Renee Nicole Good walks among the stars with Viola Liuzzo, the civil rights worker from Detroit whom the KKK murdered in 1965 during the march on Selma. As a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, my mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, interviewed those standing on the street as the hearse carrying Viola’s body arrived at church for her funeral. Jean asked a woman of African descent why she had come out in the rain. “Because she died for me,” the woman said.
One definition of a martyr is that not everyone agrees with their status at the time. So it was with Viola then and Renee today. For writing her news article, which appeared on the front page, my mother received multiple credible death threats. We were assigned police protection for a while. Racists calling her and the paper said that they knew where I went to school. What they were getting at, though they used different words, was that Viola and my mother were domestic terrorists.
Trump will now try to entomb Renee in his mausoleum of lies. Since he’s frozen Minnesota out of the investigation, we won’t be able to believe much of what the feds say. As with the events of Jan. 6, we have to study the facts and be clear about what we know. According to one report, Renee and her spouse, Rebecca, had just dropped their six year old at school. The women must have looked terrifying parked on Portland Ave. in their Honda Pilot. The scenario evidently screamed “probable cause.” In the videos, we see and hear an ICE agent shriek curses at her and demand that she get out of the car. She backs up and then turns to her right, away from the agents. We see another agent standing close to her bumper pull his gun, move smoothly to his right as Renee steers away, and pump his bullets into her.
We’re hearing arguments about whether the shooter was entitled to think that Renee was trying to kill him. If prior incidents had traumatized him, he shouldn’t have been on the job or bearing arms. He fired all his shots when she was pulling away. Trump’s investigators will work around that. Besides, the Renee haters aren’t making careful judgments about whether the shooter or driver deserves the benefit of the doubt. “I wish people would tune in to an hour or so of right-wing media a week,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote. “If you don’t see how you and I are framed incessantly as terrorists-in-formation (at best), you can’t understand what is going on. You can’t do your work as a citizen.”
As Renee may well have been doing. We have to be careful here. Not all press reports agree. We know she was a Christian, a mother of three, an award-winning poet, and a kind person. Some also claim that she had received ICE Watch training and was part of a network that warned ICE’s potential targets to stay on their toes. Her family isn’t sure about this. She and Rebecca may have driven down Portland Ave. just to see what was going on, as you or I might if it was happening in the parking lot of our local Home Depot.
We are back in Viola Liuzzo’s country, assuming we ever left, where peaceful resistance to unjust authority is reckoned as a scandal. Vance said Renee was brainwashed and radicalized and had been interfering with ICE officers. With other officials, Kristi Noem called Renee a domestic terrorist. Vance and Noem’s slanders and lies are of a piece with those of the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, enemy of the civil rights movement, who smeared Viola in death with false sex and drug charges.
In some circles these days, there’s no worse crime than loving your neighbor and demanding justice for immigrant workers. Resisting or speaking out against Trump‘s cruel, racist ICE raids and his dark decade of lies about immigration makes one an enemy of the state. So all the golden rulers and No Kings marchers had better watch out. “The bottom line is this,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), speaking about Renee’s death. “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and you get to keep your life.”
Jawohl, congressman. We will follow the instructions. Because after Minneapolis, it looks like Trump and his men really can shoot someone on Fifth Ave., or Portland Ave., and get away with it. It looks like he can do whatever he wants in Venezuela, Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, and on the streets of any city he hates — until those with the constitutional authority to end this reign of cruelty and incompetence finally muster the courage to behave as patriots.
The Jan. 6 man was always going to reoffend. Giving him power again was one of history’s worst mistakes. Life-saving drugs denied to children in Africa, murdering men of color on the high seas, now unconditionally defending ICE kills at home. He has the taste in his mouth. You can tell from his swagger this week, including telling reporters that the only moral restraint he acknowledges is his own constricted conscience. Renee is probably not our last martyr. We won’t forget that she died for us.