's like it hit me right in the face.

- [Frederica] Arthur was a warm and kindhearted person,

joyful, loving, kind, he was just great.

Personality wise was just sweet.

He's my cherished, and I cherish my Saint

because he was my love,

my one and my only, and my first love.

- So McDuffie is going to be a child of Jim Crow.

And so that's why it's important, you know,

among many reasons to understand

how this history is changing the city,

the riots that hit Miami in may of 1980

are really, you know, 50 years in the making, right?

You have not only a number of different problems

that are affecting the neighborhoods

of Liberty City and Brownsville

that go back into the 1940s and 1930s.

But there's also practices of policing

that are afflicting black neighborhoods in Miami

that really are from the outset

problems that are uniquely born

by the black neighborhoods of that city.

- For most people, when they think about Florida,

they think about Miami.

They think about this beautiful tropical paradise

as a part of the continental United States.

They think of palm trees and beaches.

They think about vacation and the leisure.

And for that reason, people don't associate us

with some of the things that are more typical

of a Southern state, when in fact

Florida is very consistent

when we talk about anti-black violence,

when we talking about the marginalization

of African-American communities.

You can find all of that in the state

and you can find all of that in Miami.

- When Miami was founded in 1896,

Blacks made up a great numbers

because of the amount of work available to build the city.

There was work available if you would do the work.

- Most people think of the great migration

of people from Georgia going to the Northeast coast,

Jersey, Philadelphia, New York, Harlem, et cetera.

And then folks from Alabama going to,

you know, Detroit, Mississippi to Chicago,

and Louisiana out west.

But a lot of folks from Southern Georgia

actually migrating to Miami,

and so you had two groups of blacks in Miami,

in the twenties, thirties, and forties.

You were either from The Bahamas,

which means you lived in the Grove,

or you are from South Georgia,

which means you lived in Overtown.

- When I went to Miami, I was about eight,

and he was two years younger than me.

So that's how old he was.

- [Luis] Basically, when we first moved

from Georgia to Miami, when he was attending school,

you know, I had heard so many stories

about the kids in Florida and whatever,

and I always had a, not a fear,

but I always want to be protected for him or whatever.

And like when he would get out of school or whatever,

I would kinda stand around on the corner

and make sure he got home safely

and nobody bothered him, anything like that.

- My mom house was always filled with kids.

You used to have to step over them

to get to where you need to go.

Bubba was one of those kids.

We lived in Overtown and 6th Court and 14th Street,

and he was this little boy that had a lot of life.

You know, he always was busy doing things.

- You know, sometimes you wish you could

go back to childhood days but,

because it was enjoyable and the neighborhood

was a super neighborhood.

People knew each other people,

people enjoyed the neighborhood.

People talked to each other, spent time.

It just was a joy growing up here in Miami.

And the neighborhood was, was a super neighborhood.

People knew each other, played ball.

We had mock races.

We would race each other and do things like that.

But it just was so cohesive and so friendly, if you will.

- [Frederica] As we were growing up, we noticed

that black people were having it hard

from just normally making a life of living.

He always known that it was hard for black people

because he was from the Georgia,

and back in those times, you know,

life was hard living and making it in Georgia.

So those things that were common for him.

- We used to work in the summer.

You know, the kids, you know,

they would ask kids to participate

in helping to bring in books and put books up,

and what have you.

And during that time period, you know,

we'd be at the school during the summer.

We'd be opening up the boxes and be so excited.

You know, we getting new books next year, you know?

So, and we got a chance to see the books first.

Well, to our surprise, when you open up

the boxes for the books, the books are used books

from predominantly white schools.

- That was the system.

And people grew up in different worlds

and they don't know each other.

Only thing they know is what they were taught

they're supposed to believe about another group of people.

- I don't know if you know it, but on 12th avenue,

along between, I guess 62nd street and 71st street,

there was a huge wall that was at least

probably eight, 10 feet.

The wall has long been torn down,

but you just see like the bottom of it.

But that was the wall that separated

the blacks from the whites.

- It was difficult, it was insulting

to know that this is your country,

but you're treated as a second class citizen.

- You weren't aware of so much racism,

as long as you stayed within that community.

It's only when the tried to leave the black community

that you were really aware of racism

and how much it touched your life.

- Black person could not operate a business

in downtown Miami in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Even earlier than that, Blacks couldn't be outside

of Colored Town after dark without a pass by a white person.

You could not go to a Crandon park,

you could not go to Keeper's Cane

without written permission from somebody that you work for.

- I had a job after school working in Hialeah.

And at that, in those days in the sixties,

Blacks weren't allowed to work in Hialeah

without an identification card.

Now here I am, a citizen born in this country,

born in the city, raised in this city,

my parents were raised in the same city,

born in the same city, but I had to get

an identification card to say who I was

and what I was doing in the city of Hialeah.

- And you had to produce this ID card anytime

the police or anybody else asked you.

- The courthouse for instance, as a Black,

you couldn't go inside the courthouse

and use the restroom or the water fountains.

They had water fountains outside,

a restroom was down in the basement.

- I remember, I was about eight years old.

My grandmother took me to Rich's Department Store

to buy my Easter suit for me.

Well, we weren't allowed, Blacks weren't allowed

to shop on the main floor at Rich's Department Store.

We had to go into the basement.

We were allowed only to go into the basement

and we weren't allowed to try anything on.

My grandmother would have to hold

the suit up to me to see if it fit.

- Until people like Father Reverend Graham

and some of the other ministers

and other community people got together,

they stage a sit-in at the counter

to demand they'd be able to be served inside.

- Brown, what do you hope to accomplish

by this demonstration?

- We hope to eliminate racial discrimination

in all public accommodations here in the city of Miami.

- But there was an incident, oh God, I can see his face.

I can't recall his name, but moved into an area

in what we know as Liberty City

and had a cross burned on his front lawn.

- [Interviewer] Did anybody sponsor your move

into a white neighborhood?

- No, no one sponsored my move into this neighborhood.

As I said before, we moved there because

it was a reasonable price and we liked the house

and we decided to get it.

- Arthur was a guy who had a lot of confidence in himself,

was easy to get along with and an outgoing personality,

paid good attention to carrying himself.

He was like that in school, he was like that in school.

- He was in the band and from the band,

he was, like I said, the president of the class

and not just one class, in every class he was in,

he was always being the president

or something, somebody important.

- I remember when Bubba wanted to date Frederica,

I remember he said, "I'm going to get that girl!"

And I said, "Boy, go on, that girl don't want you."

- [Frederica] Well, the first moment I met Arthur,

there was a harmonious, deep feeling inside of me.

And I said to myself, Hey, I like this guy.

One afternoon, my mother had sent me to the store

to buy a small can of peas.

And on my way to the store, I've seen this guy there,

but I decided that I would continue to walk on.

Even though I know deep inside,

they was that feeling in me that I wanted to talk with him.

And I went in, I bought my can of peas for Mom

and on my return back home, standing all alone,

himself on the corner, I said to myself,

I know the question is going to pop up.

Truly and surely, he decided to walk along with me

and he said to me, "Hi." I say "Hello."

He said, "Where are you going?"

I said, "I'm on my way home now."

He said, "May I walk with you?" I say, "Sure."

So he said, "I like you." I say, "Really?"

He said, "Yes, may I talk with you?"

I said "Not right now, I have to go now."

So he said, "May I have your number?"

I said, "Well, yes."

And I gave him my number and he called me

and we talked over the phone.

We decided to get married

once we both finished high school, but at the meantime,

Arthur finished high school two years before I did.

Arthur served three years in the service, Marines.

