Podcast looks back at Teaneck's crisis — and forward at America's

Jim Beckerman
NorthJersey.com

Where to begin a story that has no beginning?

Phillip Pannell, 16 — shot and killed by a police officer in Teaneck on April 10, 1990 — was not the first African-American to be killed by a cop under questionable circumstances. Nor would he be the last.

A group of students gather at Tryon Park in Teaneck, N.J., to discuss the shooting of Phillip Pannell; his mother, in center, talks to the youths to urge them to remain non-violent. April 27, 1990

But on the long road that led America to George Floyd, to Black Lives Matter, to our moment of reckoning over race, Teaneck is a major stop.

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"We're trying to show that this didn't start with George Floyd — that this goes back," said Mike Kelly, Record columnist and author of the 1995 book "Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town," the definitive book about the tragedy, which Kelly covered as it unfolded ("American journalism at its best" said The Washington Post). 

Phillip C. Pannell Shot dead by Teaneck Officer Gary Spath        April 10th 1990 Copy photos

He's also a principal consultant and narrator of a five-part podcast, "Color Lines: From Phillip to Floyd," from Upward Media.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Karen Bass, Rev. Al Sharpton, Walter Fields, Jr., the former political director of the New Jersey chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., and former New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey will also be heard from in the series, which looks at the fraught relationship between police and African-Americans from multiple perspectives.

Police reform, the role of activism, and the challenges of investigating such incidents are explored in various episodes, which will be dropping over the next five weeks on Spotify, Apple and other platforms. Emmy-winning actor Keith David ("Clockers," "Platoon" and a frequent narrator of Ken Burns documentaries on PBS) is the principal narrator.

Mike Kelly

"We've used Teaneck as a springboard, a template, to discuss what's been going on over the last 30 years, not just in Teaneck but all over the country," Kelly said.

There are people living in Teaneck today, Kelly says — he's lived there since 1983 — who still don't know about the watershed moment in the spring and summer of 1990, when the killing of a Black teen by a white cop put the town in a national spotlight.

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There were protests — both anti- and pro-police. There was rioting: shop windows were smashed, a police car was overturned. All the big names in the civil rights movement came to town: including Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the controversial Louis Farrakhan.

Rev Al Sharpton and Phillip Pannell Sr. 11/12/90

What made this an especially bitter pill to swallow, for some in Teaneck, was the seeming irony.

Teaneck, of all places, had always prided itself in its progressive spirit and racial tolerance. It had always been multicultural; in 1966 it made headlines as the first town in American to voluntarily desegregate its schools through busing. Much as some Americans felt in 2008, when Obama was elected president, so many in Teaneck felt before 1990: We've got this problem licked. 

"Teaneck thought it had figured out how to create a place where the races could work together," Kelly said. "When the shooting happened in 1990, it just ripped the Band-Aid off."

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No easy way to tell it

What happened on April 10, 1990? As Kelly points out in his book, it can't be reduced — as some on either side would have it — to a simple good-guy, bad-guy narrative.

Phillip Pannell was no thug, as some tried to paint him. He was a nervous kid who was being bullied and threatened in his school. But he did have a gun. He had borrowed it, without permission, from his mother — she was defending herself against an abusive husband — and was showing it to some of his friends, explaining how he was going to use it for self-protection. Someone saw him, called the police.

And the cop who responded, Gary Spath, was no textbook racist. He had been mentored by an African-American cop; he himself had been a mentor to kids, both Black and white. What he did have was a record of several nervous-trigger-finger incidents.

When Spath arrived, Pannell fled. After a chase, he cornered the teen, and shot. Spath claimed that Pannell had been reaching for his gun. Forensics suggested the 16-year-old had been putting his arms up to surrender. "The forensic evidence shows that his hand was nowhere near his pocket," Kelly said.

As with more recent shootings, this one was instantly politicized. Jesse Jackson called Spath an "assassin." Steve Rogers, a Nutley police officer turned conservative talk-show host (more recently, he became a Trump campaign adviser), led a pro-police rally where he got the crowd to chant over and over, "He had a gun…He had a gun…He had a gun."

Angry demonstrators flip a police car in Teaneck, N.J. the night after Teaneck police officer Gary Spath shot and killed Phillip Pannell who was suspected of brandishing a pistol.

Media coverage also came under scrutiny. Each side supplied its own photos to the Record. The police provided a mug shot (Pannell had had an earlier run-in with the police, but was no habitual delinquent) which was roundly denounced when it appeared in print.

The pro-Pannell bloc provided its own photos: old pictures of a cherubic 8th grader — also not quite on-point. Kelly, who was covering the story at the time, eventually had to track down his own photos. 

The actual trial was televised: a watershed, Kelly said.

"When Gary Spath was put on trial, it was one of the first trials broadcast nationally on Court TV," Kelly said. "Right from downtown Hackensack. People could see, if they watched the trial, the day-to-day complications, the questions raised about police conduct. It really captured in a very human way this whole story of a teenager who was killed, and the officer who shot him, and brought it right into people's living rooms."

In what has become the all-too-familiar pattern, Spath was acquitted. The jury was all-white.

On April 10, 1990 Phillip Pannell was shot in the back by the Teaneck Police Department. In April 2021, family and friends gathered in Tryon Park in Teaneck to remember him. Pannell's sister Natacha Pannell holds his photo.

Teaneck, in the "Color Lines" podcast, is used as a lens to examine other interactions of police and the African-American community, in places like Camden (which had had some notable successes in police reform) and Philadelphia. And all the other tragedies, over the years, that led to the breaking point of May 25, 2020: George Floyd.

"The difference in the Floyd case is that it was so outrageous," Kelly said. "This kneeling on George Floyd's neck for 10 minutes and snuffling the life out of him."

The other difference, now, is the wide prevalence of iPhones and body cams. But that may not make as much difference as you'd think, Kelly said.

"Capturing something on video doesn't necessarily guarantee that there will be a conviction," Kelly said.

So in the end, how did Teaneck respond to its moment of truth? What lessons, if any, does it have to teach the rest of America?

There was, Kelly says, some progress in the town. One early sign was that the makeup of the police department changed. In Spath's day, only 5 percent of the police force was non-white. Today, that number is around 30 percent.

In more subtle ways, too, attitudes in the town may be changing, Kelly said. 

"Last summer, there was a Black Lives Matter march in Teaneck," he said. "Afterwards, the Pannell family applied to the town of Teaneck government to ask if they could plant a tree in a park in honor of Phillip Pannell. They were told yes."

On Oct. 3, 2020 — Phillip's birthday — the tree was planted in Tryon Park, where Phillip used to play as a boy. There was a ceremony, with a printed brochure. And in the brochure was an advertisement — from the police department.

Family and friends gather in Tryon Park in Teaneck to remember Pannell by nourishing the tree planted in his honor.

"I thought that was significant," Kelly said. "I thought it was an effort by the police department to try to heal some old wounds."

Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to his insightful reports about how you spend your leisure time, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com 

Twitter: @jimbeckerman1