Still the ‘Best Intentions'?: Edmund Perry Case Resonates Years Later
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
If there was a shared belief regarding the promises of the Civil Rights Movement, it was the faith that with the legal limits of segregation removed, young Black Americans would be able to achieve the American Dream if they adhered to a program of hard work and dutiful study.
In June of 1985, Harlem bred Edmund Perry seemed the embodiment of that faith, having just graduated from one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools with his first year at Stanford University awaiting him in the fall. Instead, 17-year-old Perry was shot to death in his Harlem neighborhood by a White undercover detective, in what was “officially” termed an act of self-defense. Nearly three decades after his shooting, Edmund Perry’s death still resonates in meaningful ways.
On the evening of June 12, 1985, Perry and his 19-year-old brother Jonah, a second year student at Cornell University, were walking on Morningside Drive in Harlem. After a skirmish with an undercover police officer, Perry was shot in his abdomen and died shortly thereafter.
The story of Perry’s death elicited many public responses, particularly in the context of regular charges of police brutality directed at the New York City police department. Suspicions of the NYPD occurred in the aftermath of the questionable deaths of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart and 66-year-old Elenor Bumphers who was shot-to-death during a forcible eviction in the Bronx. As noted cultural critic Nelson George queried at the time of Perry’s death, “Was Edmund, like so many other victims of this city, just too black for his own good?”
Less than a month after Perry’s death, a police investigation cleared the officer of any wrongdoing and Jonah Perry was indicted on charges of assault of the police officer. Perry’s family was represented by attorney C. Vernon Mason, who along with attorney Alton Maddox, who successfully defended Jonah Perry, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, would form the political triumvirate that came to national prominence in the late 1980s in response to the rape case of Tawanna Brawley and the murder of Yusef Hawkins. Edmund Perry’s death was one of the many events that inspired Spike Lee’s depiction of racial tensions in New York City in his film Do the Right Thing (1989)
Yet the predominate question after Perry’s death was not about the reality of police brutality, but rather how someone with so much promise and opportunity, could engage in such reckless behavior?
Commentary on Edmond Perry’s life and death became a referendum on the continuance of poverty, racism and the failure of liberalism—a belief by some, that even given the opportunity to attend preps schools like Exeter or Westminster, a “culture of poverty,” doomed some Black students to failure.
Edmund Perry’s death became part of the national imagination, notably the publication of journalist Robert Sam Anson’s Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (1987), which was later adapted into the television movie Murder Without Motive: the Edmond Perry Story (1992). Perry’s killing was also fodder for a first season episode of Law and Order called “Poison Ivy” (1990). Even the late Michael Jackson offered comment; his short film for “Bad” (1987), directed by Martin Scorsese with a screenplay by novelist Richard Price (Clockers) was inspired by Perry’s story, with Jackson et al firmly suggesting that it was the culture of the hood that took Perry under.
It is Anson’s book though that has clearly been the last word on Edmund Perry. Though Anson was for the most part sympathetic to the broad and specific circumstances that led to Perry’s death, he was hamstrung by his inability—and much of White America for that matter—to wrap his head around why Black kids like Perry and so many others were not simply thankful and happy for the opportunities that prep schools afforded. Throughout the book, Anson takes at face value the view among Perry’s White school mates that he was angry and obsessed with race, some suggesting that perhaps it was anti-White racism that might explain his attack on a White police officer.
As a student, Edmond Perry was the product of A Better Chance (ABC), an organization founded in 1963, with the goal of creating a pipeline of talented students of color into elite prep schools, themselves serving as pipelines to the nation’s best colleges and universities. A Better Chance, is one of the great success stories of the Civil Rights Era—Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is one of the program’s alumni—but in the 1980s when Perry attended many of the prep schools had yet to come to terms with the real challenges that kids like Perry faced trying to negotiate the expectations of places like Exeter and the realities of the home spaces that always had to return to.
