Michigan riots: Tales of two cities and the gulf between

It's been called the longest bridge in the world. Not that the St. Joseph River is particularly wide, but the gulf of status, stereotypes, and distrust it represents needs more than steel and cable to cross it.

On one side lies St. Joseph, an Eden-like beach town, brimming with barbered lawns, boutique coffee shops, and summer art festivals. Cross to Benton Harbor, and everything changes. White becomes black, and affluence turns to poverty. Frustrated residents sit on sagging stoops and walk by boarded-up businesses.

When Benton Harbor erupted in violence this week, the trigger was ostensibly a high-speed police chase through a residential neighborhood. It was the second such pursuit in three years, and the second to result in the death of a young black.

But as with most riots, this is a story that goes much deeper than the immediate event that lit the fuse. It's about years of pent-up frustration over that gulf that separates Benton Harbor from St. Joseph. Over the sense most Benton Harbor residents have that a fair trial is impossible in Berrien County, which encompasses both towns, and that the police force engages in practices - like high-speed chases - that would be unheard of across the river. Over the accumulated anger of being pulled over by cops too often, of having job applications rejected before they were glanced at, of the assumptions that if you live in Benton Harbor, you must be a drug dealer, a criminal, a drop-out.

"What's going on now goes back way further than my age, than your age," says Sammie Kemp, a young black man with a large silver cross around his neck, as he watches police in riot gear and assault rifles swarm his neighborhood. Mr. Kemp lives just a few blocks from where the two nights of rioting occurred, in which hundreds of people burst into the streets after a tense City Hall meeting, burning as many as a dozen buildings, overturning cars, and clashing with authorities.

He knew Terrance Shurn, the young man on a motorcycle who died in the chase. But he and his friends are mostly upset about what they see as past miscarriages of justice - and their struggle to get jobs.

"What happened last night I don't agree with," he says. "But stuff like that can happen, and even worse, if they don't come up with ways for people to work here.... A lot of [the people in St. Joseph] automatically judge you. You're a drug dealer, you carry a gun. It's a lot of racial profiling."

When journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz wrote "The Other Side of the River," about another divisive death here in 1991, the undercurrent then, too, was the gap between the two towns.

To this day, Benton Harbor residents remain convinced that the black boy found in the river, who was dating a white girl, was murdered by whites, while St. Joseph residents insist he drowned accidentally.

As a Benton Harbor resident, "all you have to do is look on the other side of the river and you suddenly recognize your place in the world," says Mr. Kotlowitz. "There's an element of self-destruction that takes place."

Still, some residents say, things have started to change in recent years. On the front page of the local paper Monday, the headline was about the new apartments springing up in Benton Harbor's once-decrepit downtown, notes Scott Elliott, a long-time white resident who owns a local art gallery and has worked tirelessly to improve race relations and the fairness of the criminal-justice system.

"We've been working for years and years to dispel the old stigma [about Benton Harbor], and now it's back again," says Mr. Elliott, sitting in the renovated State Theater, once boarded up itself and now an art-house success.

Still, while he's pleased with the strides the downtown has made - and hopeful that progress will continue despite the rioting - Elliott believes that true change will require vast reforms in the way police and the local justice system operate.

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