On April 7, 2001 Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old black man, a resident of Cincinnati Ohio’s Over-the-Rhine, a poor, rundown and largely disenfranchised neighborhood located in the heart of downtown Cincinnati, was shot and killed while running from police officer Stephen Roach. The shooting sparked unrest in the Over-the-Rhine area of Cincinnati Ohio and four days later, April 11, 2001, a full-scale riot exploded in the city. After an internal investigation Roach was acquitted of manslaughter charges but subsequently lost his job. In 2003, I wrote The Armed Man as a spiritual reflection on justice.
The Armed Man 2016, produced and composed by Kaleel Skeirik, explores the context of the Timothy Thomas shooting 15 years later. The work is now over double in size, features a 68 name roll call of those shot dead by violent police shootings across the nation, primarily black men and some women aged 7 to 64. Two movements added to the front of the work engage low woodwinds in earthy sounds evoking where the deceased now lay. A Gospel choir recites the names throughout the work, much like a memorial, and new concluding material asks us to reclaim all human dignity and respect and seek justice in a society still struggling to understand inequality, race, appropriate policing systems and how to manage our conflicts civily without violence and death. The work calls us to unending tolerance when confronted with conflict. The text by Tyrone Williams, poet and Xavier University Professor of English, is taken from public accounts as reported in local newspapers and as is documented in the recent report, The State of Black Cincinnati 2015. Key points in the report include: 76% of the 14,000 people in poverty in Cincinnati are African-American, only 6.9 % of the businesses in Cincinnati are minority-owned, African-American men live on average 10 years less than white men, 18.4% of African-American babies die in infant mortality compared to 5.5% for white babies. Bruno Zabaglio created the images and Steven Skiles directed the acting.
The Armed Man 2016 is a call to each of us to seriously think about and act to create an equitable Cincinnati through “Justice and Love, Just us, Just Love,” the concluding text to the work.