During the time that he was in the Marines,

we kept communications through letters

and we prepared ourselves, you know,

while he was in the service that we would get married

once you returned home and out of the service.

- [Luis] One of my proudest moments of him,

when he, the first time he came home,

he was dressed in his Marine uniform.

And he was, you know, he really looked well.

- He got his dress blues, and at that time,

the only way you could get a dress blue uniform

in the Marine Corps, you had to be an outstanding Marine.

He got his dress blues coming out of bootcamp.

And that's very hard to do,

so for you to come out of the come out of bootcamp

and be the only guy out of 25,

there 30 guys, you had to be the best at what you did.

And he was the only kind of black guy

that got the dress blues out of all those guys,

'cause I remember that surely.

And see him in his dress blues just,

you know, just blew my mind.

I knew I wanted to be a Marine then.

- He was a military MP, just like,

when the police are out for the civilian life,

military police just does that.

- When we met in the Marine Corps,

I saw that he was still, he was still the same Arthur.

I was assigned to the USS Independence,

which is an aircraft carrier,

as a part of the attachment aboard the ship.

Arthur was assigned to that attachment.

And we spent a year and a half or so in that assignment,

traveled the Mediterranean and several other places,

we went aboard the aircraft carrier.

And then I didn't come back again until '68

when I got out of the Marine Corps.

And of course Miami had changed tremendously

because I-95 is not here when I left.

- A very cruel decision was made

in the mid fifties and early 1960s,

having to do with how to bring I-95 into downtown Miami.

The business community, the downtown business establishment,

wanted to have that expressway coming into downtown Miami

as far west as possible to allow

for the expansion of downtown to the east.

And that meant into Overtown, even though it could have

come down the old railroad track.

And so the decision was made, despite black protest.

- I mean the Miami housing authority in the mid 1960s

deliberately, deliberately chose black neighborhoods

to be the recipients of relocation housing

from this placement of the interstate highway.

They were quite explicit in this respect,

because their argument was,

if you put relocation housing into white neighborhoods,

well then those neighborhoods will just go downhill.

So we're going to go ahead and concentrate

the adverse effects of relocation housing

by forcing these buildings onto

the actual black suburban neighborhoods

that were largely, you know, built to escape

the poverty of the central Negro district.

And there are, you know, these gripping accounts

of black people protesting at, you know,

town hall meetings and forming homeowners associations,

creating LLCs, limited liability corporations,

that will basically engage in

shared ownership of rental property.

- [Reporter] How long have you lived her?

- Over 25 years, my father really owns the home

and we really, being an older man,

I don't see how he can start all over again.

- [Reporter] Well and you were brought up here.

- Yes I was.

- Do you have any feelings

about the idea of a bulldozer going through

the home you were brought up in?

- Oh, mixed emotions really.

- [Reporter] You have any idea at all what you'll do,

if you do have to move though, where you'll move to?

- No, we do not have any idea

because we haven't been informed.

I mean it's, we've heard over a period of time

this was going to happen, but when?

- They had completely destroyed the Overtown community

for the most part because the houses were gone, you know,

I-95 coming right down through Third Avenue.

And for those folks who remember,

third avenue was a major thoroughfare,

particularly for Overtown, as well as Second Avenue.

That's where all the activities occurred.

You had three or four hotels, you had nightclubs,

you had three or four theaters, and all that went away.

- You got a lot of people, Blacks,

who had no place to go, who were in some instances

forced by imminent domain out of their homes,

those that did own properties.

- You had to find places to go, you know.

The government didn't try to find no places.

Those places we lived in was like little place, you know?

So it wasn't ours, it was always,

like when the expressway came through,

everybody kind of like scattered,

you know, different places.

- So yeah, and it was heartbreaking.

- It was an incredible displacement

of tens of thousands of people in a very short time.

And that really explained this rush of people

to live in Liberty City.

We moved from there to 79th Street and 22nd Avenue.

- This is again another one of those

largely overlooked and unseen conflicts,

but it absolutely happened in ways

that then set the table for the poverty

that would've inflict Liberty City

with the McDuffie episode and everything

in the city is similarly manicured

from one generation to the next.

- [Frederica] He was discharged from the service

on October 5th, 1968, and we married November 2nd, 1968.

- It was very nice, she had a long gown,

and they went off on their honeymoon,

and then he bought a house.

- [Luis] He was kind of interested in police work,

and so when he got out of the Marines,

he applied for Dade county,

to be a uniform, you know, patrolman.

And for some reason I don't think

they called him fast enough.

- He gets himself a big piece of pie,

and he got into insurance, selling insurance.

- To all types of people, old people,

and that was the thing, he liked to be around old people.

You always had conversations, always talking,

you know, to older people, you know.

He just sold insurance to anybody

that he could help get insurance.

- This is one of the reasons so many people knew him.

In that business, you get talk to

and get to know a lot of people.

- [Luis] He likened to that very well.

And that was his goal, was to reach the top

or wherever, as far as he could go in that.

- [Frederica] He was a devoted man,

he was a hardworking man.

And most of all, a strong provider for the family,

- He liked to dance, he liked to dance.

I watched him dance with mother.

I watched him dance by himself.

One of their favorite songs was by Teddy Pendergrass,

"Turn Off the Lights", and lets light a candle.

So a lot of times the lights went out,

and I had to go to bed.

And she always looked at him with these googly eyes,

you know, like when he come home.

And I'm like, you act like you saw a ghost or something.

But that's what made her melt.

As long his car pulled up in the yard,

as long as he made it home, and it was like her world.

or there world.

He always tried to make me feel like Cinderella.

My nanny had to be matching my bed.

My curtains, and he always would put

like candy or Big Hearts, the candy,

and Valentine cards and stuff on my bed.

And that's how I realized that I was really a Daddy's girl.

- The 1970s is a decade where black people are trying to

assert a kind of community control over their institutions

and is seen as being a time of great promise.

And so even if the realities of segregation are lingering,

there's a sense that what the end of formal segregation,

with the end of voter disenfranchisement,

with the arrival of fair housing,

it might now finally be time for Black people

to catch a break and achieve some form of freedom

and durable upward mobility.

The problem of course is that there are

still very real consistencies and continuity

to the Jim Crow period.

And one of them is around policing.

- So you had to be a member of the Klan

to be a Miami police officer.

That was actually a requirement in the 1920s and 1930s,

into the Forties.

- They have pictures from the newspapers

of white police officers riding City of Miami motorcycles

down Flagler street Miami dressed in

Ku Klux Klan hoods and robes.

- You know, they didn't just have police power.

They had political power.

They were the politicians in addition to being the police.

The way that the Klan basically just diminished in Miami

has to do in part with the arrival

of many more ethnic whites to the region,

Catholics as well as Jewish Miamians.

You have African-Americans who,

especially during the 1940s and early fifties,

are much more effective at getting their own interests,

represented and reflected in the local political scene.

The bigger economic prospects of the region are also

in line here because you can't continue

to encourage investment from outside parties

if you have cross burnings

and you have other kinds of markers

of overt white supremacy.

The problem though is that by the time

you get to the 1940s and fifties,

certain kinds of violent excessive police practices

that have been in play for now, you know,

20, 30 years simply get preserved and maintained.

- What you see as police forces,

who are adopted to be the hands and arms

of the Jim Crow legal system.

It's one thing to have a law on the books

that said that black people cannot go here or here,

but who's going to enforce those codes?

It's going to be local law enforcement.

That is your primary responsibility,

to keep the social order,

to keep Black people in their place,

however you have to do that.

When you look at this history of policing

in America and its main thrust,

I think you begin to understand

the history of the friction between the two.

- When I first came on, I was told by a trainer

"Look for a black guy driving a pickup truck

with a couple of other workers,

maybe to cut lawns or things like that.

