It was a crime of unspeakable horror on the heels of spoken hatred. Last month, Roland James Smith ran into a store in New York’s Harlem holding a can of paint thinner and shouted “Brothers, get out.”
That was correctly taken as an order for those who were black, like Smith himself, to flee the store. Smith shot at others who fled, wounding four of them before he set fire to the paint thinner and killed himself. Seven others, including the Jewish owner, Fred A. Harari, died of smoke inhalation.
Smith had threatened the store before. He had taken part in angry demonstrations led by the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black activists. They were angry that Harari’s expansion plans had included the eviction of the Record Shack, a very popular black-owned fixture of Harlem’s busy 125th Street commercial strip and neighbor to the landmark Apollo Theater.
Sharpton had been recorded whipping up the crowd, daring them not to “stand by and allow . . . some white interloper (to) expand his business on 125th Street.” Yet, after Smith’s murderous rampage, Sharpton and others vigorously rejected any responsibility for the tragedy, even though angry anti-white and anti-Semitic slurs had peppered speeches and chants at the demonstrations he helped organize.
If anyone should understand the tragic consequences of expression that demonizes by race, it is African-Americans. Yet, the very day after the tragedy, pickets were back, this time at a neighboring white-owned business, Bargain World, chanting, Bargain World “must go.” At a later rally, some speakers remembered Smith as something of a martyred hero.
Sharpton and others more inflammatory than he are right in the narrow sense: They did not strike the match at Freddy’s Fashion Mart. But just as, for example, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan has admitted to contributing to “the atmosphere” that led to the assassination of Malcolm X, it is not hard to believe that the angry, scapegoating rhetoric that poisoned Harlem’s atmosphere ignited something deadly and consuming within the man who did strike the match.
Words have consequences. Such angry expressions may not set fires, but they play with fire. Hateful words do not start businesses or create jobs or save neighborhoods. They only lead to more hate.
