Jonathan Dunkley got his first car at 16.
Dunkley, now the director of operations of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, grew up in a town outside of Orlando, Fla. -- near Disneyland -- "with folks from all races," he said Monday night.
What he recalls after he began driving, he said, were the constant blue and red police lights.
"Where are your drugs? Where is your gun?" he said about the questions he received from the local police. "I was a DARE [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] kid, but when you're pulled over, and you're asked all of those questions, it makes you wonder. I started to see that race does matter."
Dunkley was one of four panelists who spoke on being "Young and African-American in 2015" at the Clinton School on Monday. The discussion -- held on the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday -- is just the beginning, said Christina Standerfer, the school's associate professor of communications. The school hopes to take the conversation into the community with one discussion later this month and two in February.
"Our students are trained to be facilitators in a way that moves it beyond the dialogue," Standerfer said to a crowd of more than 100. "If it's just the dialogue, then that's not enough."
The panel discussion was prompted by the deaths of a black youth and two unarmed black men: Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; and Eric Garner in New York City; and the shooting deaths of New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. The deaths of Brown and Garner spurred demonstrations nationwide after grand juries didn't indict white officers in their deaths.
In 2013, George Zimmerman -- a coordinator of a neighborhood watch in Sanford -- was found by a jury to be innocent of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Martin, 17.
Late last year, grand juries did not indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Brown, 18, and New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner's chokehold death.
Brown and Garner's deaths were also said to have prompted Ismaaiyl Brinsley to gun down Liu and Ramos, two officers on patrol in Brooklyn. Brinsley, who was black, shot the two officers, who were of Asian and Hispanic descent, while they were sitting in their car, before killing himself.
Clinton School student Quiana Brown said the larger context of the conversation surrounds the death of those black men. Being young and black, she said, evoked a sense of pride, pain and peril.
"It wasn't that these men were 100 percent innocent or that they had no culpability in any of their wrongdoing," she said, adding that the cases centered on "the lack" of due process. "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev [who is accused of killing three and injuring hundreds of others at the Boston Marathon] sits in jail awaiting his day in court, while Trayvon, Eric and Mike ... lie cold in their graves without ever having a chance to speak."
Tsarnaev, who faces capital murder charges, was shot and badly injured by police before being captured. His brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also a bombing suspect, was killed in a shootout with police.
After Brown's death, Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford invited all the black men in the college to lunch, the dean said. Rutherford listened to their views on the shooting and on their personal experiences.
"I had four reactions, which I wrote down," he said. "Educational. Powerful. Sad. And surprising."
He heard from black men, who asked if the Clinton School's dress code was in place so that they would not wear hoodies. Another said the most dangerous place for a black man to be walking or driving in the middle of the night was the Heights neighborhood.
Panelist and Clinton School student Melvin Clayton sees a need for generalized inquiries, including one on fatherless homes.
On one occasion, he said he, a black friend -- who graduated with Clayton at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and who now works for the Little Rock School District -- and a white friend, who works in finance, went to a restaurant in the River Market District. There, they met a group of women, including a particularly "vocal" one who praised Clayton and his black friend.
"It was such a surprise to her," he said, adding that he quickly grew tired of it. "I was just like, 'Please do not praise me for doing what I'm supposed to do.' When people speak of not seeing race or color, I don't believe in that. If you don't see the color of my skin, I'm invisible to you."
Little Rock resident Mondale Robinson said that while the panel discussion was great, it was "not a hard conversation." The discussions brought up "diversity in skin color" but not diversity in economic status.
Robinson said he was concerned that the community was "giving a pass to Little Rock's problems and Arkansas' problems," when these conversations weren't brought up with the shooting death of Monroe Isadore, a 107-year-old black man who was shot to death by Pine Bluff police officers after a three-hour standoff in September 2013.
The conversations need to start in southwest Little Rock and include topics such as police brutality, he said.
"We need to set a historical context, like what is [Interstate] 630 to the black community," he added. "Without that conversation, we're not talking about healing."
Metro on 01/20/2015