In the wake of the Alton Sterling shooting and resulting protests in Baton Rouge, LSU Law professor Christopher Tyson penned an op-ed piece “The City Where I Live and Where Alton Sterling Died,” which was published by the New York Times. In the editorial, Tyson reflects on the community in which he was raised, the issues surrounding it and the work that must be done to bring attention to these problems.
If you grew up black in Baton Rouge, La., you know the street corner where Alton B. Sterling lost his life last week. For me, it’s on the other end of the neighborhood in which my father opened his law practice before becoming a judge. It’s down the street from my current church and up the street from where I first started a youth mentoring program. From now on, however, the image of my city includes that of a visibly restrained man being shot at point blank range, then left to bleed to death while members of our police force picked his pockets for a gun.
Tyson details the two sides of Baton Rouge he has seen throughout his life. From early efforts in the civil rights movement to current day inequalities, he said race issues continue to loom in the city.
Says Tyson:
I feel truly blessed to have been born and raised in Baton Rouge and to be bringing up my young children here. I would love to tell you about our rituals around family, food and football. Despite our many virtues, we are a community with a long, troubled racial past. Much of the Baton Rouge we experience today is a direct consequence of that past. We were home to the first organized bus boycott of the civil rights movement and the nation’s longest-running school desegregation case. The latter distinction continues to shape our city in profound ways.
Tyson continues by pointing out the two sides of Baton Rouge, separated by race, wealth and attention by the public and elected officials, he says. Through working with organizations such as the Baton Rouge Youth Coalition, a group Tyson helped found, he says there is hope to blur and, in time, erase that line that divides the city.
There is a line running through the middle of Baton Rouge. It’s a color line. A class line. A line by which you can gauge which lives matter more. It’s a line deliberately drawn and one about which too many are indifferent. And it mocks each aspiration we have to be a great city. Like the residents of Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, St. Paul and Dallas, we are finding ways to pick up the pieces and do the unglamorous work of fixing the underlying problems. I don’t expect that work to end anytime soon.
Read his op-ed “The City Where I Live and Where Alton Sterling Died” in full here.
