The Man Who Loved Ferguson [View all]

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Walter Rice embodies the triumphs and tragedies of this embattled Missouri town - Stephen Yang for Newsweek


_____ Rice says he does not remember much racism from his youth. He says his parents taught him from a young age that “we had a place.” His goal was to rise gradually, inconspicuously. This was the way of Booker T. Washington, not W.E.B. Du Bois. Say what you will, but it worked. Rice graduated high school with a 1.1 GPA. He is unashamed of that fact, proud that he graduated at all. Of the 21 blacks who started high school in his class of 300, only two others did.

Rice kept working in grocery stores, hoping to become a butcher: He figured the impending integration of Local 88, the meat-cutters’ union, could assure him a comfortable job and a decent life. But then Vietnam became more than just a distant nuisance, and Rice was drafted into the Army in 1962. He was trained as an electronics expert in Germany and worked at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. In 1972, he was sent to Vietnam for nine months to retrieve electronic equipment. He recalls “rockets all the time” and is reluctant to say much more. He was awarded a bronze star, but doesn’t want to reveal for what, other than that it involved “hostilities.”




Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly · 3h
8/21 #Ferguson -Vietnam vet wants police to "take this shit home" and "get that Army crap out of here."


After leaving the Army in 1982, Walter Rice did not move to a beach cabana on the Florida Panhandle or a ranch house abutting a Phoenix golf course. “I love Ferguson,” he says. So he came back there, went to Florissant Valley Community College to learn to “speak proper English” and started working for the Defense Mapping Agency, which he did until 2002. In all, Rice spent nearly 40 years toiling in the service of his nation and is as proud of its flag as the most rabid Tea Party acolyte . . .

Rice, who had major heart surgery in 2000, was not looking for a fight in the summer of 2014. He has his garden to tend to, his history to work on. He was not looking to revisit the racial grievances that he had seemingly transcended so long ago. But the killing of Brown has left Rice rattled, driving him out into the streets to protest, along with Nation of Islam true believers from St. Louis and Occupy Wall Street activists from Chicago, although neither group would appear to be his natural allies.



Stephen Yang for Newsweek


“We screwed up,” Rice says of what he sees around him today. It is a condemnation that seems to include white and black residents of Ferguson alike: the whites for abusing their power, the blacks for not wielding theirs until it was too late.

“I’m down there because I want peace,” says Rice of his long days of protest on Ferguson’s main strip. All that walking in all that heat cannot be good for his repaired heart. But until Ferguson is made right, he will keep waving his flag . . .


read more: http://www.newsweek.com/man-who-loved-ferguson-266031



Emily Kassie @emilykassie ·
8/21 #Ferguson - "I want these tanks out of here"