Remembering Sakia Gunn

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Coming up in about 20 minutes, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and of course, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC is going to join us with an update on the situation in Russia and Ukraine after the coup attempt, if you want to call it that, this weekend. David, as some of you know, is also the author of a couple of books on Putin and Russia. He is a close Russia watcher, so we're going to get David Remnick's update on developments this morning and his bigger picture take as well coming up.

Right now, this year, marks 20 years since a queer teenager named Sakia Gunn was murdered in Newark at a bus stop on Broad and Market Street. Sakia was just 15 years old when she was fatally stabbed by a man because of her sexual orientation marking her murder is one of the first prosecuted LGBTQ+ hate crimes in New Jersey. Outside of the devastation it caused in the community, particularly the queer Black community, Sakia's story then and now has been rarely told on the national media level.

Jenna Flanagan many of you know as the host of Metro Focus on WNET and WLIW, and she's telling Sakia's story and what happened in the months, years, and decades after Sakia's murder in a new podcast called After Broad and Market. She joins us now. Jenna, always good to talk to you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jenna Flanagan: Oh, absolutely. It's great to be on.

Brian Lehrer: Did you cover this story when it originally happened?

Jenna Flanagan: Yes, I did. I was a brand new general assignment reporter for the NPR member station in Newark WBGO. This was the first story, I would say, outside of the typical governmental running of the city, running of the county pieces that I had done, and it was quite jarring.

Brian Lehrer: It was that long ago, 20 years. What made you want to do a podcast series about it now?

Jenna Flanagan: Because it never left me. First of all, I think every journalist probably has at least one major story that they've covered that leaves just an emotional mark on them. For me, this one was it. A lot of that had to do with the fact that-- I think one of the important parts about having a diverse newsroom is that you get to have people who are able to not just cover a story, but see themselves in the lives or embodiment of the subjects that they're covering. While I'm not a member of the queer community, there was a lot about Sakia that I completely identified with, and I could see myself with her.

The reaction of what I thought was going to be another major pivotal moment in the fight for queer rights, something perhaps akin to what we had recently seen with the death of Matthew Shepard just a few years ago, that didn't happen. As a young Black woman, it was one of those reminders that no, people don't value your life in the same way. I think that's part of the reason why the story just never left me.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to hear a clip in a minute from the first episode of your podcast of Saki's best friend at the time, Valencia Bailey. They were so close that, as we will hear in the clip, Valencia refers to Sakia as her cousin. Before we do that, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Sakia's life. Young girl living in Newark. She identified as an AG. Can you briefly describe what AG meant at the time, and why that label was important to her and her friends?

Jenna Flanagan: Yes. AG is short for aggressive. Really what that is-- it's very interesting because the terminology in our understanding of not just sexuality, but the language around it has just grown and developed so much, of course, over the 20 years. At the time that was very popular within specifically the Black queer communities, specifically for Black femmes who identified as lesbians. It basically meant that you were presenting in a gender non-conforming somewhat masculine way.

One of the things we found out when we went back and were speaking with a lot of Sakia's friends is that when they first met her, they thought she was a boy themselves. It wasn't until they got to know her that they realized that she was a girl. She just felt more comfortable dressing in a boyish type way. By boyish type way, again, this is 2003, but this would have been baggy jeans, baggy T-shirts, durags, sneakers. She looked like one of the other boys in Newark.

Brian Lehrer: Very 2003. Sakia and a group of her young girlfriends were headed home the night of May 11th, 2003, when they were approached by two men. They didn't accept the men's advances and Sakia openly stated her sexual orientation. Can you briefly tell us what happened next?

Jenna Flanagan: To really condense what happened, first and foremost, I should say is that the kids were hanging out at the Chelsea Piers, which I think at this point has been well documented as a space that existed where the queer community, particularly the Black queer community, could really find acceptance in community, et cetera. There wasn't something specifically like that 24/7 in Newark. The fact that they were hanging out at Chelsea Piers would not have been unusual.

As Valencia told me that this was a trip home they had made a gazillion times, they're waiting at the bus stop and these two men pull up. Sakia and Valencia, her best friend/effectively twin or cousin, were both AGs. They were both, I guess, "tomboys" if you will, but the other three girls that they're with are much more femme presenting. Two guys pull up in a car, and they start hitting on them, and Sakia is the one who steps in and says, "We're not interested. We're lesbians."

Condensing the story very shortly, that actually ends up escalating the situation as if that's not a good enough reason to leave these young girls alone. As the tension grows, and Sakia, again, asserts, "No, we're not interested in you, leave us alone," for whatever reason, and unfortunately, we don't know, her killer got very, very offended by this. Again, it's just girls asking a man to leave them alone, and he ends up swinging a knife and then nicks Sakia in the chest. That gets her in the heart, and she bleeds out on the corner.