Almost all the time, they're going to have tickets

they didn't pay or court appearances they didn't make

and there's warrants out for them."

And sure enough, that was true.

Most, at least half the time anyway.

So this was like ingrained to me as a young cop.

As time went on and changes in leadership happened

and civil rights happened in all different mentalities

that took place by 1980, this had all pretty much changed.

And I was happy to think that all that was gone by 1980,

when the McDuffie thing happened.

- Liberty City was, it was, it was a good place to live.

Your neighbors were all friendly.

There were people that had known each other

for many many years, but again,

it was patrolled by primarily white police officers.

- The police in Miami, even before the riots,

decade before the riot, police were seen as problematic,

as being overzealous in black areas,

as being disrespectful of Black people,

and there was good basis for those kinds of beliefs

The police became viewed as occupants,

occupiers of the community rather than participants.

- My own brother was beaten by the police department.

And it was the same department

that I was working for at the time,

the public safety department.

He was in the hospital for weeks on end.

And he sustained serious injuries,

but he could not recollect what had happened.

Other than that he was stopped by the police,

supposedly for a traffic infraction.

Their perception of police was very negative.

that they didn't trust the police,

and that if you had an encounter

that there may be dire consequences.

- So the sense was that the police

were advancing the interests of the White community

while discriminating against Blacks

in terms of how they were enforcing the law.

- I was the first African-American female

ever hired as an attorney by the public safety department

of Miami-Dade county.

At the time that I was hired,

there were more white lieutenants in the police department,

which was a total of 87,

and I don't know why I remember that number, but I do,

than the total number of black police officers.

- When I joined the department,

the department was a combination

of the police department and the jails.

There were not that many African-Americans

on the department, probably every African-American

knew every other African-American on the department.

- I was assigned as a part of my duties

in the police legal unit to give advice

to internal affairs or to any other department

or, you know, any other division

or group within the police unit,

department that needed advice.

And so I would get calls occasionally

from like internal affairs.

I think that's when I became acquainted with Linda Saunders.

- I was one of the first women to do patrol

for Metro-Dade police department.

And at the time I joined in '72,

I was one of five African-American policewomen,

because at the time they had not yet

changed the title from policewoman to police officer.

The PBA, which was the Police Benevolence Union,

which is kind of the union for police departments,

they did not represent African-American officers

or women for that matter.

- We started an organization

called the Progressive Officers Club

in the police department with African-Americans,

because there were things that were not happening.

There were people not being able to get assignments,

your promotions and things like that.

And we actually ended up filing a lawsuit

against the department, and that was not an easy process,

but we were being fought by the PBA at the time.

- [Reporter] Bobby Jones, acting director

of the Dade Public Safety Department

and members of the Progressive Officers Club

today announce the terms of an agreement,

which guarantees fair employment and promotion

for black and other minority officers

within the police department.

The settlement grew out of a lawsuit

filed against Dade County by the Black officers in 1976.

- Been a long, hard battle for us,

but we're not concerned so much about

what we're going to get today,

but we're concerned about making the department

a place where everyone would enjoy working

as police officers, a department that the community

can be very proud of.

And we hope that the impact that this settlement will have

on the department and on the community

will be one that we'll all be proud of.

- Well, at the time of the incident,

I was assigned to the public affairs unit

of Miami-Dade Police.

One of the internal affairs investigators

came over to the office and said to me

she had a case that she thought might be of concern.

And you know, we started talking and I said,

"Well, what's the case about?"

And she said, it's about a motorcyclist

who officers were involved with a use of force.

And you know, your first thought is, okay,

use of force, you know, what,

they tussle with him to get him.

And I said, so what happened?

And she explained to me that this person,

the motorcyclist, had been killed.

And I said, so do we know who the victim is yet?

And she said to me, yeah, we identified the victim.

I said okay, and I asked her,

what was the name of the victim?

So I'm sitting there taking notes,

just in case I got to do a press release.

And she said, "The last name is McDuffie."

I said "Okay."

And then all of a sudden, it just sort of hit me,

for whatever reason, I don't know.

It just of hit me, I said, well,

"What's the victim's first name?"

And she said "Arthur."

I had to pause, because I needed her

to tell me more about this Arthur McDuffie.

- What essentially happened?

You had Mr. McDuffie, he was riding a motorcycle,

two o'clock in the morning.

He stopped at a red light, but there was nobody around,

two o'clock in the morning, no other cars.

So he sped from the red light, popped a wheelie,

which is riding the motorcycle on the back of the back tire

for a little bit of distance, not thinking anybody's there.

Then all of a sudden, Sergeant Diggs,

one of the supervisors, gave chase.

And they chased him around the city,

wound up at an entrance to the expressway

til McDuffie, realizing he couldn't, there was a sharp turn.

He couldn't maneuver that turn.

He stopped the motorcycle, put the kickstand down.

First officer to him was an officer named Meier.

He was a relatively young and new officer.

He approached him with his hands up.

Meyer pulled his gun, "Stop."

McDuffie held his hands up.

Well, by this time, you had any number

of police cars arriving.

They all jumped out of the car and rushed him,

and subsequently began to beat him,

and they talk about nightsticks.

Not only do they have nightsticks,

they used something called a Kel-light.

This is a flashlight that's very long.

That's about a foot and a half.

And it has a heavy light orb

and beat him to virtually unconsciousness.

- I always told my mom, I said,

if he could have just made it to the house,

we lived on 34th to 12th.

That happened on 36 and Second Avenue.

I said, Mom, he was trying to get home.

He was just trying to get home.

Trying to get home.

(breathing heavily)

- In that place, where they beat him, beat him down there,

I had to go to that place every day,

36th street in Miami, remind me having down the expressway

right there where they caught him.

It would be there every day,

going back home or coming to work, I'd go by that place.

For 27 years I would go by it,

and every time I would go by it,

I would remember everything about it.

Every time I got off that expressway on Miami Avenue,

and 36th Street, I would have to remember,

I would have to remember.

- This is still happening, it's still happening.

It's still happening, still happening.

It's still, it's still happening.

It's insane.

- [Frederica] The very same hospital Arthur was admitted to

was the hospital where I worked,

which is Jackson Memorial Hospital.

And while I was at work,

which was two o'clock in the morning,

I was in a patient's room,

happened to be standing to the window.

And I looked out and I seen an ambulance

coming by, forwarding to the emergency room.

And I said to myself, well, someone is coming in,

not knowing that at the same time

that it was Arthur coming in.

Never did I think anymore about the patient,

nor did I think of Arthur.

- I was the on-call Sergeant that night.

And I received a call.

Based on my previous experience

in working in internal affairs,

I knew that officers often would collude

and get their story straight, if you would,

before they met with internal affairs,

I told the sergeants and people that were involved,

they identified, nobody goes home

until I get a chance to interview you.

Now it's interesting, the report shows, and this is factual,

the incident happened at two in the morning.

I was not called until six in the morning.

So from two-to-six, these officers and supervisors

orchestrated a major coverup.

Their stories were just so in sync.

And that rarely happens, rarely do you have

them almost using the same verbiage in their statements.

What the officers put in the report is that

he was speeding and he attempted to make a turn.

And as he attempted to make the turn,

the motorcycle, he had an accident

and the motorcycle hit the ground.

His helmet came off, his head hit the ground,

and it skidded on its side.

And then when they approached him

to make the arrest for speeding and reckless driving

and so forth and so on, he jumped up

and began to fight like a madman.

I think that that was the word they used in their statement.

- I came home, I think I was in the third grade.

And it was a letter on the door.

The nurse said "Contact Jackson Hospital,"

or contact one's insurance partners.

