TONY CASTRO’S LA-In one of our last conversations before his death earlier this year, author and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi lamented that while he had successfully imprisoned Charles Manson, he feared he had only made a dent in the threat of an apocalyptic race war that the mass murderer had hoped to ignite.
“Madness and mad men,” said Bugliosi, co-author Helter Skelter, his best-seller about the Manson Family’s notorious 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and others. “We will always have them with us.”
Bugliosi’s fears may have been well founded. Half a century after the racial turmoil of the 1960s, little would appear to have changed in race relations in America – seemingly as if the slew of civil rights laws and the historic election of the country’s first black president have been for naught.
Race relations are worse today than they were before President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 -- especially from the perspective of African Americans, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released last week that underscored just how badly a majority of Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, believe the situation to be.
Perhaps even more distressing, nearly four in 10 Americans think that race relations are even getting worse.
The senseless murders of blacks by whites that continue to shock the nation, from Trayvon Martin to the nine dead in the church shooting in Charleston, S.C., have understandably outraged African-Americans and whites, while raising fears that at any unsuspecting point there could be mass violence on the scale of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Black leaders and others have done an admirable job in quelling the anger and despair among African Americans, especially among activists, and there have been surprisingly few incidents of retribution.
Perhaps we forget, however, that any potential race war – the Helter Skelter wall scrawl found at the Manson Family crime scenes, which Manson had taken from the Beatles' White Album that included the song – would also require an opposing army of white Americans.
To be sure, that army lies in wait, and it is not limited to the Ku Klux Klan in the South, the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons or the white militias along the U.S.-Mexican border.
You just have to look for it among the Internet comments on web sites that have popped up to rally white fear and loathing to the race relations developments but especially the incidents of violent crimes committed by blacks against whites.
Last Friday night, police in Los Angeles arrested a 31-year-old black man in connection with the July 5 cold blooded shotgun shooting death of a white woman in Hollywood.
Ezeoma Obioha (photo below left) remains in custody with bail set at $1 million for the fatal shooting took place just blocks away from the tourist attractions Hollywood and Highland intersection, including the Dolby Theater, the home of the Academy Awards.
Obioha is accused of approaching Carrie Jean Melvin (photo right), 30, and her boyfriend as they walked near Sunset Boulevard and firing a single shotgun blast, killing her before he calmly got into a black sedan, which drove off.
Melvin was a former film student at UC Santa Cruz who had been trying to break into the entertainment industry. She apparently did odd jobs, including social media development which appears to be how she met Obioha, for whom she did $600 worth of work.
Police said Melvin and Obioha had a dispute over Obioha bouncing a check for payment that led to Obioha killing her.
Obioha has been described as a security guard who also had a side business selling gangsta-style clothing and shoes.
The murder and Obioha’s lifestyle were not lost on outraged whites who have posted online on sites like prowhiteparty.com.
“The lesson to be learned here is that White women should have NOTHING to do with Black men including doing any sort of work for them,” wrote one contributor. “Apparently this African thought so little of a White life that he murdered this woman rather than pay her $600 that he owed her.
“I suppose murdering someone over $600 is standard operating procedure for businesses in Africa and other parts of the Third World.”
Most other posts about the shooting and the arrest on other white power web sites have been less kind and filled with racial epithets, and it is safe to say that these have hardly been the last words on the issue.
“I’m thankful that he was apprehended and arrested, but we can’t celebrate,” the victim’s father, Bernie Melvin, told the Los Angeles Times after the arrest. “This was a violent, senseless, meaningless act.”
(Tony Castro, whose Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son The New York Times called the best biography of the baseball Hall of Fame legend, is the author of the forthcoming books DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (Taylor Trade, 2016) and Looking for Hemingway And The Lost Generation (Lyons Press). He was formerly a columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a political writer for The Los Angeles Daily News. Castro is a feature writer for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 61
Pub: Jul 28, 2015
