article_snippet.sent: I was 12 years old, and my younger sister and I were with our parents attending a peaceful demonstration in downtown Miami near the courthouse.
article_snippet.sent: We were there to protest the acquittal of four police officers in the beating death of unarmed motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie.
article_snippet.sent: That was Miami 35 years ago, but a car could just as easily have been Baltimore this week.
article_snippet.sent: Then the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Baltimore and 125 other cities erupted in flames.
article_snippet.sent: Wednesday marks the 23rd anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles riots.
article_snippet.sent: And now we have Baltimore 2015, with the death of suspect Freddie Gray in police custody.
article_snippet.sent: Juxtapose decades-old images of youths being hosed down by police during nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma with Tuesday's images of Baltimore youths throwing rocks at police, and you wonder what has happened.
article_snippet.sent: As a 12-year-old girl in Miami, I didn't understand how people could injure and even kill others and destroy people neighborhoods, and risk going to jail, by rioting.
article_snippet.sent: Maybe the Baltimore youths involved in the 1965-68 riots felt the way one youth did in Watts in 1965.
article_snippet.sent: Homes are destroyed, blacks are dead in the streets, stores you shop from for food and clothes are destroyed.
article_snippet.sent: We made the police chief and mayor come.
article_snippet.sent: But the Rev. Jamal Bryant got it right when the Rev. Jamal Bryant said the Rev. Jamal Bryant would open the Rev. Jamal Bryant Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore to youths who would not be in school so the Rev. Jamal Bryant could teach youths who would not be in school the power of nonviolence to change society.
highlights_snippet.sent: Johnita Due: The anger and frustration I saw in 1980 Miami is repeated in 2015 Baltimore .
  