You call that an apology?

A sorry excuse for an apology û

By MIKE
ARGENTO

Where was the big check?

It’s a rule of governmental press conferences involving large sums of cash to always have a big check to illustrate that a large sum of money is being handed over for the public good.

At the news conference to announce the $2 million settlement of the lawsuit brought by the family of Lillie Belle Allen, murdered by a gang of racist punks on North Newberry Street, the big check was nowhere in evidence. That was probably good — as its presence would have been, as one observer put it, “amusingly inappropriate.�

“Amusingly inappropriate,� of course, applies to much of York’s public discourse. But in this instance, good taste prevailed, an historic occurrence in these parts.

The money, though, is only part of the story. Certainly, $2 million is a lot of money. But in this case, it is woefully inadequate considering the facts of the case.

Lillie Belle Allen was visiting family in York, from South Carolina, when she took a wrong turn on Newberry Street and entered a free-fire zone. She died trying to save family members in the car. She was 27 and left two children.

The money doesn’t fill the hole left in their lives. Nor does it fill the hole left in the history of her family. As consolation, its effect is negligible.

As was the sort-of apology offered Tuesday morning by Mayor John Brenner.

The mayor began by saying, “Now much has been said about an apology from the city. What I want to say today is to the family .¤.¤.�

At that moment, if you listened carefully, you could have heard assistant city solicitor Don Hoyt’s jaw crack. Hoyt reportedly advised against apologizing — which, essentially, is what Allen’s family wanted most out of this legal exercise — saying it would open the city up to further liability.

So the mayor stepped up and told Allen’s family, “On behalf of the citizens of the City of York, all 40,862, we are very sorry for your loss.�

Parsing the apology, you will notice that the mayor did not apologize for anything the city may have done to bring about Allen’s death. He didn’t apologize for the members of the police department who, back then, encouraged white punks to take up arms against their fellow citizens. He didn’t apologize for the cops who manned the barricade at Philadelphia and Newberry streets and let Allen and family members pass into what amounted to a kill zone. He didn’t apologize for the alleged actions of former Mayor Charlie Robertson, a cop at the time who was charged with murder in Allen’s death and later acquitted. He didn’t say, simply, we’re sorry a group of our citizens killed Lillie Belle Allen and that it took more than 30 years to catch the people responsible for it.

“Sorry for your loss.�

In the pantheon of apologies, it is a notch above the catch-all of weasely apologies — “I’m sorry you feel that way.�
And so this marks the end of the race riot case and the end, finally, of 1969, sort of.

The mayor did announce that he intended to appoint a committee to study Lord knows what and come up with recommendations to solve whatever the problem may be. Sorry about that, but the announcement was kind of vague. OK, it was really vague.

But we’ll have a committee, and if there’s one thing York does well, it’s committees. At last count, for instance, we’ve had six or eight committees appointed to study whether the city or the county or whoever should build a minor-league baseball stadium in York. (At one point, in another moment that could be called “amusingly inappropriate,� I believe a committee was appointed to find out whatever happened to another committee.)

We had a committee back in the day. It was called the York Charrette and included all sorts of community leaders and came up with all sorts of recommendations to fix the city and cure racism and all of that. Mostly, according to someone who was there, the Charrette produced a lot of grandstanding and speechifying and such, but not much else.

The committee’s report was, well, largely ignored.

So now, we’ll have a new committee to come up with all sorts of ideas and notions and solutions to problems far and wide that can also be ignored.

And so, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

At the end of the press conference, as the participants milled about and created the impression of a cocktail party without the drinks and the conviviality, a courier for an armored car service wheeled a hand truck carrying bags of change from the city’s parking meters through the foyer of City Hall.

As broke as the city is, there is no truth to the notion that it will pay off the settlement — $200,000 a year for a decade — in quarters taken from parking meters.

Now that would be “amusingly inappropriate.�

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.