Twenty years ago today, I attended a stranger’s funeral.

I was a 23-year-old white American woman who had desperately tried to avoid the reality of my mother’s terminal illness by diving headlong into applying to graduate programs. I looked up to find myself in journalism school. On this particular day, the day of the funeral, I was on assignment for a class clutching a narrow, spiral reporter’s notebook.

Amadou Diallo was a 23-year-old black man, born in Liberia to Guinean parents, who had come to New York with dreams of studying computer programming. On a night the prior week, he looked up to find himself in a hail of 41 bullets shot by a team of four white plains-clothes New York City cops. He was unarmed, standing in the vestibule of his apartment building clutching his wallet.

Diallo, six months younger than I was, died on February 3, 1999. My mother died the following year. Diallo’s mother, Kadiatou Diallo, lives on with me. We are each missing part of our heart.

My mother’s death came too soon at the hands of a disease that might have been prevented, making it hurt more than if she’d died of old age. But Mrs. Diallo’s pain knows no equal. For a mother to have to mourn her own child, one who had barely entered adulthood yet himself, is a tragedy. To know that he died unjustly at the hands of other human beings because of the color of his skin, an unspeakable nightmare.   

Though I never met Diallo, attending someone’s funeral—the goods ones, at least—leaves you with a deep sense of who that person was. Diallo was a hard-working, enterprising, optimistic person with deeply held beliefs, including in the good of others. With talents still to tap and love still to give. My mother was, too.

I can only imagine how saddened they would both be to see how little has changed in the two decades they have missed. That today, just as 20 Februarys ago, FAR too many people of color pursuing the American dream just like Diallo are instead murdered by its racism. And far too few white people can truly comprehend how privileged they are to feel safe on their own fronts steps.

In honor of my mother, who believed in a better world, and in remembrance of Amadou Diallo, who deserved one, I invite you to attend his funeral with me.

by Jeanette Brown

February 13, 1999—Yesterday, moments after noon, a simple wooden casket was lifted from a hearse and carried by more than 20 men chanting “God is great” in Arabic to a back entrance of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The casket held the body of Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old West African immigrant cut down by a spray of bullets fired by four policemen from New York’s elite Street Crime Unit last Thursday. His body had been washed and wrapped in a white shroud in accordance with Muslim traditions.

For Muslims to come to this mosque to pray on a Friday at noon is not unusual. It happens every week. For thousands, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to pack the place of worship and for hundreds more to fill the surrounding courtyard and sidewalks was one more sign of the outrage and bewilderment felt around the city and the world over the 41 shots fired at an unarmed man standing in the vestibule of his own apartment building.

As the casket disappeared behind the mosque, mourners began to file into the building. “Sisters to the left, two floors down,” said a man standing in the middle of the front entrance. During Muslim prayer services, men and women traditionally pray in separate areas, though Diallo’s parents, Kadiatou and Saikou, entered the main floor of the mosque arm in arm. Most women, however, followed the man’s advice and made their way to the building’s side entrance.

The scene inside the mosque at first was very calm. The women in the prayer room designated for sisters had removed their shoes and placed them in cubbyholes lining the walls of the ground-level lobby. Most were dressed in traditional Muslim attire, ankle-length gowns with elaborate shawls covering their heads and cascading down their backs. As people continued filing in, the tension began to mount, and mosque employees tried delicately to shift visitors toward the rear so that those praying could move forward. Outside, people were intense and angry.

Prayers, in Arabic, were broadcast over a loudspeaker, and Muslim women fell to their knees and leaned forward in worship. Then the voice switched from Arabic to English, explaining that those in the mosque had come to say the Friday prayer, after which the funeral to give tribute to brother Amadou Diallo would begin.

“Please,” implored the voice, “we want this occasion to be done orderly. No shouting, no nothing should turn this gathering here into a chaotic thing. And those who came to condole us as the Muslim community, we want to welcome and let them have an idea about us as Muslims.”

Outside the mosque, the story was much the same. As more mourners poured through the gates, clear plastic was rolled out along the ground of the courtyard so those who could not fit into the building could kneel and pray. Soon, the plastic sheets reached the outer gates. Those not praying, the press among them, were requested and then physically encouraged to assume positions on the opposite side of Third Avenue, which had been barricaded for the event.