It was a real small paper,

but you can tell whoever wrote it, they were in the area.

So I let myself inside the house.

- [Frederica] The hospital called me.

And they asked me several questions over the phone.

Immediately, they needed me to come to the hospital.

As my kid arrived from school, I drove to the hospital.

There was four hours before I seen Arthur.

When I did see Arthur and was like, no, this is not Arthur.

Arthur's head was so swollen,

there's no features in his face at all.

Arthur's eyes were totally popped out.

The neck was no where to be found on Arthur.

It was just totally swollen all up.

Arthur's body was more bruises and more scratches

from the ground, was just totally all over his legs

and his arms and the total body movement was just,

just a jerk movement.

And I'm saying to myself, no accident could look like this.

The doctor said that we bolted, we had to go in

and his head and put bolts in his head

to release the pressure that was floating around the brains.

- I remember sitting, I believe it was West Wing,

It was a West Wing floor at Jefferson

and he was in the intensive care.

And there, that door was opening up,

revolving like maybe for three days.

And I just see so many people kept

coming out the door crying,

and I still didn't know what was going on.

I still didn't have any answers.

I just knew that that's where he was.

- My mother was very devastated.

She was devastated, she was the one who, when this happened,

they put him in the hospital as John Doe.

They beat him and put him in there as John Doe.

So mother was the one who went to the street

where they say this happened, and searched around

to see if she could find anything,

because she felt like something was wrong.

- I have learned that one of the trips here

led investigators to the discovery

of a set of keys, keys which belonged to Arthur McDuffie.

They were not found over there

where McDuffie was allegedly beaten,

but instead were found upon

the rooftop of a nearby building,

indicating that someone deliberately threw them there

in what is thought to be an attempt

to ensure that Arthur McDuffie's identity

would remain a secret.

- [Frederica] Once I've actually heard the actual word

that he was dead and gone forever,

my heart was broken, torn apart.

The only love, the first love,

was gone, no more, no return, forever away for home.

- He actually was deceased on the scene,

when it first happened, I mean,

his head was crushed in and he had to be on life support

to have any sign of life at all.

- When he was killed, he was on the ground with his hands,

cuffed behind his back and his head resting on the curb.

And one of the officers, Alex Marrero,

straddled Mr. McDuffie and used his long flashlight

to come down and strike him in the back of his head.

And because his head couldn't recourse, it split his skull.

- Well it later turned out that

it was the medical examiner's office

that told the police department that

the wounds that Mr. McDuffie suffered were inconsistent

with the police reports that were written.

- Dr. Wright, what made you decide that

the death of Arthur McDuffie was not

the result of a traffic accident?

- The correlation of his injuries with the scene examination

and the examination of the bicycle

clearly indicated that he was beaten to death.

- He had no injuries from an accident

falling off his motorcycle or wrecking the motorcycle?

- No significant injuries whatsoever.

- What did he die from?

- He died as a result of blunt head injuries

with destruction of his underlying brain.

He was beaten to death.

The most severe wound is the one

which is between his eyes, fractured his skull

and literally destroyed his brain.

- [McFarland] How hard would someone have to hit

someone to inflict such an injury?

- Amazingly hard.

- There's a clip that that plays in my head

time and time again, my grandmother is weeping

and she just repeatedly says, they beat him like a dog.

They beat him like a dog, they beat him like a dog.

And it's something that resonates with our family.

Because at that time, when she was interviewed,

that was the first thing that everyone

kind of clung to and really heard.

That's what the people heard.

They heard of the discouragement of her voice,

they heard the disappointment and the,

just the disheartening in her voice.

- We had SOP documents or standards, our manuals,

that says very specifically anytime a person

is considered critical or could die as a result of wounds

or activity dealing with a police officer,

that person could likely die, it is automatically

belongs as a homicide case from day one.

A dozen cops involved in beating up a guy

until he died in the middle of the night,

and the head of the police division

didn't even know the incident had even occurred.

It was a woman named Edna Buchanan.

Edna Buchanan was a high-powered

female reporter from Miami Herald,

very bright, very quick, Edna had great sources

at the medical examiner's office.

So she got the word, somehow,

about McDuffie being declared deceased.

So the right person for her to call

would be Charlie Black, the head of the police division.

So she calls Charlie black up at home at night.

This is four days later.

She says to Black,

what do you know about this guy named Arthur McDuffie?

And Black says, Arthur who?

Arthur McDuffie, he got beat up by the police

and now he's dead.

Black was, he was really angry.

And the first person Black called was me.

- The day he died, it was, I was with family,

getting ready to celebrate Christmas holiday.

I got a call and one was that McDuffie died,

and I literally remember crying.

I do remember I cried and my family

wanted to know why was I crying?

And I said to them, "They killed him, they killed him."

It still brings an emotional response from me,

because I was a police officer,

sworn to carry out a mission to protect and serve

the community just as those officers had,

and that was an ultimate betrayal.

I was almost embarrassed to be an officer,

part of an agency that would,

this kind of thing have happen.

Emotionally, it was very draining.

The reality there were no black officers on the scene

that night at all from City of Miami or Metro-Dade.

The only black people involved

was Mr. McDuffie and me, and Mr. McDuffie died.

I learned from Marsha Frank

and the other supervisors and brasses around

that to Guywalla, who had worked with City of Miami,

when he learned that this man had died, he resigned.

And then he came forward to say, there was no accident.

Between those four hours,

between the incident and them calling me,

this is what was occurring:

the coverup came when Sergeant Evans,

who was not initially on the scene,

he came after the beating

and they realized that they had really hurt this man,

decided they were going to orchestrate

and make it appear as though his injuries

came from the fall in the motorcycle accident.

Guywalla, when he got there, was in the early stages

of them deciding this coverup.

He saw the motorcycle standing, you know?

And watched them knock the damn thing down,

saw somebody take the helmet

and hit the helmet on the ground

to try to make it look like the helmet

would have hit the ground and then popped off.

One of our prime officer's involved,

and I think it was Hanlon, involved in the beating,

who knew they were in trouble.

Hanlon got in the car and drove over the motorcycle.

Well they towed the motorcycle away from the scene

to an impound lot And Eric Seyman said,

if a motorcycle goes down,

there's certain damage that needs to happen.

He went to the impound lot, which was locked,

once the guy bought the motorcycle in

and jumped the fence and proceeded

to hit it with his Kel light to make the damage

look as though the motorcycle went down.

- So we got, we went and looked at the motorcycle

for damages and things like that.

And you can, you didn't have to be an expert policemen

or forensic giant to understand that

this motorcycle didn't go down

and skid and run into something.

This motorcycle was hit with sticks

or batons and flashlights, it just had dents.

We're still hustling and bustling,

and one day Veverka just walks in my office

and he has blue copies of this report.

And he says, I want to talk to you.

I didn't even have to give him his rights.

You know, he just wanted to talk to me.

And I knew who he was, and I knew his dad.

His father had been a long time police officer

in the department and he had Mark Meier with him.

- He was shrewd, he knew that they were caught

and he was one the first ones to come in and say,

"I'll talk, but I need immunity."

- One thing I was concerned with,

was this report a lie?

Was it really a lie and Veverka presented it as a lie.

Because he said he was told to lie

by his boss, the Sergeant.

Janet Reno then was the head state attorney.

From there, it was working with the state attorney's office.

- We have filed charges today against five officers

of the public safety department,

as a result of the tragic killing of Mr. Arthur McDuffie

and the ensuing effort to cover up

the circumstances surrounding it.

- [Reporter] Four Dade County policemen

were charged with manslaughter:

Sergeant Ira Diggs, Officer Alex Marrero,

Officer William Hanlon and Officer Michael Watts.

