In an account of the events, of which details admittedly remain obscure, Miami-Dade police gunned down an alleged suspect in a burglary after said suspect reportedly shot at police injuring several and killing one officer. The events, which unfolded over the period of an entire day, reportedly began early Thursday morning, September 13, when officers were responding to what was described as a "routine burglary". The Miami Herald sums it up as such:
What happened next was anything but routine: one Miami-Dade officer shot dead; three wounded; a massive manhunt across South Florida; a dangerous killer, on the run for hours, caught and shot.
This probably would have ended there, had it not been for the identity of the young Black man that was gunned down.
The alleged burglar was 25 year old Shawn Sherwin Labeet, half brother of Ishmael Labeet. The Miami Herald provides this as a background:
Shawn Labeet was not yet born in 1972 when Ishmael LaBeet and four associates killed eight people at a St. Croix resort, Carambola. The five -- all dressed in fatigues -- sprang out of the bushes at the Rockefeller-owned Fountain Valley golf course in St. Croix and sprayed the dining area with bullets. According to newspaper accounts of the 1972 massacre, the attackers rounded up as many as 15 people into a nearby patio. Four Miami residents were among them. Eight were ordered to kneel in a circle and systematically shot to death with a shotgun and .45-caliber and 9mm pistols. The four from Miami, two couples vacationing together, were among the dead. The five black robbers, who had screamed racial, anti-white insults during the massacre, according to witnesses, then fled with $731 from the cash register and the personal effects of the dead. Thirteen years later, on New Year's Eve, 1985, Ishmael LaBeet overpowered guards from the Virgin Islands Department of Corrections who were escorting him on a flight from St. Croix to New York. LaBeet forced the American Airlines flight with 198 people aboard to divert to Havana, Cuba, where he was taken off the plane by Cuban authorities. The plane later made the flight to New York with the rest of the passengers.
Now, let me step back for a moment to try to examine this historical water-shed in the history of the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. I do recall the Fountain Valley massacre, as it was subsequently called, since I had commenced my teen years at the time of the events. I am a Virgin Islander not by birth but by virtue of family connections (and given the proximity of the VI to Puerto Rico, I spend a great deal of time over there with my cousins and extended family; most recently having taught for two years at the St. Croix campus of the University of the Virgin Islands). We always understood that what had happened at Fountain Valley that day was tragic and terrible, but constituted a robbery that had gone awry. I have no reason to doubt that to this day. According to author G.A. Elmer Griffin (Former Chairman of the Religious Studies Department at Occidental College) who has published about the circumstances surrounding the massace,
They [the gunmen] were known as marginal hoodlums, kids who used to hang around the Frederiksted post office, but they were not uniformly disliked.
The grave crime, however, took on an even larger than life profile because of the context of the crime scene and the inevitable racial undertones that would surround it. The above-cited author continues:
During the legal proceedings, and even now and then in certain retellings, they achieve the status of political victims, of embarrassingly compromised heroes. But it is the scene of the crime, the institutional target of the misdeeds, which best embodies Fountain Valley's enduring significance.
The exclusive 330 acre Fountain Valley golf course would have been perceived as an oasis of White privilege by a West Indian former plantation slave society with very strong lingering memories not only of past Black servitude but of the struggle to overthrow such servitude. I would venture to argue that St. Croix symbolizes the beacon of freedom which championed the collective resistance that resulted in the emancipation of the islands from slavery. As I once wrote:
There was another attempt to abolish slavery in 1847. The following year, the second historically significant insurrection occurred, this time on St. Croix (the first was on the island of St. John in 1733). The King of Denmark, Christian VIII had decreed that the slaves were to be liberated after a twelve year period of apprenticeship. The simmering hostility among the slaves toward the system and their owners boiled over into open rebellion once they caught wind of the decree. Refusing to wait 12 years for their freedom, the slaves organized an insurrection that ended by forcing local governor Von Scholten to decree abolition immediately. Hence the Emancipation proclamation entered into effect on July 3, 1848. (taken from page 325 of Migratory Waves to the US Virgin Islands, by Dr. 'Maracatu' La Torre, Año X, Núm. 36-37, abril septiembre, 2005)
Returning to Fountain Valley, I would extend the context further afield beyond the shores of St. Croix, since, as I will cite below, it involved an astounding display of US coercive power that could only be understood in the wider US and worldwide context of the times. As for St. Croix, the entire affair would prove a watershed in the history of the island because a large portion of the white mainlander (US) population subsequently uprooted themselves and abandoned St. Croix in fear.
