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After a conversation with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) troubleinchina, I'm reading about race riots. (Detroit 67, Los Angeles 92.) I was aware of the Rodney King Riots, as they're called, at the time, but I was eleven years old. So much of what I'm reading is new to me.
The thing that's kind of horrifying is that the victims of violence in these things are generally the innocent, and the individual incidents that triggered both riots really weren't worth it. It seems clear that in both cases it's a matter of tensions rising until something is going to break.
But the thing is, I'm getting choked up by heroism and kindness this morning.
The instances:
In 1743, a woman was convicted of stealing a shoulder of mutton from a Whitechapel butcher. It turned out that her husband was ill, and her children starving, at the time of the theft. The jury returned their guilty verdict in a mumble, to indicate they thought she deserved compassion. The judge replied, "I hear you, gentlemen," and imposed the token fine of one shilling.
Which the jury proceeded to pay.
No age is without kindness.
On the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a white truck driver, stopped at a traffic light, was dragged from his truck and beaten. News helicopters filmed and broadcast every blow. The police had been ordered to withdraw for their own safety and never came. Reginald Denny was rescued by a black man named Bobby Green, Jr, who was unarmed but nearby and, having seen the broadcast, rushed to the scene and took Denny to hospital in Denny's own heavily-laden truck. Denny recovered after brain surgery. Bobby Green, Jr, is a big damn hero.
Minutes later, Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was brutally attacked. Reverend Bennie Newton, a black minister who ran an inner-city ministry for troubled youth, physically placed himself between Lopez and his attackers and said that if they wanted to kill Lopez, they'd have to kill him too. He then took Lopez to hospital.
That, too, is real heroism.
I am, literally, crying right now, because human nature never changes, and there is always cruelty and savagery and nobility and kindness and heroism. I honestly believe that so long as the good people keep trying, the bad people can't truly win out; racism is still around, sure, but you can't tell me things aren't better than they were fifty or a hundred years ago.
And there are heroes.
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I'm not sure what to think of this.
In 1743, Jonathan Bradford, an Oxford innkeeper, was executed for murder on circumstantial evidence: he was found in the room of one of his guests, who had been murdered in his bed. Bradford was holding a knife. He was innocent of the murder.
As it turns out, he had gone in, intending to murder the guest for his money, but discovered that someone had beaten him to it. As it turns out, it was the dead man's servant, who made a deathbed confession.
The thing is, he was hanged for a crime he did not commit... but he had intended to commit that exact crime, just someone else did it first.
Setting aside approval/disapproval of the death penalty itself, was his prosecution wholly unjustified?
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