THE FLORIDA SPECTATOR: Hanging Tree
Valiunas, Algis
THE F ORIDA SPECTATOR ALGIS VALIUNAS Hanging Tree and address that a man as drunk as Golden was would be exceedingly hard put to muster. The medical examiner was a neophyte, the argument...
...and he saw Mr...
...Unlike many Chicago slum dwellings, say, the houses down here, in architectural styles ranging from hencoop to shoebox, were built for the poorest of the poor...
...He has not shown up because the spiritual leaders of Belle Glade's black community—its most prominent ministers—made it clear they did not want him there...
...the town is known chiefly for producing professional football players and AIDS cases in record numbers...
...the U.S...
...The medical examiner detected no bumps on the dead man's head or ligature marks on his wrists, and indeed found the only wound on Golden's body to be the ropeburn around his neck...
...he has not shown up since...
...King announced the next day that he would return to Belle Glade on September 27 to lead a protest march...
...Belle Glade was ripe for a movement, he asserted...
...and an associate of his remarked that the townreminded him of Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, a place where black people lived in terror of the white police, and where racial injustice was a way of life...
...Attorney General to investigate the possibility that Belle Glade police had murdered Golden...
...Golden might still have been alive, and that they were trying to avert a suicide in progress...
...He did not show up in town on September 27, as he promised he would...
...The medical examiner, the sidewinding argument went on, was in bed with the police, who had instructed him to assume the position and to make no unseemly noises while he was doing his duty...
...The same detective admitted that he never looked into the rumor that Golden was sexually involved with a white woman...
...The ruling that Golden's death was indeed a suicide did not quiet matters any...
...The black spectators in the room gasped and snorted and murmured knowingly, and not without reason, though as it turns out not with very good reaA T 7 A.M...
...scoffers subsequently pointed out that these experts had never even spoken to Golden's relatives or friends and had relied exclusively on the police report in reaching their judgment...
...however, an adjoining district a few blocks west, right down Martin Luther King Avenue, is a foretaste of perdition...
...Floridian slums tend to be more emphatic in their desolation than their northern counterparts...
...There might be some truth to that...
...LAST MAY 28 the body of a black man was found hanging from a scheffiera tree in Belle Glade, Florida...
...King for his part put on his best archiepiscopal manner: condescendingly fussy, overstated in its solemnity, yet anxious that everyone appreciate how down home and tenderly human the prelate really is: the effect was of a Renaissance pope dropping the ermine stole and the conqueror's sword and dressing up as St...
...there is no picturesque faded glory to them...
...The medical examiner was a neophyte, the argument continued, and he overlooked the evidence of blows to the head...
...Other aspects of the story were less clear...
...Word started to spread among Belle Glade's black residents that Feraris Golden had been lynched...
...her demeanor showed no trace of pleasure in her exalted proximity to African-American royalty, no hint of moral grandstanding...
...And in a semi-tropical climate, life spills readily out of these houses into the street, which offers a regular desperado carnival, though not an amusing one...
...The medical examiner's report only inflamed the suspicious in the black community, who were becoming legion...
...the tree stood beside the house where Mr...
...King, very publicly, and their repudiation evidently stung...
...and a pure-hearted movement to improve conditions there would surely be a blessing...
...Several local men of the cloth dissed Mr...
...Belle Glade police promptly arrived on the scene (the town's mayor is black, but the police chief and most other police officers are white), and immediately cut Mr...
...Certain political men have contended that these ministers live in fear of the police, who would be only too happy to do them the same way somebody—perhaps some policemen—did Feraris Golden...
...A police officer who had cut Golden's body down was asked about the position of Golden's hands...
...One would rather spend eternity in Dante's Hell than in the dirt-end of Belle Glade...
...R. KING WAS IN BELLE GLADE last September 13, where he met in a church with several dozen black residents, then conducted a very brief press conference under the schefflera tree, declaring that he only sought truth and justice, and holding Bernice Golden's hand all the while...
...It transpired that the bedsheet wound around Golden's neck had belonged to an aunt of his and had come from his grandmother's house...
...King's own aspirations were clearly on a pontifical throne, which no doubt he considers his birthright but which no one else has seen fit to recognize as his...
...Denouncing this miscarriage of justice, a committee of black activists vowed to search the matter to the bottom...
...The official account said otherwise...
...To kill oneself in this chosen manner, the argument ran, would require qualities of nimbleness 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 ALGIS VA L IUNAS son: police photographs of Golden's body showed his hands at his sides...
...King will not be the man to lead that movement...
...Golden's blood alcohol level was 0.33, or over four times the legal limit for driving, and there was also cocaine in his system...
...Golden's body down...
...Francis of Assisi...
...he replied that the hands were behind Golden's back, then suddenly corrected himself and said they were at his sides...
...Lumpkin later insisted she never said such a thing...
...Bernice Golden looked preternaturally wizened, as though mummified by grief...
...The part of town where Feraris Golden lived is unprepossessing but not unpleasant...
...she was just a tiny bone-tired woman whose life had clearly gone on too long, and neither truth nor justice was going to change that...
...indeed, there are at least a few circles of Dante's hell where one would rather spend eternity than in the dirt-end of Belle Glade...
...He is unmistakably a public man dismayed that he doesn't have much of a public...
...But Mr...
...Golden's ex-wife observed that he had lately been seeing a black woman...
...Rumor further drew the conclusion that it had been white police officers who had strung Golden up for this unpardonable impropriety...
...Rumor had it that Golden had been dating the 22-yearold daughter of a white police lieutenant, who did not cotton to the liaison...
...The enduring truth in places like Belle Glade is that, however shattering the American spectacle sometimes becomes, nothing is likely to change any time soon...
...A clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist contended that Golden was an alcoholic in the depths of depression, and thus a prime candidate for suicide...
...Public clamor grew, and Palm Beach County officialdom conducted a coroner's inquest—a public affair, and the county's first in 18 years—into the death in late July...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...As for Belle Glade, it is a farming town of 15,000 people, about half of them black, in the northwest corner of Palm Beach County, where sugar cane is king...
...Family and friends registered their dismay and even their disgust, and the professionally aggrieved were called into play...
...they were later to say that they thought Mr...
...Golden's death as a chance to change his luck...
...A4 Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Florida...
...Golden lived with his grandmother...
...They regarded him as an outside agitator—to use the term of art favored by Southern sheriffs talking about those civil rights types back in the '60s—whose principal concern is not the good of Belle Glade but the enhancement of his own reputation...
...Commission on Civil Rights asked the U.S...
...the woman who found him was Bernice Golden, his mother...
...The dead man was Feraris Golden, a 32-year-old unemployed handyman...
...Bernice Golden thought she saw evidence that her son's death was not suicide but murder: she believed his hands might have been tied behind his back, she would declare, and she was quite sure there were a couple knots on his head...
...Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, promised Bernice Golden, who had gone to Memphis as a suppliant, that he would come to Belle Glade, and mused, "I'm not sure how you commit suicide with your hands behind your back...
...A black state legislator accused the police of shoddy work, and not without reason: they failed to check empty beer cans found under the tree for fingerprints, and neglected to take DNA samples from the fatal bed-sheet...
...A detective testified that Golden's grandmother, Juanita Lumpkin, had told him that Golden had told her on the night of his death he intended to end his life...
...Belle Glade is as ravaged and woebegone a place as I've seen in America...
Vol. 37 • March 2004 • No. 2
