There is No Short Cut

Seventeen years ago, Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of forty-one bullets from police guns in the Soundview section of the South Bronx, holding a wallet, not a gun, in his hand. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it, “41 shots…American Skin.”  When I wrote an editorial about it, it got me in a lot of trouble. I said that if Amadou had been my son (one of my sons was Amadou’s age), he would still be alive. I called on public and religious leaders to admit that we have a racial problem in our community and that we needed to find the resolve to face it together.