No Justice by Robbie Tolan & Lawrence Ross

Author:Robbie Tolan & Lawrence Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / African American, Political Science / Civil Rights, Biography & Autobiography / Cultural Heritage, Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Violence In Society, Social Science / General
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2018-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

I loathed the idea that the defense team was going to get a chance to interrogate my dad. To me, the defense team was an extension of the Bellaire Police Department and the City of Bellaire, two entities that had fought tooth and nail to discredit me and pretend that there wasn’t a problem between their police department and black people. Plus, I’d been in several depositions with the District Attorney, the grand jury, and Bill Helfand, the City of Bellaire’s civil attorney, and I know how sarcastic and condescending they could be.

With a pat on my shoulder, my dad told me, “See ya in a bit,” as though he was going to the ballpark to play a game. He was gone about twenty-five minutes, which was pretty much about how long his depositions had been in the pretrial interviews. The fact is that when the shooting went down, my dad had his face and hands pressed to our Chevy Suburban SUV, with a gun pointed at him, when Cotton came around the front of the truck. My dad didn’t get a solid view of what happened because he couldn’t turn his head, but he heard everything.

As we’d been warned before, my dad didn’t pretend that he’d seen something he hadn’t, and that meant that we were able to keep our credibility. Unlike the police officers, I might add.

“This is my son. This is my house. This is my car. We live here,” my dad testified. “Two to three seconds later, I heard a bang (of Marian Tolan hitting the garage). A second or two after that I heard a gunshot. Then all I heard was my wife saying ‘Call on Jesus. Pray Robbie. Call on the Lord.’”

Anthony was in the room with us, but Greenwood and Morris told us that they weren’t going to call him. That hit me hard, and I think it hit him hard. For the most part, during this ordeal, because he wasn’t shot, he’d pretty much been ignored.

Years before, Anthony came to live with us when he was a teenager, around fifteen or sixteen, and we instantly saw that he was a good kid with a good heart. Like a lot of families, my parents opened their home to him because they thought that he needed a stable home. Without getting too much into his previous situation, my mom and dad figured that, at such an impressionable age, he needed that special positive attention that could make or break a kid.

I loved having him around because it filled a void in my own life. They say that twins have a sixth sense about the other person who shared a womb with them. Well, my twin died before I was born, and I was the only survivor. Having Anthony in our home felt like a void was being filled. Forget about the cousin versus brother thing, Anthony Cooper, for all intents and purposes, was a Tolan in our house, and that meant that I considered him my little brother, and I’d like to think that he considered me his big brother.

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