As those who were around then may recall, the early seventies were tumultuous years; the sixties had just ended and the Viet Nam War was plodding onward. The summer of 1971 had seen court ordered busing, student protests and tensions boiling over in the US prison system. April of 1972 saw North Viet Nam's Easter offensive which severely battered the south Vietnamese economy. Pundits were proclaiming the end of an era, under the guise of US "disengagement" from Viet Nam, despite stepped up bombing raids. On the home front, however, certain events were exacerbating the widening racial divide in the United States. A wave of violence had stuck the US prison system in 1971, the most memorable of which was the Attica Prison rebellion in September of that year.
Just over a year prior to the Fountain Valley massacre, George Jackson was slain while allegedly trying to escape from San Quentin:
George Jackson was originally convicted of a $70 gas station heist in his late teens and sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. Because of his refusal to bend down and crawl on his knees, so to speak, he never again left the California prison system and was murdered by guards in the yard at San Quentin on August 21, 1971. By that time, George was a member of the Black Panther Party and a revolutionary hero to millions around the world. His book Soledad Brother is still in publication and is remarkable not only for its insights into Jackson's life and thoughts but also for the emotionally charged writing it contains.
So this war-torn, racially and emotionally charged atmosphere served as a contextual backdrop to what happened on the seemingly distant island of St. Croix in September of 1972. Again according to G. A. Elmer Griffin:
The response to the murders was rapid and massive. The pentagon flew 150 soldiers to St. Croix and neighboring St. Thomas. Heavily armed helicopters conducted periodic "sweeps" of the island and enforced an island-wide curfew; we became an occupied territory. Crime rates spiked dramatically. Although the killings would normally have fallen under the jurisdiction of of the local police, the US attorney general odered the FBI to take the case.
Government officials were reportedly worried that this would have been the prelude to a race war in the US territory. White residents, mistrusting of the local authorities and government, asked for the US Federal government to intercede on their behalf, but some had already started leaving the island. G. A. Elmer Griffin then quotes from a book entitled Massacre in Paradise: The Untold Story of the Fountain Valley Massacre by authors Harold Willocks and Myron Allick:
On November 11, 1972, news was channeled to the Naval Investigation Services ... indicating that "the natives" plan to terrorize the Virgin Islands community to protest the Fountain Valley case. According to the source, the Black Panthers and other Black groups were to come to the Virgin Islands on Novermber 19, 1972, and during the week of November 22, they were going to shoot Whites and burn their properties and businesses on the island of St. Thomas. On St. Croix, the Whites were to be shot on December 1, 1972.
Ishmael Labeet played into the whole stateside political and racial maelstrom thus conflating the actions of himself and his associates at Fountain Valley with a wider political struggle. That probably wouldn't have even been necessary to account for what occured once the FBI arrived in St. Croix. According to G. A. Elmer Griffin, the FBI:
...set up their command post at the Golf course. ... Suspects were detained on the putting green; they later testified that officers applied "shock clubs" to their ears and genitals, beating, choking and pistol-whipping confessions out of them. It might have disturbed Robert Trent Jones, Sr. to know that defendant Meral Smith reported being taken to a tree on this beautiful course, where a rope was placed around his neck and he was jerked off the ground at least twenty times in a fifteen minute period. This crypto lynching, more than any of the alleged tortures laid bare the plantation ethos latent in the resort.
Needless to say, this was not unexpected given the times and should be one piece more of historical evidence that our current bout with illegal torture techniques in faraway lands does have precedents.
Finally, I want to draw your attention to a sad point about how the past is actually being "re-assembled" in the present to fit a nefarious agenda: We can already see how right wing hate sites are using the Labeet killing last week in Miami-Dade to whip up hysteria against Muslims. The past certainly intrudes on the present in unexpected ways.
This diary is cross-posted at Progressive Historians and at Diatribune.