Brian Lehrer: So disgusting and heartbreaking. In the first episode of your podcast After Broad and Market, you do talk, as I said, to Sakia's best friend at the time Valencia about how she was treated in the immediate aftermath of the murder. The police took Valencia to the hospital, you report, and kept her on close guard at that time. Let's take a listen to 30 seconds of what she told you.

Valencia Bailey: I couldn't go find my cousin. He wouldn't give me no information on my cousin. He wouldn't tell me what the [beep] was going on. I went to go get a drink water, and there was a cop right [beep] there, so that I wouldn't go in the back looking for my cousin. Couldn't go to the bathroom. So it was hours, hours. Nighttime had came again. Mind you, this happened early morning. Nighttime is around again. I still ain't even sleep. I still haven't seen my cousin. I still haven't had a moment to myself to process anything and I'm 15.

Brian Lehrer: "I still hadn't had a moment to myself to process anything and I'm 15." Jenna, want to reflect a bit on that clip, and Valencia's treatment by the police as a 15-year-old who had just seen her best friend, who she calls her cousin in the clip, get stabbed.

Jenna Flanagan: Yes. I should also be very clear that it wasn't just that Valencia witnessed this. As soon as Sakia fell to the ground, she went, and picked her up, and held her, and cradled her. The girls flagged down a passing car, and somebody stopped and picked them up, and took them to, I believe, UMDNJ, the hospital. She was holding her the entire time. Not only was Valencia held alone in an isolated room with police surveillance for hours, and hours, and hours without any information, but she was soaked in her best friend's blood, and I mean soaked.

This was someone who was stabbed in the heart. I can't even begin to imagine how much blood loss that would have involved. You can hear it in her voice. Yes, this happened 20 years ago, but for Valencia, this might as well have happened very recently. It's still so incredibly raw. That was one of the things that I found in revisiting this story is that for the nucleolus of people who felt very involved in fighting for queer rights, queer safety, queer visibility in Newark, this is still very raw because it never really got a chance to heal.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if we have any listeners right now who maybe are members of the LGBTQ+ community in Newark or even elsewhere in the area, but who were familiar with Sakia's story even as it happened, and in the immediate aftermath in 2003. Anything you want to share about that moment in time and how you felt or anyone in the queer Black community in particular, how do you think hate crimes toward your community get covered and what do you wish would change?

Jenna Flanagan from PBS's Channel 13 and Channel 21 in our area has a new podcast about the aftermath of that 2003 murder which she covered at the time. Is there a story that you think like Sakia's was under-reported or have you followed this one? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also text your comment or question to that number. Jenna, it was interesting to me in your podcast, sorry, that you said that this is not a true crime podcast. This is about what happened after Sakia's murder. Back in 2003, it was immediately clear to the public and prosecutors that this was an anti-LGBTQ hate crime, wasn't it?

Jenna Flanagan: Yes and no. I say yes and no because again, the hate crime laws were still brand new on the books. We also touch on the fact that initially the perpetrator, his name was Richard McCullough, he eventually turned himself in and pled guilty but he didn't want to do that because I suppose nobody wants to plead guilty, but he didn't want to plead guilty to the hate crime charge because he didn't feel as though he had committed a hate crime because he maintained that he thought Sakia was a boy.

Now, I'm still not quite sure how that justifies what happened either way. We know from court records that it was stated at least from his point of view that she ran into his knife but by all accounts of what we've heard from everyone else, no, Sakia was stabbed. Yes, again, it was the aftermath. We had a chance to speak with a professor who actually studied and wrote a paper about the discrepancies in-- or not the discrepancies, but the differences in the way that Matthew Shepard's murder had been covered.

Which again, was just four and a half years prior and Sakia's murder, and about the exact same time that had elapsed since both deaths, Matthew Shepard's murder had garnered hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of articles nationwide, et cetera and Sakia's had only garnered about 70 or so, and most of them were local. When she said that she pushed back on this, and again, specifically to journalists in the queer community, or journalists in the Black community, she said that some--

Again, I don't want to paint everyone with a broad brush here, but some queer journalists didn't really see how someone in, say, the middle of the country would even care about a murder that took place in Newark. Then some, again, emphasizing some Black journalists shrugged it off as Newark has a high murder rate, and really this wouldn't be any different than the other ones that we've just seen happen over and over again.

Brian Lehrer: About a year after Sakia's murder, as you referenced in the podcast, the late great journalist Gwen Ifill from PBS coined the term missing white woman syndrome to describe the disproportionate amount of media coverage white women get when they go missing, You talk about how Columbia University picked up that idea and actually crunched those numbers. What did their formula determine for how many stories a story like Sakia's would garner?

Jenna Flanagan: Oh, it was a very low number. I want to say in the tens something. I believe when we crunched the number, we came up with something, and it was really heartbreaking, but something in like the teens, not even really the 20s, like a very low number. Again, that's because of public perception about a city like Newark where the murder rate stood at the time which was fairly high. Also because of that, that affects the way the public perceives as what is actually an emergency and what isn't.