Sergeant Herbert Evans was charged

with tampering with evidence

and being an accessory after the fact.

The McDuffie homicide has opened

the largest police brutality investigation

in Dade County's history.

Sergeant Ira Diggs and Officers Michael Watts,

Alex Marrero and Charles Veverka have

47 complaints on their records,

12 involving physical force.

None were ever convicted of brutality.

Now they face possible murder charges.

- I think your two hardest times was

hearing what happened, and then seeing the,

being at the funeral itself, very difficult.

Yeah, very difficult, but it was,

it was an excellent homegoing service for him.

- [Frederica] Sad, the funeral was quite sad.

To walk behind someone you really deeply love,

to sit and face someone you really deeply cherish

and spent moments and days of time with,

it's just like saying everything,

in all in all it's all of me.

- I felt the need to protest because I felt angry.

And I felt sad for what had happened

to miss Mr. McDuffie and his family.

And I felt vulnerable., I felt that if it

could happen to him, it could happen to me.

A lot of people felt that way,

that McDuffie was not a criminal, no history of violence,

former Marine Corps corporal,

and the only thing he was guilty of

was speeding on his motorcycle.

So there was a sense that could happen to him,

that could happen to any of us.

So it really made for a collective sense of endangerment,

of vulnerability, of our Blacks.

And I think that promoted a lot of us

to get out and protest.

- We were going through some trying times

as an overall community then,

because we were dealing with the Mariel boatlift,

I believe it was doing that time.

We had an influx from Haiti and politically,

there were a lot of little things going on

that affected the communities in terms of representation

and things just were not cohesive, if you will, at the time.

- In the late 1970s, 1978, 1979 in particular,

there were a number of incidents with the police and Blacks

that lay the groundwork for this riot in 1980.

One of the things that upset people most

was an incident involving a white highway patrolman

who stopped a little Black girl in South Bay county.

She must have been around 10 or 11,

told her that she looked like someone

who had been reported to have stolen some candy.

You put this child in his car in the backseat,

drove to an isolated area, moved into the back seat

with this child and began fondling her.

She resisted and cried,

but he still proceeded to fondle her.

Because she was crying, he stopped,

and drove her to our house and told her not to tell anybody

and to keep this secret between them.

The girl eventually told her aunt,

she was living with her aunt and uncle at the time,

what had happened.

Within hour, highway patrol had officers at the house,

the child remembered the man name

on the visor of his car, and it was Jones.

And within minutes, the police knew who this office was,

the girl identified him photographically.

- I guess the thing that outrages us primarily

is the fact that this man was a State Trooper

using his office, his car, his uniform,

to a place a child in a very compromising position.

And we teach our children to trust the police.

And this makes this kind of an incident

particularly abhorrent.

- A deal was worked out with the child's family

and this man to pay for mental health

and some other minor amount of money.

That was the agreement.

He left, he ran away.

We don't know where he is today.

Never did anything to restore this girl's mental health.

Another incident involved a young man,

a Black man named Randy Heath,

who was urinating in the warehouse area of Hialeah.

He was with his sister or some other relative.

Stopped the car, and while he was in the process

of relieving himself, he was approached by

a white police officer who put his revolver

to the man's head and told him not to move.

Well the man turned his head and the gun went off

and blew his brains out.

- [Reporter] For months, the Black community

has been closely watching the Larry Shockley case.

Shockley, appearing last week before the Dade grand jury,

was suspected of manslaughter in the death of Ray Heath,

a black man that Shockley thought

was robbing a Hialeah warehouse.

The grand jury yesterday said

there was not enough evidence to indict Shockley,

and that decision has outraged black community leaders.

- An officer admitted having made a mistake.

And then for the grand jury to be able

to walk away and say, even though,

even though they felt that was cause,

they could not find sufficient cause to indict him.

I think it's an indictment on the Black community.

And I think that the Black community is slowly but surely

coming into the knowledge of the fact

that we are just a forgotten people in this area.

- Then that was the LaFluer case.

Mr. LaFluer was a Dade county teacher, school teacher

and the police raided his house looking for drugs,

turns out it was wrong house,

but Mr. LaFluer was beaten severely,

eventually died some years later of his injuries,

but the wrong house raid as it was called

also incensed the community.

The most prominent black person in Miami-Dade county

at the time was the Black Dade County School Superintendent,

Dr. Johnny L. Jones.

He was big, he was a powerful man.

He was good, but he was convicted of stealing money

from the school system to provide gold plated plumbing

in a private home he was building in Naples, Florida.

A lot of folks felt that he was charged and prosecuted

because he was Black, because he was too powerful.

His trial was covered gavel-to-gavel,

people followed it very closely, and in the end,

there was a sense among Blacks

that he had been railroaded because he was Black.

So these things were fermenting in the Black community

before it incident in which McDuffie

was killed in December, 1979.

- What is clear to me,

having worked on this, you know, for over a decade

is that Miami's past really is America's future, right?

What Miami's past shows you

is that even with linguistic diversity,

cultural diversity, with, you know,

any number of residential communities

that have, you know, people

from around the world, occupying them,

you still have a very consistent

White over Black social order.

Now that White may include people

from Cuba, Argentina, Jewish Americans, Anglo-Americans.

That Black may include black Cubans, Haitians,

Jamaicans, African-Americans.

But the data on this is absolutely clear,

that the biggest variable in determining

your fortunes in Miami is whether or not you are Black.

The way that the region was behaving

through the 1970s into the eighties

was as if somehow, you know,

there wasn't going to be any need

to kind of go back and address the problems

of the color line because Miami was

a multicultural and cosmopolitan city.

So that argument was developing, you know,

certainly was in the interest of local boosters

to develop that argument as, you know,

investment in the seventies in Miami Beach

was flagging and the like.

You have this expectation and anger really

on the part of African-Americans

that we have never gotten the true

promises from the Civil Rights movement.

And now you're talking about 10 years

after the fair housing act and housing is still a problem.

You're talking about, you know,

more than a decade since the voting rights act

but the reality of Black political power

in the city had not been realized.

- And I think times were just so bad

for the Black community, no elected officials,

you know, not owning anything, schools deteriorating.

We had that one powerful position

that you just removed him, superintendent,

even though, you know, what he was accused of was egregious.

I mean, the fact is that the one person

we had that was in power has now been disgraced.

So I just think the community was at a boiling point.

And I think everybody knew that we had to stand up.

- The McDuffie episode is one that is, you know,

absolutely going to erupt in Liberty City

because that's the most concentrated place

of Black disempowerment and ongoing segregation.

- There had to be some changes that not only just dealt

with law enforcement and it had to be some change

with access to self-govern.

There had to be change for economic opportunity.

There had to be change for a better housing opportunity,

in our educational system, our schools had to do better.

- Ms. Reno assigned the McDuffie police officers'

prosecution to Hank Adorno and George Yas,

when in fact I was the intern for George Yas

and they were the rock stars,

superstars at the State Attorney's office

as far as the prosecution of major cases.

- We intend to do everything possible

and appropriate, to obtain a conviction.

We obtain a conviction,

we will be seeking the maximum sentence.

If we get these people sentenced after conviction,

we will hope that the parole commission

would not parole them.

- All of the detail about what occurred had been reported.

in the newspaper over and over and over again.

- But when all that stuff went into the media,

it was building the case for the defense attorneys to say,

change of venue, and if the venue got changed,

I just knew in my gut that they

were going to take it someplace

where they didn't understand the impact of that case

on the community, and they didn't care.

- Just moments ago, Judge Lenore Nesbitt

granted a change of venue

in the Arthur McDuffie murder trial.

