george floyd

“Can We Live?”

The daughter of civil rights activists on the question that’s haunted her for decades.

June 1, 2020

People walk past ruins in Miami after rioting over the acquittal of four police officers charged with the 1979 death of...

In the blizzard of stories across my social media feed after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, one stopped me cold: A 12-year-old boy, Keedron Bryant, went viral singing a song he wrote about police brutality called “I Just Want to Live.” The song and his voice are lovely. But I was heartbroken. I was only a little older than Bryant, and sitting in my junior high school cafeteria, when I wrote a poem inspired by police brutality called “I Want to Live.”

I was 14, and neighborhoods in my home city of Miami were burning.

The memory returns, raw and visceral, as I watch footage from the uprisings in Minneapolis and nationwide protesting Floyd’s killing. It returned, too, during the Louisville protests after police shot and killed EMT Breonna Taylor in her own home. It returned in 2014, when I saw footage of tear gas flying in Ferguson after police killed 18-year-old Mike Brown, as well as in 1991, in the aftermath of the Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles.

Every city’s new scream of pain sweeps my mind back to May 17, 1980—the day my childhood ended. On that day the police officers charged with killing Arthur McDuffie were acquitted.

McDuffie was a 33-year-old black motorcyclist (an insurance salesman and former Marine M.P.) who had led police on a high-speed chase before he coasted to a stop at the freeway exchange. As many as 12 police officers swarmed him, full of rage. While McDuffie was handcuffed, they beat him so badly with heavy flashlights that the coroner said his skull looked like “a cracked egg.” The officers then damaged his motorcycle and crafted a lie, saying he had been injured in a crash. McDuffie died days later.

Arthur McDuffie might have died under the cloud of the police officers’ lie if not for Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan, who got a tip and investigated his death, exposing the conspiracy to hide his murder. After the exposé, several officers were tried for manslaughter—which, even as a child, didn’t seem like a powerful enough charge to me. Even so, an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted them. I felt stunned and shattered as I watched the news crawl silently across my television screen on a sleepy Saturday afternoon.

He didn’t matter to them, I thought. Our lives don’t matter.

Patricia Stephens Due, center, and John Due, profiled against the movie sign, at the Florida Theater protest in Tallahassee in 1963.Courtesy of the State Library and Archives of Flordia.

It was almost too big for my mind to accept. My parents were civil rights activists, so I knew how bad things had been back in the 1960s from their stories of fire hoses and tear gas and jail cells and beatings. But 1980 was the first time I understood how Jim Crow was still hiding inside the criminal justice system. I was pledging allegiance to the same flag as my white classmates at school, but there was no such thing as “liberty and justice for all.” Although the Black Lives Matter movement would not be born until more than 30 years later, Arthur McDuffie was my first Black Lives Matter moment.

My late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was part of the first jail-in in the 1960s student sit-in movement. She and her sister (my aunt Priscilla Stephens Kruize) and three other Florida A&M University students spent 49 days in jail rather than paying their fines after they were arrested for ordering food at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. My father, John Due, 85 now and still a self-titled “freedom lawyer,” did dangerous fieldwork in Mississippi and helped pioneer the tactic of removing southern civil rights cases from state to federal court. My two younger sisters and I were practically homeschooled on black history. Both of my parents have been inducted into Florida’s Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

The night of the McDuffie verdict in 1980, my mother and two younger sisters attended a protest at the county justice building, but I’d spent much of my childhood at local protests with my parents—and, even at 14, I was already weary. What good would holding another sign do against a problem so entrenched? Instead I chose to go see a silly comedy with a friend, trying to escape. By the time my friend and I got back from the movie, images of burning cars and a smoke-choked sky were on the evening news. The protest had turned violent. For long minutes I did not know if my family had been hurt. Thankfully, my mom had been able to take my sisters to safety with the help of community leaders. My father worked the streets as a member of the Community Relations Board to try to instill calm.

Over the next three days, smoke hung over the city as Miami burned. I felt sick, sleepwalking at school while my hometown was in flames. My junior high school played Muzak over the cafeteria loudspeaker to try to quell any tensions at my tri-ethnic school, but the music wasn’t helping me breathe. So I began writing my poem instead, “I Want to Live”: I want to live in a society where nobody remembers what ‘nigger’ used to mean. With line after line, I described the utopian society I wished I lived in. No hate. No discrimination. The poem ended: Maybe that sounds like heaven, but if I lived there right now, I’d call this society hell. You know why? MAYBE IT IS.

When I was finished, I had tears in my eyes, but the despair in my chest felt soothed. I showed the poem to my mother, and she told me how lucky I was to have writing as an outlet for my emotions. “The people setting those fires feel hopeless,” she said. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was four, but that was the first time I understood that writing might save my life.

Now a new generation is discovering just how devalued their lives are in U.S. society, risking a pandemic and possible police violence to protest in the name of a better society. In their cities they are facing their own baptisms by fire.

But it comes with a cost. After my mother was teargassed at a peaceful march in Tallahassee in 1960, she wore dark glasses even indoors for the rest of her life, complaining about lingering sensitivity to light. “I went to jail so you won’t have to,” she once told me.

If only it were that simple. If only one generation’s sacrifices could have fixed it all.

It’s no wonder that my mother found solace in horror movies, where the real-life horrors she feared most could be confronted, or even vanquished, in the form of monsters and demons. She passed that love on to me, and my writing shifted from utopias to horror scenarios where I could write characters strong enough to face seemingly insurmountable odds. Just like the child writer I was in 1980, everything I write is designed to make me stronger. To give me hope.

Years after the death of Arthur McDuffie—when the police officers who had beaten Rodney King for the world to see on video were acquitted and Los Angeles erupted in protest—I had a dream that felt real enough to touch: I was present during McDuffie’s beating at that freeway exchange as he lay prone on the asphalt absorbing blow after blow in horrifying slow motion. I tried to scream out, but my voice was gone. I could only witness, helpless. I woke up sobbing with the anguish I had not allowed myself to experience while I was awake. Suddenly, I was a 14-year-old girl again.

Some nightmares never go away.

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award–winning novelist and coauthor of Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She was an executive producer on Shudder’s Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband, Steven Barnes, cowrote an upcoming episode of The Twilight Zone, “A Small Town,” for CBS All Access. She teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA and online. Her website is at tananarivedue.com.