Memorial Portrait Poster of Ricardo Mason, killed by Cleveland police on August 27, 2002
“Ricardo Mason was a Black youth. He was in the car with a friend of his, who was white. Now the white guy allegedly stole the car from a drug addict. You know, they would lend them the car for a while or whatever. So, anyway this one evening, right before school started, Mason came over to be with his friend. They were hanging out of the car driving and the police are chasing them in the car, so they drove up-and-down streets on the west side of Cleveland. And at one point they run up into an alley or something and they couldn’t go anywhere, nothing was gonna happen. So, what do the police say? They are going to back into them. (When I went over there you could see the car couldn’t have moved.) They go to the driver side where the white boy, Lily, was sitting. They shoot Lily and only graze him and I guess the other cop goes on the other side to Mason and shoots him down and he dies.
So there is a memorial built and then it was torched. Everyone around there thought the police did it. The youth made up shirts for Ricardo Mason and the police threatened them with arrest if they kept them on. The funeral for Mason was huge and one of the youth sang “A Change is Gonna Come”, a Sam Cooke song. The point of the funeral was it was packed with angry youth, so the authorities had one of their fireman, one of these Black “leaders”, talk about how they have to just calm down and not let this bother them too much or some bullshit.”–Bill Swain