Judge Nesbitt made her opinion based

on all that she had heard today in her courtroom.

When the attorneys for the six former Metro police officers

charged in the death of Arthur McDuffie

asked for the change of venue.

Subpoenas were served to both major newspapers

and to the three major television stations here in Miami,

ordering that all stories pertaining to the case

be turned over to the court as evidence

of the large amount of coverage

that this case has received.

- Arthur McDuffie has become a by-word.

It has become a word to symbolize terrorism,

it has become a word to symbolize white police officers

who beat up our black citizens,

lying police officers, police brutality.

It has created an all pervasive atmosphere or attitude

that many white policemen are racist and liars

that beat up on our Black citizens.

The word McDuffie has keynoted racial

and many police failings in the community.

- And the case needed to be tried

in the Miami-Dade County area,

because that was the community most effected.

(scoffs)

- I think for a lot of us, when the trial got moved,

a lot of us said, oops, it might not be a victory here.

- So when I went up to the trial in Hillsborough County,

which is the Tampa area, very conservative area,

predominantly white at the time.

And I sat in that witness box and looked at that jury,

all white middle-aged men, and my heart sank.

They weren't listening.

You know, most of the time you look at a jury,

you can see people who are intense and they write notes.

They weren't worried about notes, some were yawning.

Kind of looking at the ceiling.

- I began to ask where is my mom,

and they said that she's in Tampa.

I discovered that I would not be seeing my mama for a while.

So I've never saw my mom.

It was like three or four weeks, maybe to a month.

I know she was calling

and she was talking to different people,

but me and her never talked.

- [Luis] Just alone the attitude of the people in Tampa,

some of the restaurants that we would go in to eat,

even the hotel that we were staying in,

when we'd walk in the lobby, I mean, everybody, I mean,

they knew us without even, you know,

I mean people in that town just,

they just knew us everywhere we went.

We go to burger king, they know us.

We go to eat breakfast, they know us.

And I mean, they would just, and really,

I was afraid of the people in the town.

- The evidence is going to show at this point,

Arthur McDuffie wasn't talking,

he wasn't saying anything, he wasn't moving.

he wasn't fighting, he wasn't doing anything.

He especially wasn't reaching for anybody's gun.

And the evidence is going to show, right there,

that this man, Alex Marrero,

Alex Marrero declared one size more that Arthur McDuffie,

and he stood over him with a man handcuffed

and hands behind his back

and picked up his nightstick and Kel-light,

over his head and struck right on the head.

Not once, not twice, but three times.

And the second time he struck him,

he struck him so hard that blood splattered

in excess of four feet away.

There's no tighter fraternity than a police fraternity,

but there is a code.

Thank God all of them don't live by the code,

but the evidence is going to show

that these people live by the code,

and Skip Evans was teaching the code,

and that is you don't turn in another fellow officer.

You don't rat on a cop.

- And I was in a courthouse and I couldn't,

you couldn't cry,

you couldn't do anything in the courthouse,

because they was having a trial.

So they told us, Janet Reno told us

that we couldn't show no emotion while we was in there.

And all of them had to testify.

Well, the police has got up there and they lied.

And they said that, that he was on drugs.

They lie, say he was on drugs.

But the really bad, the really,

the testimony that really upset me the most

was the medical examiner.

Cause he told what happened and how my brother died.

And that was devastating to me and the family.

His head was so damaged.

His head was half done,

like he fell from the five story building.

And how could anybody live through that, you know?

And the medical examiner was up in the courthouse,

explaining that, and my mother had to sit through that.

And me too, all the family had to sit through it.

It was me and my mother, my sister and my other brother.

He passed away too because he was so torn up.

My older brother, he never got over it.

- Based on what happened, the testimony and evidence,

and the face you had some officers

allegedly did not participate in the actual beating

were willing to testify and what have you.

with all that surrounding that.

there was a common belief that there's no way

that all these guys would get off,

that somebody was going to get convicted.

- Think about what it is that was alleged to have happened.

If it happened destroys the criminal justice

system at Dade county.

What could be worse than sworn officers

covering for themselves?

I can't think of anything.

- We were right, we were,

to be concerned about the outcome.

- It took three weeks to find a jury here,

it took four weeks to hear

all the arguments and the evidence,

but it took the jury less than three hours

to reach the verdict.

The six members of the all white male jury

left the courtroom at 11:30, 2 hours and 40 minutes later,

they signaled the verdict was at hand.

- We the Jury at Tampa

this Saturday, 3rd of May, 1980,

has found the defendant Michael Watts

as to manslaughter as charged

and tampering with information as not guilty.

So say we all, this verdict is set and final.

- [Mother] They murdered my child!

They beat him like a dog!

My God, I'm going to take care of you.

Do you hear what I said?

(screaming)

That's all right, that' all right.

Lord gonna take care of him.

- I thought it was a joke when it started.

And I don't think it should have ever

gotten this far in the first place.

Truth came out and thank God this country

still has people who are honest

and base their opinion on the truth.

- I know the Black community is going to feel

very remorseful at this, but I don't see why.

The truth came out and we're going to

have to live with the truth

and if people can't live with the truth,

then what are we going to live with?

- So when I got the beep, the beeper went off about

the verdict, reached out,

the verdict came back not guilty on all.

(stammers) I couldn't believe it.

I went back and I whispered the director at the time.

I told him, I said, you're not gonna believe this.

I said, the verdict is back and it's not guilty.

And he said, you gotta be BSing me.

No, sir.

I said, as a matter of fact,

we need to leave now and you need to activate

the emergency operations plan.

And he said to me, he says "Really? You think so?"

And I said, "No, I know so."

I said, it's not going to be pretty.

I was, I was on 62nd and Seventh avenue.

My girlfriend, DC, I was at her apartment.

Somebody from down, she stayed on the second floor,

so someone on first floor was like,

"They got the verdict, they got the verdict."

Everybody knew it was over.

And I said, oh, DC, I got to get home.

I got to get home, I said, because it's going to get,

I've got to get home.

And by the time I came down those steps,

62nd and by Seventh Avenue, it was like, it was total,

it was less than 30 minutes, it was like, whoa.

- Yes, I remember the first night,

a group of people were down at the Metro Justice Building,

on 12th avenue and 13th street.

(crowd screaming)

- People giving very passionate speeches.

People had all kinds of signs and making all kinds of noise.

The crowd just kept getting larger and larger and larger.

And then you would see incidents of stuff

where you knew it was just only a matter of time

before something big happened.

And you saw the police sort of standing around,

ready to break up the crowd with tear gas.

And you knew that this was really, really going to be bad.

- Today, several decisions were handed down in Tampa,

that shocked many of us.

Certainly rattled some violent sides.

Something wrong in this town.

Black people must be able to deal with this

in an orderly fashion.

(crowd disagreeing)

- Now there were 40 officers on motors in those days,

40, 45 officers on motors those days.

They had each one of us come down to get a shotgun,

the issued a shot gun and four rounds of ammunition.

Frank Christmas and myself were the only two

Black police officers on the squad at that time.

And guess what, we were the last two in line

and they ran out of shotguns, we didn't get a shotgun.

Frank and I were given riot batons

to be on the street that night.

- A couple hours later, I got a call from a reporter

asking me if I knew that whites

were being attacked on 62nd Street in Liberty City.

I got in my car and drove up to Liberty City,

to 62nd Street above 12th Avenue,

that had been shut off by that time by the police

to prevent white people from going

into this area and into danger,

and then a car driven by a white young man

got through the Western end of the blocked off street

because police had really left that position,

and the car drove into the part of this going riot.

People started throwing rocks, bricks, bottles at the car.

