Hartmann: Retire, Lyda
Date Posted: July 7, 2020
Posted In: Discussion, People,
From Riverfront Times: It’s not every day that one bumps a legendary quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. out of the lead of one’s column. Especially without legendary words of one’s own.
But this week’s an exception. I’d planned on quoting Dr. King’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in particular the part where he worried aloud that “white moderates” were more of a threat to the civil rights movement than Klansmen and other racists.
I was going to suggest that we in St. Louis were starting to look more like Dr. King’s nightmare than his famous dream, with two white moderates — Mayor Lyda Krewson and County Executive Sam Page — vying for St. Louis’ first-ever “This Is What MLK Was Warning About” award. It looked like a tight race.
And then Doxx-Gate happened. Apparently having had a little more than her fill of democracy for a Friday, Krewson decided to disturb the peace of some peaceful protesters who had offended her with budgetary suggestions that would have basically eliminated the police. These were numbers written on pieces of paper, mind you, not burning torches or shards of broken glass. Pieces of paper.
Very calmly, Krewson used her Facebook Live platform to give the citizens a little virtual perp-walking for the crime of radical thought. Krewson ridiculed their numbers and then read their names and addresses for all of the internet to behold. She doxxed them.
This was actually quite new. The optics of a white Democratic mayor — in the middle of the largest racial protest movement in American history — angrily launching virtual tear gas at her own constituents was almost beyond description.
It was f***ing unbelievable.
Now, we all make mistakes, and sometimes we might get upset and fly off the handle and say something we wish we hadn’t. Mayors of major cities aren’t typically expected to do such a thing when annoyed by their constituents, but people lose their tempers. It happens.
But Lyda Krewson didn’t just lose her temper. She lost the city. Many hours after her Facebook Live political-death march, Krewson calmly looked at cameras uncomfortably outside the front of her home and doubled down by refusing to apologize. She had to know by then that heads were exploding all over town, but she stood her ground.