Say his name
April 8, 2021 |
Timothy DeWayne Thomas, Jr. (1981-2001)Twenty years ago this week, Timothy Thomas became the 15th Black man killed by a Cincinnati police officer in a six-year span.
The death of this unarmed teenager in Over the Rhine sparked three days of civil unrest — what news reports at the time characterized as the "Cincinnati riots."
In the months that followed, Fr. Graham and others at Xavier contributed to the conversations that yielded the federally mandated Collaborative Agreement between the Cincinnati Black United Front, the ACLU, the City of Cincinnati, and the Fraternal Order of Police.
Some who were around in those days see real progress from that agreement. They point to new institutional safeguards and a neighborhood transformed, at least for some (as CBI showed).
Yet policing data, studies of Black Cincinnati, and even the white-supremacist vandalism that once again stained our campus last week all show how much remains for us to do.
Timothy Thomas. Say his name.