I think Jeffrey Cope was the young man was driving this car

with his brother, a really young man,

in the car with him and a 15 year old white girl,

they were together in the backseat,

so that the car lost control, lost control of the car,

swerved across the median and struck Shaniqua Perry,

who was, I think, an 11 year old black girl at the time,

smashed her against the wall of one of the buildings.

Severed her leg cleanly.

So people took the child, put her on a taxi with the leg,

wrapped into some sheets they took from a clothes line.

Put that in the trunk of the car,

put the girl in with a relative and drove her,

she was driven to Jackson hospital.

She survived, she's an amputee today.

That event when Shaniqua was struck by that car,

set off a frenzy of anger and violence

against these two white boys.

When I got there, there were about 15 to 20 young Black men

surrounding one of the boys, he was the ground,

they drug out of the car by that time,

and they were beating him and kicking him

and using the Miami Herald newspaper dispenser,

those boxes you see on the streets,

they were crushing it down on his head repeatedly.

And I'm watching this in real time,

I'm watching this mob kill this boy.

So what did he do?

Then I heard somebody say,

"We're going to get an Uncle Tom niggas next,"

and I knew they were talking about me,

people like me, supposedly black leaders

who they felt had failed them.

One survived whose very severely injured today.

The other died and Debbie Caplin was saved

by some of the relative of the Hamlin officer,

who hit her they had to be stopped

and drove her out the riot area.

And that was the beginning of the worst day in my history.

- And when you have communities that have been neglected

for so long and nothing is being done about it,

then people tend to react.

- Of one after the other of what people

viewed as an unjustified shooting and unjustified killing.

And after being exposed to that over and over

and over again, that anger, it builds up in you.

- Their emotional, and anything

that looks like may be an occasion

to throw some bricks and rocks and shoot.

- [Reporter] And shooting?

- And shooting, they're for real.

- [Reporter] They have guns out there?

- There two people that are laying

in the middle of the street right now.

- [Reporter] Two people are laying down.

- Right now, in the middle of the street.

Don't go up there, in matter of fact,

you're too close, I'm telling you, you're too close.

(hospital workers)

- There was people, we were on the side of the road

and then they jumped out in front of us.

And we had to stop the car, and everybody

just started throwing at us.

And I didn't see, I thought they were

just crossing the street,

and the girl who was sitting in back of me, she ducked,

but then she would scream at me to duck,

and they threw a bottle right at my neck,

and so we took a side street,

and there were people just laughing at us

and nobody even cared to stop and help us or anything.

- I was standing in my office at the headquarters building.

I think I was talking to the director on the phone.

I said, well, I think the stuff is about to hit the fan

because I'm looking out my window down 14th Street,

coming from 12th Avenue, the largest number

of African-Americans I've ever seen in one spot,

and they're not happy.

A group of people came in front of the

headquarters building and stopped.

And I think what they were about to do

was to try to come in there.

Five story building, which was the heartbeat

of the whole police agency, okay?

The crime lab was there, all the records were there,

center communications, dispatch was there, detectives,

administration, everything was there.

There was a Dunkometer officer,

older man and a woman police officer

that was sitting at the front desk

when you walked in the police station.

The rest of the police station was uninhabited almost,

except for the detectives on the second floor where I was.

They got into the building in the lobby.

They face these two older people and they were angry,

you can see they're angry and they were

ready to like destroy the police headquarters.

- Would have been a bad move.

So I went downstairs and I recognized some people

and I said, look, you don't want to do that.

I said, because I'm gonna tell you if you come in,

you're not going out the way you came in.

So they went back out, went down the street,

went around the corner and they went

and found the justice building.

And I think that's where the first vehicle was torched.

- All the communications for police

were to come to an end, all the records

would have been destroyed.

Arrest records, police records, report records.

Everything would have been gone.

Dispatchers would no longer be dispatching.

Not at least that night or many days to come.

There would be no one answering calls for police.

The department would have been frozen,

had these guys taken over the building.

And there was enough of them to be able to do that.

- A white police officer drove over in a brand new car

and started telling people to disperse.

He had a brand new police car.

They took him out of the car,

flipped the car on its roof and burned it.

We had something we call stomp and drag.

And it was the fact of the stomp and drag,

it's supposed to be a show of force.

And it supposed to be a tactic that,

that intimidates the crowd.

And we was stomping and dragging.

You could see us and you could hear us.

They started throwing things at us and we realized

that we were going to be outnumbered.

And if they really rushed us and decided to surround us,

we couldn't do anything about it, so we had to retreat.

- When this rioting stuff happens,

so many people who never what kind of person they were,

they were just upset the way that it was handled

and the things that they did to him,

it was just not, it just was not right.

It just doesn't sit right with the people.

And they knew what kind of person he was,

they knew it was unfair for them to just do that to him.

- I'm from the advisory committee of your county manager.

And I came over here to try to help bring the peace about,

for what they have created out here, okay?

These nothings here, these pigs, these are pigs out here,

these policeman pigs, these guys have done the dirt.

They have taken McDuffie, they've killed him.

These people asked for justice.

They're thinking of Johnny Jones,

they have crucified him under white jury.

This stuff doesn't make sense.

These people want justice, and I don't blame them.

The leadership where these people are,

everybody has gone in their cubbyholes.

I say Reno and your county manager

need to come out their holes.

And let's go to the round table

because to release these cops without these people,

having an explanation is no good.

- There were a lot of people that didn't appreciate

seeing black police officers out there either.

I had things thrown at me.

- And I remember talking with one black supervisor

who said, I understand the impact

and how difficult it is, but we still have a job to do.

He had a difficulty persuading

the Blacks who he supervised to come to work.

- I was sympathetic, and I'll tell you the truth.

If I hadn't been a policeman,

I might've been over there with them.

- Throughout the night,

we didn't get an opportunity for a single nap.

We would go from one fire to the next fire

to the next fire to the next five.

We were relieved the next morning by the next shift.

And we were advised,

you better go home and get as much sleep as you can,

because there's a likelihood

that you're going to be called back in the evening.

And lo and behold, we were called back in the evening.

And again, we responded from fire,

one fire to the next fire to the next fire.

- The fire department will respond to a fire

and it'd be pelted with rocks and everything else.

The fire department wouldn't go to any fire

unless it had a police escort.

And obviously that was one of the reasons why.

- We've seen all sorts of major trauma,

from gunshot wounds, stab wounds,

people beaten up every parts of the body

from the head, abdomen, chest, you name it, it's happened.

- I mean, things were happening so fast

in so many different locations,

it became difficult to keep up with them

and respond to them.

- We've asked the governor to release

a third battalion, the governor's office

has now told us that there will be

1200 state people between troopers and the national guard

and other law enforcement agents of the state

to supplement our 750 police department

and metropolitan Dade counties 2000.

So I think that those men evidently might be needed

the way this thing is shaping up.

- I remember one night we had to respond to a fire

that happened and that was over

on 27th Avenue and 54th street.

Someone, vandals had set the place on fire.

There were, you know, several hundred thousand tires

and then made quite a fire and it was hard to extinguish.

- The Norton Tire Company in the midst

of the McDuffie riots, it's set on fire,

it had been a major employer

of African-Americans in the community.

And people look at that and said,

you shot yourself in the foot, look at what you did.

Why did you do that?

Not realizing that for Black people in that community,

the tire company was a site of injustice.

The police regularly used it as a place

to illegally and brutally interrogate

prisoners in their custody.

And so in the minds of people in that community,

this was a site of devastation.

And so given the opportunity to strike back,

they set it on fire and burned it down.

So you have to kind of change the vantage point

through which you examine a lot of what's happening.

