How ‘Gardening While Black’ in Detroit Almost Landed Marc Peeples in Jail
By Audra D. S. Burch
The New York Times
October 26, 2018
DETROIT — For nearly two years, a man tilled an overgrown park in a half-abandoned Detroit neighborhood into a tiny urban farm, filling the earth with the seeds of kale and spinach and radishes. He was black.
For half of that time, the man, Marc Peeples, 32, was the subject of dozens of calls to the police — the allegations growing more serious with each call — by three women who lived on a street facing the park. They were white.
Mr. Peeples said he returned to the neighborhood where he grew up to create a garden that could help feed residents, chip away at food deserts and teach children about urban horticulture — a personal redemptive mission after three years in prison on drug charges.
What happened next was something else: gardening while black, as his lawyer described it, another example of white people calling the police on a black person for everyday activities.
In many of these cases, the caller is mocked with whimsical, alliterative nicknames like BBQ Becky, Cornerstore Caroline and Permit Patty. A cellphone video of the caller goes viral. Sometimes they lose their jobs.
This time was different. Mr. Peeples was arrested and went to trial. But a judge intervened and last week dismissed the case against him.
The women who complained said Mr. Peeples had terrorized the neighborhood, about 20 minutes north of downtown, by repeatedly threatening to burn down their houses and ordering them to leave because they were white.
They accused him of illegally painting trees and vandalizing houses. And in the most serious allegation, one neighbor falsely accused him of sexual misconduct.
The multiple police calls and reports made by the three women — Deborah Nash, Martha Callahan and her granddaughter, Jennifer Morris — eventually led to three stalking charges against Mr. Peeples and a trial. In a case first reported by The Detroit Metro Times, State District Judge E. Lynise Bryant threw the charges out at the trial, calling them fabricated and rooted in racism.
“At the heart of this case is a kind of inseparable mix of race and power,” Mr. Peeples’s lawyer, Robert Burton-Harris, said adding that the women had their own plans for the park, which fed their hostility. “They knew they could use the police as their own personal henchman to get him removed from this area just based on their allegations.”
In some ways, the story hints at the unsteady, culture-clashing path of gentrification, the ubiquitous lens of race and the social role of law enforcement. Absent race, the women insisted, this is a dispute between residents about rebuilding a neighborhood that had largely been written off.
“You see people giving these nicknames. That is letting them off the hook,” Mr. Peeples said. “These are serious allegations. They tried to have me go down for a hate crime.”
Days after the verdict, Ms. Nash sat outside in her car, giving her first interview about the case.
“I am not a racist. I was all for the garden and even helped with supplies at first, but he threatened me several times, in person to my face, that I needed to leave my neighborhood or I would be put out one way or another,” said Ms. Nash, 49, a part-time art teacher who moved to the neighborhood in 2014. “I called the police because he was destroying property in the neighborhood and painting graffiti. No one had the right to paint park trees.”
In spring of 2017, Mr. Peeples, the great-great grandson of a South Carolina farmer and third-generation community member, began planting seeds in Hunt Playground, a city-owned park near the old State Fairgrounds. He described the neighborhood where deer still roam, as desolate and desperate but in its own way, full of promise.
“I like to say farming is in my DNA. I remember reading articles about how Detroit was a food desert and thinking, I don’t have the money to buy a supermarket, so what can I do to combat it?” he said.
The trouble started in the summer of 2017 with the colors red, black and green. Mr. Peeples painted the color bands on a tree and on the porch of a gutted home facing the park. He said they were the colors of liberation, of Pan Africanism. The women said they were the colors of a gang.
It wasn’t long before the three women were calling the police.
“We were like, ‘You can’t paint them trees.’ That’s when the threats started. He yelled it out from the field. He said he would kill us, burn down our homes and kill our dogs too, so we went and filed the police reports,” Ms. Morris, 37, said in an interview. “We went down to the prosecuting attorney’s office and told our story and it went to court. We didn’t want it to go that far. We just wanted the threats to stop.”
Until that point, the two sides mostly stayed away from each other. But in March, just as the weather broke and Mr. Peeples returned to the garden for another season, the police received a report that he had a gun. Six officers in three cars responded. It turned out that Mr. Peeples had a rake, for gathering leaves. The police soon left.
“Now I know these women are calling the police on me all the time, but I didn’t know how deep it was, that they were accusing me of threatening to burn the house down, threatening to kill the dogs,” Mr. Peeples said.
Two months later, Mr. Peeples hosted a group of home-school children at the garden. As they planted cabbage, carrots and wildflowers, the police showed up once again. During cross-examination at the trial, Ms. Callahan admitted that she called 911 and told the police that Mr. Peeples had been convicted of sexual misconduct, according to Mr. Burton-Harris and Judge Bryant.
Ms. Callahan, 74, testified that she had called the principals of nearby schools to warn them about Mr. Peeples, but offered no evidence to corroborate her testimony.
Shortly after, Mr. Peeples was arrested on three counts of stalking charges based on the earlier claims that he had threatened the women. Each count carried a sentence of up to a year in jail.
In court last week, Judge Bryant described the women’s testimony as inconsistent, without credibility and part of a strategic campaign against Mr. Peeples. In one example that came out in court, Ms. Nash admitted she hired Mr. Peeples to paint a house after she accused him of threatening her.
“This is disgusting and a waste of the court’s time and resources,” Judge Bryant said, who added that she found the case upsetting.
“These ladies testified they made the initial contact with him, not the other way around,” she said in an interview. “They testified that they called the police and the parks and recreation department and they followed him to the bus stop and said he was in a gang and had a gun. That is the definition of harassment.”
“From the bottom of my heart, I believe race was a motivating factor and an injustice has been done to this man,” Judge Bryant said.
The three women say they were not allowed to present evidence and they have since been threatened on social media. Clutching a walker outside her home, Ms. Callahan said she planned to move from her home of 15 years.
Because of the charges, Mr. Peeples said he stopped getting temporary jobs with a janitorial service, lost business opportunities and had to hire a lawyer. He spent about $4,500. A fund-raising campaign on his behalf has generated about $27,000.
“These women are racist, plain and simple. They don’t want me here. They wanted to do this garden without me,” Mr. Peeples said. “I am boarding up houses, cutting grass, planting a garden, trying to keep riffraff out of here and they are a filing false reports against me. They did a lot of damage to me.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: I hope Peeples sues the supreme shit out of those three white racist bitches.
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