Mayor Ron Littlefield has shifted his position against the Bessie Smith Strut just enough to make it seem there’s still hope for the Strut’s survival, but clearly not enough to assure the city’s treasured 30-year-old street bash sufficient oxygen to keep going — especially after the rap of potential violence he’s laid on it.
The mayor has rightly, albeit reluctantly, retreated under public backlash from his sudden, unilateral decision two weeks ago to move the uniquely interracial Strut to the annual Riverbend festival’s more intensely policed riverfront venue. Yet his new terms for allowing the Strut to continue on Martin Luther King Boulevard are so rigid, difficult and distant from the Strut’s traditional operating format that they may well be insurmountable.
Littlefield now demands that a qualified organization take responsibility — including liability insurance — for the Strut; that the site be completely fenced or subject to another form of controlled access; and, that vendors be subject to permits based on location and licenses for sales of food and alcohol.
The first two conditions are overwhelmingly onerous. They appear to shred the umbrella of police security and governmental responsibility that local governments have provided for the Strut (and for the entire Riverbend Festival) without question for 29 years. And they appear to demand a nearly impossible level of apparently upgraded security measures for an area six-to-eight blocks long and two-blocks wide that city and county government officials themselves have never previously suggested was entirely possible, or actually needed.
Yet given the mayor’s own articulated and amply broadcasted fears about potential violence from a tiny minority of black youths in street gangs, a cloud of liability not previously formed has been named and given shape — never mind that urban violence could potentially erupt at any time and place in this city, or any other city.