Thousands had indeed come to pray, but others came for reasons both personal and political. Gregoris Ramos, a grey-haired 81-year-old Dominican man with a quick and gentle smile, said in Spanish, the only language he knew, that he came en sentimiento—in sympathy—for Diallo’s family. He explained that as a young man living in the same apartment he now lives in, just blocks from the mosque, he was beaten badly enough by the police to have to go to the hospital.

“They said they were looking for my son,” he said, “and they attacked me in my own home. There is much discrimination by the police against humanity,” he said sadly, shaking his head.

“A murder,” responded Carol Shuttleworth when asked what had brought her to the service. “The murder of a son,” she elaborated. The mother of four sons, one of whom died of AIDS, Shuttleworth was radicalized going to demonstrations held by the gay community, she said. In the process, she had personal experiences with the police doing what she considered to be reprehensible things. “The way they treated me, a white woman from the Upper East Side…I can only imagine what it’s like if you’re not like them,” she said.

Larry Darrell, a black man from Beverly Hills dressed in a suit and tie standing just outside the gates of the mosque, had flown in the night before just for the service. “The people here don’t realize that this is all over. It’s not just here in New York. It’s in L.A. It’s everywhere. If, in fact, we don’t come together as a people—not white, not black, not green or blue, just citizens of the United States—to fight terrorists within the police department on our own terms—that is, to raise our voices and say that Rodney King was wrong, Abner Louima was wrong, now this kid—it’s all over.”

Sulay Mandibba, who had taken the day off from work to attend the service, came mostly because he is from a part of Africa close to where the victim was from. Diallo’s parents are both from Guinea, and Diallo was born in neighboring Liberia. The Diallos plan to return to Guinea to bury their son there this Sunday.

“It can happen to anyone,” Mandibba said. Though he is Muslim, he had elected not to enter the mosque but to stand outside the gates “because the place is packed full and not everyone is able to be in there.” He confirmed that this incident is drawing not only national, but international attention. “My family called,” he said, meaning his family in Gambia, “because they heard and are worried about my safety here. They don’t understand how something like this could have happened.”

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani also attended the service, a move not meant to reflect his opinion of the actions of the four policemen involved, said officials from the mayor’s office, “but as a sign of respect and a show of support for the family.”

But Giuliani’s 15-minute appearance, which took place after Diallo’s casket had been carried out of the mosque and the family had left, did not impress Eva Nugent, a Jamaican woman living in Brooklyn. “Listen,” she said, “he don’t care about black people, we know that. Everybody targeted is always a foreigner or a black person.”

There was an electricity in the air, and everyone seemed fearful of a potential explosion. “I heard there are hundreds of police with tear gas, helmets, everything, right behind the mosque,” said Cliff Joseph, a black baker from Brooklyn. And there were. “It just takes one person to turn these things from one extreme to another,” he said.

His was a sentiment echoed by a white cop in uniform standing at a counter in a deli at the corner of Lexington and 96th Street. He was sipping coffee and flipping through the pages of the Village Voice. “McLaughlin,” read his badge. First name Jimmy. He usually worked in the South Bronx, he explained, but he had been pulled down to provide additional security at the subway station nearest the mosque. There had been no altercations so far, he said, which he hoped would continue to be the case. But because a volatile situation could easily emerge, the police were out in great numbers, he said. “There are a whole lot of guys down there in plainclothes, too,” he confided.

“It’s just an unfortunate accident,” he said about the shooting, “And unfortunately, you can’t bring him back. But accidents do happen.”

“And I know those guys feel terrible about it,” he said of the four cops who fired on Diallo. “That guy who was crying,” he said, referring to one of the officers who recently appeared on television in tears. “I know what he was going through. It happened to me once,” he said. “It really plays on your emotions. It’s a terrible thing.”

Of the officer’s tears, Nana Joseph, an 86-year-old mother and grandmother in the crowd outside the mosque, said simply, “A guilty conscious needs no accuser.”

In the end, level heads prevailed. The prayer service, designed to honor a man who lived a pious life and prayed five times a day facing Mecca in a crowded storeroom, ended without violence.