The deep significance of Black '1870' pins worn for SOTU address

As President Biden approaches the lectern for Tuesday’s State of the Union speech to address the country’s top issues before Congress, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other Democrats will be making a bold statement of their own — albeit a silent one.

Many of them will be wearing black pins with the year “1870” on them, which marks the date of the first known police killing of an unarmed and free Black person that occurred in the United States. The pins are a call for action on reforming the institution of policing that has killed thousands of Black people in the 153 years since.

“I’m tired of moments of silence. I’m tired of periods of mourning,” New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat who came up with the idea to create the pins, told Yahoo News. “I wanted to highlight that police killings of unarmed Black citizens have been in the news since 1870 and yet significant action has yet to be taken.”

On March 31, 1870, 26-year-old Henry Truman, a Black man, was shot and killed by Philadelphia Officer John Whiteside after being accused of shoplifting from a grocery store.

Whiteside had allegedly chased Truman into an alley when at some point Truman turned to ask what he did wrong, and the officer fatally shot him, according to an account in the Philadelphia Inquirer the following day. At trial, Whiteside claimed that he had been ambushed by a crowd while he chased Truman. Whiteside was later convicted of manslaughter. That same year the country adopted the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote.

Over a century and a half since Truman’s killing, a steady stream of Black people have been killed by law enforcement, including 1,353 since 2017, according to data from Statista, a digital insights company. In fact, Black Americans are three times as likely to be killed by police than white people and account for one in four police killings, despite making up just 13% of the country’s population.

Many of the parents, siblings and children of Black people killed by police over the last decade will be in attendance at Tuesday’s address as guests of members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The attendees include the families of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who was gunned down by Cleveland police in 2014 on a playground; Amir Locke, the 22-year-old fatally shot by Minneapolis police in a predawn, no-knock raid last year; Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old fatally beaten by Memphis police during a traffic stop early last month and a dozen other families who have lost loved ones.

“I hope today that we can get Congress to see that we need to pass this bill because this should never happen,” Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, said Tuesday afternoon at a press conference with the Congressional Black Caucus. “I don’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

In contrast, several Republicans have chosen to honor members of law enforcement as their guests, including Rep. Mike Garcia of California, who will bring Tania Owen, a retired detective and widow of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant who was shot and killed by a suspect when he answered a burglary-in-progress call in 2016. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon will also host police officers from their respective districts.

The invitations come after several other Republicans last week were photographed wearing AR-15 pins during National Gun Violence Survivors Week, which were passed out by Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia on the House Floor. Clyde claimed the pins were “to remind people of the Second Amendment of the Constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties.”

Many police reform advocates have argued that the systemic issues tied to policing transcend even racial lines, highlighting the fact that the five main officers involved in the brutal beating of Nichols were also Black.

“Blackness doesn’t shield you from all of the forces that make police violence possible,” James Forman Jr., a Yale law school professor and expert on race and law enforcement, told the New York Times. “What are the theories of policing and styles of policing, the training that police receive? All of those dynamics that propel violence and brutality are more powerful than the race of the officer.”

Karundi Williams, CEO of re:power, an organization that trains Black people to become political leaders, told NBC News that addressing the core issues is the only way to prevent more killings.

“When we have moments of racial injustice that is thrust in the national spotlight, there is an uptick of outrage, and people take to the streets,” Williams said. “But then the media tends to move on to other things, and that consciousness decreases. But we never really got underneath the problem.”

In 2022 alone, police killed 1,192 people, more than any year in the past decade, according to a new report released last week by nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. Black people accounted for more than 300 of those killings. The report also claimed that many of these killings could have been avoided by changing law enforcement’s approach to such encounters, such as sending mental health providers to certain 911 calls.

But substantial police reform has continued to lag.

The 2021 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was put forth following the murder of 46-year-old George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, seeks to end excessive force, qualified immunity and racial bias in policing and to combat police misconduct. The bill has passed the House of Representatives twice in the previous Congress, but has continued to fail in the Senate.

Following the most recent police killing of Nichols, members of the Black Caucus are cautiously optimistic that change will soon come.

“This unfortunately reignites the fervor and the necessity and the urgency,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee for Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, recently told Yahoo News. “With 18,000 police communities, there has to be a federal law that addresses the training and the relationship between police. We have to restart.”

An info card attached to the black pin given to members of the Black Caucus expresses the frustration of numerous police killings from Truman to Nichols.

“153 years later, nothing has changed,” the note read in part. “We are tired of mourning and demand change.”

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Cover thumbnail photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images