- I walked up the street, and I watched buildings burn,

cars turned over, rocks being thrown.

People were really mad, really mad.

- And it said, "This is for McDuffie, this is for McDuffie,"

it was written all over, everywhere.

All over the walls, all over, everywhere.

"For McDuffie, for McDuffie."

- [Frederica] During the time of the riot,

well, I was just arriving back from the trial,

which was held in Tampa.

I felt a little disappointed, no need to,

but who am I to control someone else's feelings?

- Well mama took it hard, she did.

She, but she's was a strong woman in the Lord.

Even with the riot was going on, the told them to stop.

She told them they were going to ruin her Sunday.

- But there's going too far with it,

and I ask these people and beg them,

with tears in my eyes to quit this, to quit this.

And look for God, that's who they need to look to.

Because if there had been more God in them,

this wouldn't have even happened.

It wouldn't have happened,

they don't have no God in them to guide them.

And to guide them from doing such terrible things.

They just need to look to God,

that what I, and I would like to say,

to the community of people

that are doing this in the community, quit that.

Quit that, cut it out, it ain't no good.

It ain't no good.

And it has been enough, it has been enough

to stir up the people and let them know what they mean.

- The toll was 18 people were killed in the city of Miami.

There were more than

a hundred million dollars in property damage.

- We responded to an excess of 300 calls, fire calls.

Buildings burned out, burnt to the ground.

And then you start thinking about the impact of that.

The long term devastation of the results of a riot.

- It was the community that I had worked,

as a rookie officer of the community that I had lived in,

as a young adult, was just torn down, torn apart,

stores that I had frequented when I patrolled the area

and also just lived in the area were burning,

restaurants, businesses, and it's sickened me.

Because I realized that none of this

was going to be replaced.

- And we had some large businesses as a matter of fact,

in Liberty City at that time,

not many of them were owned by Blacks,

but they did provide jobs.

And not all of the jobs that Blacks

had in those businesses were necessarily menial jobs.

You had some black store owners

that we're beginning now to hire Black cashiers,

which had not been the case before.

So there was an upward mobility of blacks

in the Liberty City prior to the riot

which stopped in the aftermath of that riot.

The businesses left, the jobs left,

and they're not going back, even now.

- I wasn't as aware that his death

and his legacy and the civil services

and the actions that came afterward

has determined my path in life.

I mean, there's absolutely no question about.

The place that I'm sitting now was

founded based upon the opportunity

that came about because of his death

and the civil disturbances and the political will

of the black community afterwards.

It was a way of addressing economic and housing development

in that community by supposedly federal government,

Jimmy Carter then, appropriating $89 million

to come into Miami to go to community based organizations,

to help revitalize those communities.

The state legislature did fulfill this promise

and appropriated about $10 million to fund

and create a statute that actually

recognized community development,

corporations and neighborhood government corporations,

all of that money that was allocated

and appropriated under Jimmy Carter,

he lost the election in November.

And so even though Congress had allocated it

and it was written, it was at HUD, ready to come down here,

first thing President Reagan did was freeze all spending.

And so anything like that, you know,

you had Republican in congress.

He did what this current president did was he cut it.

And so we never got any federal assistance.

And so what happened, you had all these

community-based organizations that had got

these administrative dollars to organize themselves

and to hire staff, but the money

that was supposed to come down for the economic development,

the job training, the capital to start small businesses,

the money to buy property and build affordable housing,

none of that came.

You had these organizations sort of running around

with resource to pay salary,

but no resources to do anything else.

Most folded after the first three or four years,

because it was just really no access to capital.

- So you had a community that had been started by the riot,

had lost jobs, had lost important opportunities

for advancing that community,

and this was replaced with an atmosphere of fear.

You wouldn't want to be caught

in Liberty City after that riot.

The sense was that if you were

White or Hispanic, you would be killed.

And so it became a more isolated community

as a result of what had happened.

It just a time for people to simply

get over the disappointment and the anger

and sadness about what had happened.

But I don't think we ever came back together.

- The McDuffie case, the riots, the subsequent acquittals,

it created a huge schism in Miami-Dade county.

I mean, I think that Miami-Dade county thought

that we were all right, that we were different,

that we got along, that things were good.

And the death of Mr. McDuffie

and those subsequent riots showed that we were not good.

We were, you know, things were not all right.

Well, I think it's symptomatic of our country.

I mean, we have a segregated past,

we have issues in this country that we don't talk about.

- And the things that we're going through today,

you wouldn't believe it.

Think things are changing, but somehow

they seem to stay the same.

When what happened happens to others,

bring those feeling back to a certain degree.

- When you look at some of the things

that happened in the Black community,

not everybody has an appreciation for why they're happening

and why people might be upset about why they're happening,

because they haven't experienced it.

You know, it's something different for them.

They're not close to it, so, you know,

they get that attitude about,

you keep it over there, don't bother us,

do whatever you want to do.

That's why it's so important to do things

to try to change that kind of thought process.

Because the fact of the matter is,

Liberty City goes, so does Miami.

You know, people look at something

about "Liberty City Burning", but it represents Miami.

And people have to understand that.

So they gotta be concerned about what happens everywhere,

and how it's affecting anybody.

- Totally false to say that

that incident changed everything for the better,

because it hasn't, you know, it traumatized my family.

It's devastated my family,

incidents such as that keeps happening.

And even though it's not always in Miami,

it's in our world today, it's in different states,

it's in different cities, and it's affecting families

and it's affecting people,

even when the incident happened in California,

where I believe Rodney King, it affected us in such a way,

because it just brought back so many feelings

and so many just disheartening moments

regarding my father and what he had to endure,

because we had to just see that years later,

it's still happening in the world that we live in.

- I used to turn from it, but I don't any more

because it affects me, it affects my grandkids.

Being young at that age, I was learning dad.

Those men, the police officers

were the ones that hurt my father.

In my head, at that young age, was questioning why.

I question it to the age of 33 or, 33 or so?

And at time I started getting closure.

And the reason being is because

it wasn't nothing I could do about it but to accept it.

I was snatched out of public school

and put in private schools because everywhere I went,

everybody wanted to question and wanted answer

and they was like, oh, look, that's her,

that's Arthur McDuffie's daughter.

And so my mom felt that she had to hide me.

I had to grow up really fast

and I had to learn how to say "I'm a different person

other than what I was, or who I was,"

so if anyone questioned me, because people wanted to know.

I didn't want them to know.

I didn't want to talk about it,

because for me, my dad was opening the pain.

So it was times that I will say, I'm somebody else.

And I'm not even that person.

That was one of my things I did go for therapy

to really come to the real identity of myself.

My mom was depressed a lot.

She was holding her head a lot.

She stopped going to church.

She stopped going to church, real heavy, real real heavy.

and it was so heavy to me and my sister,

there was not option that we could miss Church.

- Just the fact of having to grow up without a father,

you know, ministry has definitely kept our heads on intact

and it's allowed us to be brave

and to be able to speak about it

and to be able to share with the community

and to share with one another

how we feel and just to be an encouragement to people.

- God has taken my brokenness and made it whole.

So I manage to reach people in their brokenness,

in their despairs and tell them, believe it or not,

there is hope, there is hope. There is.

- [MLK] What is it that America has failed to hear?

It has failed to hear how the plight

of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.

It has failed to hear with the promises

of freedom and justice have not been met.

And it is failed to hear that large segments

of white society are more concerned

about tranquility and the status quo

than about justice, equality and humanity.

And so in a real sense, on nation summers of riots

are caused by our nations winters of delay.

And as long as America postpones justice,

we stand in the position of having

these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.

Social justice and progress are the absolute

guarantors of riot prevention.