In a city where people perceive that people die all the time, even a murder that is committed specifically against somebody because of their sexual orientation and gender presentation doesn't rise to emergency.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned in the podcast that you spoke to journalism professor Kim Pearson at the College of New Jersey, who looked into the disparity reflected in Sakia's story. I'm going to play a clip of this person you interviewed right now. Again, Kim Pearson, a journalism professor at the College of New Jersey, and she compared the news coverage of Sakia's murder with that of Matthew Shepard in 1998. This murder was in 2003. Let's take a listen to what she had to say.

Kim Pearson: I just started asking questions. I sent an e-mail to the National Association of Black Journalists and said, "Hey, I noticed that within the first month after Sakia Gunn was murdered, there were like eight stories in the LexisNexis database whereas, within the first month of Matthew Shepard's murder, there were hundreds of stories just in major newspapers. What do you think about that?" Then I contacted the vice president at the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association and asked the same question. To be honest, the responses that I got initially kind of shocked me.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Spoiler alert, shocked her how?

Jenna Flanagan: Yes, definitely. Again, I think watching the aftermath, particularly as a Black woman journalist, it just drove home this point that perhaps I was aware of existentially but when you see it play out in real-time in front of your face, it can be quite chilling. I was just a journalist covering this. Again for Sakia's friends, this has been a scar that has changed some of their lives completely, and not just the loss of their friend, but the aftermath, what happened afterwards.

Brian Lehrer: Let me take one caller because Jim in the West Village says he is another journalist who covered the story at the time and even attended Sakia's funeral. Jim, you are on WNYC with Jenna Flanagan from Channel 13, Channel 21, and her new podcast. Hi.

Jim: Hello Brian and congratulations for Jenna for actually covering this story which has been so undercovered. I was assigned by Gay City News' editor to follow up on when we heard about the murder of Sakia. I did go to the funeral. What was interesting, I'm a white gay man, I got through the police lines, I got into the service area, I went down, I saw her in the casket, I met her family and they were keeping all of the other people out of it. When I went back outside the entire parking lot was filled with mostly students.

I remember speaking there was a Black male father with his teenage daughter. I asked him why he was there and he said, "Because my daughter asked me to come." Sakia Gunn,-- I'm going to use the word butch. I'm going to try to use the language that was current during that time and some of the new language that has been on the air this morning. She was a very butch 15-year-old and the gender expression was very masculine. The guy pulled the knife on her. No one contested that. She died.

There was a lot of public reaction because of the high school kids that knew her and knew other mostly closeted Black lesbians and gays. The mayor called the meeting at the high school and it was very well attended and I'm hoping that that's part of the podcast which I haven't heard yet, but I'm certainly going to go listen to it. He made all of these promises about the changes he was going to make about fighting homophobia, et cetera. To the best of my knowledge, nothing changed, nothing. It just went away.

Interestingly enough, Amiri Baraka, who had a lesbian daughter had been very homophobic in his public statements but what happened to Sakia affected his daughter very strongly, and he changed his rhetoric around homosexuality [unintelligible 00:19:39] gay men and lesbians of color.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Jim, I'm going to leave it there because we're running out of time, but any reaction to anything in that call, Jenna?

Jenna Flanagan: Yes. First of all, everything that was said about the funeral is 100% true. Again, the way that Sakia attended West Side High School in Newark, depending on who you ask, some people say that the school didn't know how to handle something like this. Other people have said that the school district bungled it but the kids didn't have the day off, so they just walked out, and we're talking hundreds and hundreds of kids.

This is not necessarily walking all the way across Newark to get from Westside High School to Perry Funeral Home, where the funeral took place, but for just streaming numbers of kids to go in. This was straight kids. This was boys, this was girls. Sakia was an incredibly popular teenager. Incredibly popular and by all accounts, we also discovered very much a leader amongst her peers. Yes, so the other part, again, speaking of the aftermath, was that a lot of promises were made. A lot of people came in and perhaps said what seemed like the right thing to say, but the follow-through wasn't necessarily there.

There is an LGBTQ+ center in Newark now, but it's been moved around several times and still finding resources, if you are a young queer person in Newark, can be challenging. I'll put it that way. One of the things that strikes me is that even to this day, there really isn't anything like if you didn't know Sakia's story, you would never know Sakia's story. There is a mural that exists on McCarter Highway that has a very striking series of portraits of her but that's it. It's that and her headstone and that's all you would know that she existed if you didn't know the story.

Brian Lehrer: The podcast is called After Broad and Market. It's a co-production of LWC Studios and Chasing the Dream, a public media initiative from the WNET group. My guest has been Jenna Flanagan, who you may know as the host of MetroFocus, now the host of After Broad and Market, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for reflecting on the 20 years After Broad and Market, since the death of Sakia Gunn. Thanks, Jenna.

Jenna Flanagan: Thank you.

 

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