Florida Jury Awards Four Cents

Racist Contempt for Black Life

A Florida jury has mocked the grieving young children of a black man, Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr., gunned down by a white sheriff’s deputy while listening to music in his own home. On May 26, the federal jury of seven whites and a lone black man awarded damages of $1 to each child—Aryanna, Destiny and Gregory—for the loss of their father in a wrongful death case. They tossed Hill’s mother an additional $1 for funeral expenses. Adding insult to injury, under Florida’s bizarre blame apportionment formulas, the $4 total in damages was reduced to four cents when jurors found St. Lucie County sheriff Ken Mascara, a Democrat, to be only 1 percent at fault in the killing of Hill. The “award” was then reduced to nothing because Hill had been drinking. In his “man cave.” On his day off. In the garage of the house he grew up in.

The Coca-Cola warehouse worker was 30 years old on the day he died in January 2014, killed by cop bullets fired through his garage door, while Destiny, then nine years old, watched in horror from the elementary school across the street. Two sheriff’s deputies had shown up at Hill’s house in Fort Pierce after a busybody parent picking up her child at the school called in a complaint about loud music and obscenities—potentially a municipal code violation for which the penalty on first complaint is a simple warning.

Hill was in the garage listening to Drake’s “All Me,” a rap song about a black man who made it, when the deputies arrived. The cops banged violently on the garage door. Hill raised it. Then one of the cops screamed “Gun!” Hill quickly closed the door as the other deputy emptied four bullets into the door. Three of the projectiles struck Hill, one of them in the head, killing him instantly where he stood behind the closed door. The man died in a pool of blood on the garage floor. Destiny and other witnesses from the school said that Hill was not holding a gun and that the deputies issued no warnings before firing.

Remembering her lost fiancé as a hardworking family man who loved to fish and hang out in his garage, Terrica Monique Davis bitterly stated two years later, “He loved his kids, and he loved that garage. So for him to die in there…it’s just too much.” Davis had lived with Hill in the home. They had planned to marry.

After shooting up his garage, cops claimed that Hill was “barricaded” inside and called in a SWAT team, which fired tear gas through the windows of the house. They flooded the children’s home with chemical agents, rendering it uninhabitable. They also deployed a robot to cut through the door and photograph the garage. Once inside, the cops found Hill dead, with an unloaded gun in his back pocket—a gun that he nominally had the right to keep and carry in his home under Florida law.

In 2016, after a local grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against the deputy who fired the lethal shots, Viola Bryant, Hill’s mother, filed the civil wrongful death suit, seeking the modest amount of only $15,000. When the jury’s award was announced last month, Monique Davis walked out of the courtroom to keep from shouting out in rage. “It was basically a slap in the face,” Davis told the Associated Press. “You value someone’s life as one dollar?” The family’s lawyer, John Phillips, told the New York Times (30 May), “Why go there with the $1? That was the hurtful part.” The lawyer, who set up a GoFundMe page to financially aid the family, said he was drafting a motion for a new trial, and that if the motion is denied, he will file an appeal.

We have often cited the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court case, in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The exclusion of citizenship for black people in the high court’s decision was in part justified by noting that if black men were citizens they could “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” More than 150 years after slavery was defeated, in no small measure through the valor and courage of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors carrying Union rifles, the case of Greg Hill demonstrates yet again that black men and women can be struck down by the cops, including in their own homes, on the mere presumption that they may be armed.

Just as it took the Civil War to smash the Southern slavocracy, it will take a third American Revolution to shatter the power of the capitalist ruling class and the state apparatus—including the cops, courts and prison system—which exists to defend it. There is only one force in this society with the social power to do that: the multiracial working class, whose labor produces the wealth that the capitalist rulers claim as theirs. All workers, including white workers, face the same enemy—a ruling class that condemns them to ever more vicious exploitation and wields the knife of racism to keep working people divided and to maintain its power. That the workers have not been mobilized in their own defense, much less in defense of the oppressed, is the responsibility of the trade-union misleaders who have shackled labor’s power by their defense of the capitalist system.

The Spartacist League/U.S. is dedicated to the fight to forge a new leadership of the working class—a multiracial revolutionary workers party. The cause of black freedom will be a great driving force in the struggle for a socialist America and a great achievement of workers revolution. Only when those who labor rule will the wealth of this country be used for the benefit of those who produced it—not least the descendants of black slaves, upon whose backs American capitalism was built. And only then will there be any real justice for the working class, black people and all the oppressed. For black liberation through socialist revolution!