Police Killing of Unarmed Black Man Finally Wakes Up Sleepy Naptown

On June 29, 2017, Indianapolis police approached the car driven by African American city resident Aaron Bailey, who sped away.  The two officers in the car then shot at Bailey’s car multiple times, causing it to crash into a tree.  Bailey was pronounced dead at the scene, had no warrants out for his arrest, and was unarmed.

While police killings have happened several times before in Indianapolis, they are usually greeted by an apathetic “Ho hum” by the city’s residents, black, white and Latino, and the officers are almost always automatically acquitted of any charges by the city’s toothless police review board.  This time, however, was different.  The two police officers have been placed on administrative leave, the FBI is investigating for possible civil rights violations against Bailey by the officers, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett stated publicly that unspecified changes would be made in the way the police handled shootings, and the prosecutor’s office is even supposedly looking into criminal charges against the officers. 

Also, an angry rally against the killing of Bailey occurred July 15 on the grounds of the Indiana State House, a traditional free speech gathering place.  It drew about 200 people of all races, with many participants, speakers, and rally organizers wearing “Wake Up!” and “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts.  Relatives of Aaron Bailey tearfully addressed the gathered crowd, and one local speaker from Black Lives Matter gave an impassioned, militant speech calling not only for justice for Bailey but also demanding justice for Indianapolis’s black community, indictment of the officers, and substantive changes, not just cosmetic ones, in the way the Indianapolis Police Department relates to the black community.  In this writer’s 38 years living in Indianapolis, he’d never before seen such a response to a police shooting.  But then again, even in sleepy Naptown, Trump’s election has brought about a new sense of urgency and activism among blacks and Latinos, and the politically liberal and left, not previously experienced.  And it has sustained itself.  And is not fizzling out, as the Occupy demonstration and takeover of the State House lawn did in early 2012, leaving almost nothing behind except wistful nostalgia

Indianapolis.  Naptown (the city that always sleeps).  Indianoplace.  Frustrating city for progressives to live in; the largest city in equally frustrating Indiana, yet one would not sense it.  The standard norm here is apathy and complacency, with glitzy shopping areas and upscale restaurants that mock its 22% poverty rate and the lack of good jobs.  In many ways, Indianapolis is a throwback to an earlier time, a place straight out of a Sinclair Lewis novel. An atavism, a throwback to the mores of 19^th Century Mississippi, only with high tech.  Indianapolis’s most notable contemporary citizen, the late leftist writer Kurt Vonnegut, scathingly satirized it (although as a thinly-veiled fictional surrogate) in his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, calling it, through one of the book’s characters, “the asshole of the universe.”  Vonnegut also said of Indianapolis, his boyhood and adolescent home, “Indianapolis watches the 500 one day, and sleeps 364;” and as well, “There’s the 500, then 364 days of miniature golf, then the 500 again.”  Another noted contemporary writer who grew up here, Dan Wakefield, was equally harsh in his satirizing of Indianapolis in his 1970 novel Going All the Way, which, while set there in detailed accuracy in the year 1953, still eerily resembles the Indianapolis of 2017.

But perhaps now, all that is changing?  This writer hopes so.  But he’s also seen a lot of hopes raised in the past, only to be dashed.  But there is real possibility that this time now is different, markedly so, and the old ways of justly-named Naptown and Indianoplace will not recur again.  Al least on the overwhelming, stultifying scale they did before, and so heartbreakingly often.  Hell, even Indianapolis’s overarching problem of massive sewer overflow whenever it rained that spewed fecal matter and raw sewage waste into the streets has finally been addressed, and is being fixed!  Granted, fixing it will take till 2025.  But that’s much better than the frustration of before, when nothing was done.  As Bob Dylan sang, “the times, they are a-changin’.”  Even in Indianapolis, even in Indiana.       .

"When we fight, we win!"

INDIANAPOLIS.  What was going to be a civil disobedience confrontation between SEIU Local 1 and Mission Peak, the building management company that just hired a new anti-union janitorial service at two adjacent buildings in downtown Indianapolis, turned into a victory celebration instead.  The day before the scheduled civil disobedience action, Thursday, July 13, Mission Peak informed SEIU Local 1 by letter that it was not hiring as its janitorial contractor Bulldog, the contractor Local 1 vehemently opposed as unfair to its workers.   (Local 1 held a union contract with the previous contractor, which was now nullified under Bulldog.)  Mission Peak, as stated in its letter, would instead open bidding for a “responsible employer,” one that the union could work with.  So, at 10 AM, the approximately 75 people gathered at Indianapolis downtown’s City Market to move over to the nearby Gold Building for civil disobedience, remained gathered for a victory celebration instead.  In telling the supporters of the good news, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s 31-year-old sole paid staff organizer in Indianapolis, shouted out the lesson from this:  “When we fight, we win!”

Represented among the supporters of Local 1, which has waged a multi-year campaign to organize the janitors in Indianapolis downtown janitorial services, were of course, activist janitors of Local 1 themselves, but also security guards supporting Local 1, which is another organizing task in Indianapolis the SEIU local is undertaking.  Also among the activists were members of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), United Steelworkers (USW), AFSCME, and community activist and political groups Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Labor for Our Revolution, offshoot of the Bernie Sanders campaign; Jobs with Justice (JwJ); and activists from the campaign for justice for Aaron Bailey, an unarmed black man who had recently been shot dead in his car by an Indianapolis police officer.  This writer attended as an activist and as a member of the union he belongs to, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). 

The short but spirited rally featured four Latina activist janitors who had worked at the Mission Peak-managed Gold Building and the adjacent 262 E. Ohio building, and had been dismissed.  They now had their jobs back, and each one addressed the crowd in Spanish through an interpreter thanking everyone for their support.  Of the 75 or so in attendance, a good ⅔ had been willing to perform civil disobedience and be arrested.  The rally ended by everyone joining together in singing all five verses plus the repeated chorus of “Solidarity Forever” to sax and French horn accompaniment, and multiple photo-taking of the participants.

While Indiana’s overall poverty rate is 14% (however, that’s according to federal poverty guidelines, which considerably understate the threshold for actual poverty), in Indianapolis it’s 21% overall, with the poverty rate for African Americans at 22%, and the poverty rate a whopping 28% for Latinos in the city, while the Indianapolis poverty rate for whites overall is 14%.  Also, janitors at the cleaning services often only work 4-6 hours a night, and pay, even under the union contact, is only around $9 an hour; however, with a contact there are benefits, and workers represented by the union do much better than the minimum wage or a little above, with no benefits, that non-union janitors make.  Plus, they have job security.  While SEIU’s demands for a “responsible employer” and “fair wages” with decent working conditions may seem “reformist” or just apolitical pure-and-simple trade unionism to many on the left, these demands are very important to the workers involved themselves, who are enthusiastic supporters of SEIU Local 1, and are heavily black and Latino.

So, Paul Nappier, SEIU Local 1’s young activist organizer, definitely has a point.  “When we fight, we win!”—and sometimes with surprising victories.  And every victory for labor in these hard times is, of course, incredibly sweet.