R Place: Fading to Black

Last week The Cap Times carried an interesting article about R Place and the trials & tribulations of its owners. Someone fired a gun in the bar's parking lot on 10 October and this was the fifth weapons incident of 2009 for R Place. Owners Rick Flowers and Annie Weatherby-Flowers have been given a last chance by the city to discourage the violence surrounding their establishment. Personally, I will be surprised if R Place makes it until the end of the year and would be shocked if it's still up and running in 2011.

There are a lot of issues at play here including racism, crime, commerce, and culture. Flowers charges that "the issue is not really R Place" but with "the societal forces and city policies that put unreasonable demands on bars popular with the black community and set them up to fail." The author of the piece, Pat Schneider, notes, "A study by the city's Equal Opportunities Commission found what appeared to be a different standard for bars that cater to people of color compared to campus-area bars" and that "remarks by then-Alcohol License Review Committee head Tim Bruer supporting a supposed moratorium on liquor licenses in the "fragile neighborhoods" south of Wingra Creek." Flowers surely has a prima facie case of unequal treatment under the law.

Flowers also complains that he is being held responsible for the incidents despite the fact that most (all?) of them happened outside his establishment where he has little control.

Two of the gun incidents since May were armed hold-ups that according to "word on the street," were done by the same group that has pulled other hold-ups in the area over the past year, Flowers says. Police have not arrested anyone. The police department has tens of millions in its budget, "and they can't deal with these shooters. They come over here and I'm supposed to deal with it. They wouldn't ask that of white people," he says.

This brought to mind the situation over by Red Letter News several years ago where hookers and johns littered the area outside the store. RLN stayed open and the police conducted a sting operation to rid the area of prostitution. These two situations are not exactly the same but both have in common nefarious or dangerous activity outside an establishment which did not solicit it. In one case, the police took action while in Flowers' case, he is expected to be the police. Just as prostitution didn't end in the aftermath of the sting and instead moved elsewhere from the corner of Washington and North, gun violence won't end when R Place closes.

It will be a shame when R Place shuts its doors for the last time because, as the article notes, "Flowers, who is black, says he wishes white people would try to understand the significance of the fact that his bar is the only place in town that caters primarily to people of color." Although I haven't read all the comments, many of those I have were by people who don't appear to even have tried to understand the what Flowers spoke of.

I was reminded of this significance over the weekend when The Dulcinea told me about getting her nails done. (The Dulcinea is my bi-racial girlfriend, for non-regular readers.) She was given a manicure by a black woman and she told me that they had a good conversation which drifted from talking about raising sons to movies and other topics. The manicurist was about 10 years older than The D and had adult children. She moved to Madison from Chicago while The D was born and raised here. They were both looking forward to seeing Precious next month while the nail expert was fearful that Good Hair wouldn't play in Madison.

Now, two women of color chatting about movies with black stars and generally exploring their common ground may sound insignificant to you, but for The D, it wasn't. If you take the significance of that conversation and broaden it, deepen it, then I suspect you'll get at what Flowers meant.

Strictly from reading the articles, I feel that it's a shame that the city – in the form of the cops, Alcohol Policy Coordinator Katherine Plominski, and even the area's alderperson Julia Kerr – are basically abandoning Flowers. The cops have seemingly foisted the burden for policing those outside his bar on his shoulders. If some guy packing heat steps into Flowers' parking lot looking to settle a score or hold someone up, why is Flowers paying the penalty? Kerr takes the same line: "But I do hope they can turn it around and make a go of it." Does she really think that Flowers can single-handedly deter criminals? Is that what she expects of the citizens in her district? From reading Schneider's piece, it seems that no one representing city government is the least bit interested in helping Flowers out.

When the city puts the kibosh on R Place, not only will the assholes with guns just go shooting elsewhere, but the black community here will see yet another attempt at carving out their own social niche in Madison go the way of the dodo. And most of Madison won't even notice.