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Minkah / "Poetic Justice"

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Minkah: One time some sheriff deputies went to arrest a group of Mexican guys, something with drugs, something like that maybe, I think, and the Mexican guys got the upper hand, and they took them down in the bottom down in West Dallas, the Trinity River bottom, and they shot them up. And so I think two of the main people they were looking for was Guzman and Lopez, you know. So they just went through Mexican neighborhoods, just anybody Mexican, you know. And they shot up a, luckily they didn't kill them, they shot up a man and his wife. They weren't Guzman and Lopez, you know, they went in the wrong place. And I went to visit them in the hospital, you know, and...and I didn't tell anybody in the organization. One got my defense captain, I just told him to come go with me, I need you to stand guard and just do what I say to do and just be cool. I read off, I went to City Council, City Council meeting, and I didn't register to speak on purpose. And we had a Black city councilman named George Allen, and I went to the side and told George, I said, "George, whatever I do, you don't need to back me or be against me, I just wanted you to know that everything is cool, you know, everything is cool." I said. "But I'm gonna speak." He said "okay", you know, and just backs up. I wanted to show him that respect, you know. And so a lady was speaking, it wouldn't look good to snatch the mic from a lady, you know, so I sit there. Then a man got up and spoke, just he was leaving back, I took the mic, when he was leaving [the] mic I took the mic and started reading off my speech. And it was addressed the issue. I said the, I think I spoke, you know, said that those officers got killed down in the river bottom, I said, but it was poetic justice. Because that's the same river bottom where traditionally police took Blacks, Mexicans, and poor whites, and beat them up up, often times didn't even arrest them, just beat them up and let them go, or sometimes beat them up and then took them to jail. And it was the truth, that's what happened down there in the river bottom. You know, so, I said "The Blacks and the Browns and the poor whites are gonna work together to resolve this issue, police abuse of citizens, because, you know, you running around kicking in and shooting up Mexicans who hadn't done nothing to go for Guzman and Lopez." You know, so... after that the Mexican Americans fell in love with me, you know, and it was from my heart. I didn't, it wasn't calculated, it was just, you know, it was bad what they was doing.

Interview Interview with Fahim Minkah
Subjects Race Relations › Anglo-Mexican Race Relations
Race Relations › Black-Brown Race Relations
Police and Law Enforcement › Police Brutality
Tags Guzman, Rene
Lopez, Leonardo
Rodriguez, Tomas
Rodriguez, Berta
Allen, George
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Interview date 2017-08-26
Interview source CRBB Summer 2017
Interviewees Minkah, Fahim
Interviewers Bynum, Katherine
Duration 00:03:53
Citation ""Poetic Justice"," from Fahim Minkah oral history interview with Katherine Bynum,  August 26, 2017, Glenn Heights, TX, Civil Rights in Black and Brown Interview Database, https://crbb.tcu.edu/clips/7146/poetic-justice, accessed October 12, 2024