My country, 'tis of thee. . .

Craig Ferguson was a single father raising 6 children. He put in long hours in the crushing South Florida heat as a construction worker. The circumstances of his death last month are surprising to those who knew him as a devoted father and winner of an “Ultimate Father” award from Frontline for Kids, an after-school program in St Lucie County. Executive director Jerome Gayman who knew him for almost 7 years, said the 49 year old Ferguson was active in his children's activities and served as a good role model to other young people in the program.

Ferguson drowned, according to Sheriff’s deputies, in an alligator infested canal on a moonless night while they watched him struggle and call out in vain for help.
According to police records, officers had attempted unsuccessfully to stop Ferguson’s van because of defective brake lights and he had been attempting to elude them.

The van reached a dead end street in Ft. Pierce, a dead end town on Florida’s ironically named Treasure Coast and the driver fled, jumping into a canal. Just before reaching the other side, Ferguson, an excellent swimmer according to a family spokesman, began to struggle and call for help. Witnesses in the area heard gunshots.

According to the police report, no attempt was made to save him; the officers elected not to follow him into the murky canal, notoriously full of alligators. According to Sheriff Ken Mascara, the deputies thought Ferguson had a warrant out for his arrest, though it turned out to be for a different person with the same name. A spokesman for the Sheriff said that as no agency policies were found to have been broken, no internal investigation was done.

The family however was not allowed to see the body and was told that an autopsy confirmed drowning as the cause of death. With the help of a prominent local attorney, they have finally obtained a second autopsy, the results of which the family hopes will confirm their suspicions of foul play and reconcile the cause of death with reports from other witnesses.

I should mention that Craig Ferguson was a black man, a native of the Bahamas who was unable to get his driver’s license renewed after September 11th, 2001. He had been in trouble a few times since for driving with an expired license, but had no convictions and could hardly be called a terrorist. He helped rebuild our homes after three hurricanes, he tried to make his neighborhood a better one. Yet he was a foreigner and we no longer like or trust foreigners and particularly dark colored foreigners.

So whether the investigation goes anywhere or finds an evidence of foul play, none of it makes America look good, none of it makes me proud or comfortable. The comments attached to the article in the on line version of today’s paper are sadder yet: not a trace of compassion for the six orphans, much conjecture about how he must have been a bad guy and drug user and all the other things smug, white, angry America attaches to black men. There is no sorrow in any of them, no humanity, no trace of that Christianity that’s bragged about on every possible occasion, no trace at all of the fictitious land of justice and opportunity I once believed in.

My country, ‘tis of thee, hate anger and bigotry
Of thee I sing.