Apropos for an era noted for a crack-cocaine epidemic, some Black students experienced these “two worlds” like a version W.E. B. Dubois theory of “double-consciousness” on crack. Some elite prep schools were simply ill-equipped to address the trauma that some of these kids experienced. As one of Perry’s three Black teachers described that experience in Best Intentions, “They will never again be part of the world from which they came…Everyone who comes to Exeter loses their homes. It goes with the territory.” (154)
And “home” was often ambivalent about what to do with these “success” stories. As one of Anson interviewers offered, Perry “died a natural death” in Harlem, a reminder of the lack of value placed on Black bodies in some communities no matter what your SAT scores were. Another of Anson’s respondents, a Black women who had traveled a similar academic trajectory in the 1970s, puts this disconnect in full context, noting that the kind of confidence and even hubris that “can get you elected student body president at Exeter can get you shot in Harlem.” (94)
Edmund Perry was representative of a cultural schizophrenia that afflicted a generation of young Black Americans, who were sold on the liberal world that was the post-Civil Rights era, only to find that their experiences with racism and prejudice, were only different than those their parents and grand-parents experienced, not non-existent. Very often such racism took the form of benign ignorance about the lives of Black people, though when such incidents occur repeatedly—proverbial questions like “why do all the Black kids sit together?”—they take on a more purposeful effect.
Part of this schizophrenia was derived by the inability of some Black kids to get a true reading of what their academic skill set was. Thus when Black students are lauded for their academic achievements, they are sometimes unsure whether such accolades are recognition of academic success in general or success simply for Black kid. In other words, “am I smart?” or “smart for a Black kid.”
No doubt those kind of questions dogged Perry from the time that he entered Exeter. When combined with the regular practice of Whites expecting that Black kids attended prep schools only as affirmative action admissions or as athletic studs—Perry was famously average as an athlete—Perry’s experience at Exeter was admittedly toxic.
At Exeter, Perry did not struggle in isolation—many of his Black peers were having similar experiences. Anson notes that Exeter became increasingly aware of a restlessness among its Black students or as one White faculty member described it, “a sullenness about them…real sense of hostility and confrontation.” (156)
What Exeter and most of America failed to discern at the time was that Perry and his peers were part of the first cohort of what would become known as the Hip-Hop generation. This would be the generation of college-aged Blacks that would embrace the music and politics of Public Enemy and KRS-One, who would register to vote for the first time in order to cast a vote for Jesse Jackson, and who would be Spike Lee’s core audience for his brand of Cultural Nationalism.
What many observers sensed as anger among this cohort of Black prep schools kids, might be better explained as their acceptance of the utility of their prep school educations. As one of Perry’s instructors suggested in Best Intentions, Perry “never professed any great love of learning…it was what learning could bring for him—what he could acquire from it.” (139). This rather pragmatic view of “opportunity” would be a hallmark of the generation of high achieving Blacks, who came to maturity during the 1980s, in both their schooling and experiences in Corporate America. Their striving was a means to an end as opposed to an end unto itself.
Late in the book, Anson disingenuously introduces readers to the fact that that Perry was a sometime drug dealer and user. Anson’s divulging of this information has the effect of highlighting Perry’s inability to survive the pressures of living in multiple worlds. His choice to deal drugs represents a moral burden that his White peers (users) did not have to carry.
There are many reasons to suspect why Perry dealt drugs to his White classmate at Exeter. In interviews with those who knew him, Perry was described as a kid who was stridently opposed to paying any attention to what others might have thought of him. This again something that was indicative of his generational cohort, who might be the first generation of Black Americans whose lives were not ordered by the presence of the “White Gaze”—the very source of DuBois’s theory of “double-consciousness.” Entering Exeter, Perry simply did not care what White people thought of him.
In his last year at Exeter, Perry’s drug dealing and drug use was most pronounced, though still unknown to school administrators. To accept the theory of one of Anson’s interviewers, Perry had become “weary.” What Perry and so many Black over-achievers have experienced is not simply the stereotypes that they inspire, but the racial scripts that are set in motion which ultimately dictate how racialized experiences play out.
Thus Black kids are not just seen as lazy or criminal, but there are a set of expectations set in motion in response to those stereotypes. By the end of his four years at Exeter, it was simply easier for Perry to accommodate a script that suggested that a kid from Harlem must also be drug dealer, as opposed to a emerging scholar. Indeed his regular tales to his White classmates about his street rep in Harlem was part of his negotiation of that script. Perry was no hard-core dealer, though living in Harlem, he certainly bore witness to the drug trade.
In the end, a Black male professional who was close to Anson and knew Perry well—Anson’s version of the “my one black friend” narrative that we are all familiar with—suggests that Perry was “worn out,” coming to terms with the reality that he was never simply going to be “Eddie Perry,” but always “Eddie, the smart black.” (207)
As such one popular theory of Edmund Perry’s demise is that he simply lost his mind. But saying that Perry was crazy is a much too casual way to explain a mental and emotional state that far too many Black over-achievers and lay people experience on a daily basis. To suggest that Perry lost his mind on that June night in 1985 is to let racism and racialized violence—in its myriad forms—off the hook.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming "Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities" (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
