Robinson Is No Hero

Rosa Parks was no accident. When Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP’s legal division, was looking for a case to challenge racial segregation in public accommodations he had many potential plaintiffs to choose from. He selected Parks carefully. She was a sympathetic character who had a good story. A hard working woman who just wanted to sit down. People could relate to her story.

That was 1955.

In 2015 Tony Robinson, who had participated in an armed robbery a year earlier, was high on a mixture of drugs and had already assaulted two people when he punched a Madison cop in a dark stairwell and ended up dead because of his own actions. He was no Rosa Parks.

Much of the churn and investigation and reform following the deaths of Robinson, George Floyd and too many others is appropriate, but all of these incidents were not the same. Robinson was responsible for his own actions while Minneapolis cop Dereck Chauvin went too far in kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. He has now been appropriately brought to justice and is serving a lengthy prison term while the Minneapolis Police Department is undergoing reform under order from the U.S. Justice Department.

But that makes Floyd a victim, not a hero. He too had a criminal past. He also was no Rosa Parks.

Punishment of bad cops and reform of historically bad departments is important, but it shouldn’t translate into the beatification of their victims. I bring this up now. because the Madison Parks Commission has erred, I think, in approving a mural lionizing Robinson. The mural is a copy of one that went up in the downtown during the protests over the Floyd killing. But it’s one thing for protesters to portray Robinson in this manner. It’s quite another for the city itself to embrace this narrative. Robinson attacked a Madison police officer and the city is honoring his attacker. That’s just wrong.

This is even worse than the permanent memorials set up to honor Floyd in Minneapolis because here we are not dealing with either a bad cop or a racist department. Officer Matt Kenny was cleared after two investigations by officials who were under tremendous pressure to find that he was at fault. And the Madison Police Department has long been among the most progressive in the nation.

Floyd was the victim of a bad cop in a troubled department while Robinson was the cause of his own demise in a city that has an exemplary police force. So, the mural which will be installed for at least a year at McPike Park near where Robinson died, sends all the wrong messages. It should never go up in the first place, but the sooner it comes down the better.