Civility

Daniel McGraw covered the Oberlin College vs. Gibson Bakery case for Legal Insurrection,

“All Oberlin had to do,” Gibson told me in September, “was to say we weren’t racists and there would have been no trial. What I didn’t understand is that they didn’t have the civility to do so. The basic civility we all try to live by. They didn’t seem to understand that.”

...Following the verdict in June, I wrote about the case for Quillette in an attempt to explain why an anodyne shoplifting incident had blown into a vicious racial scandal, and a cultural standoff between town and gown. The community that once joined the college and its environs no longer exists. What happened to David Gibson and his family is evidence of a resentful meanness that always lurked in the background, but which polarizing cultural and political pressures have inflamed.

As I reported at the time, David Gibson testified that the school had offered to allow the bakery’s food back in the university cafeteria on two conditions: that Gibson’s drop the shoplifting charges, and agree to report all future instances of theft by students to the university and not the police. Gibson refused. “They didn’t want to move forward until we agreed to special treatment for students shoplifting,” he told the jury. “But I kept telling them that we have to be consistent and call the police no matter who is stealing.” Only later did he realize that the school administrators might be using the controversy to launder their own reputations. “[The school administration] had been accused of being racists by students in the previous year,” he testified, “and I think they used us to deflect from that problem they had. I believe they were using us as a target so that their racial problems with their students would go away.”

David Gibson has not lived to see the end of this distressing saga. In late 2018, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, on November 16 of this year, he passed away aged 65. At his funeral, there were no bitter condemnations of the school’s administrators. Instead, friends and family spoke fondly of his kindness, his volunteer work helping the marginalized to find jobs and addiction treatment, his unpaid service on various local boards, and how his family had been active members of the Oberlin community since the late 1800s. But Eddie Holoway, a longtime family friend and one of many African Americans who attended the service, did address the point that almost everyone else had tactfully avoided. “The environment today is where name-calling is quite popular,” he said. “Words do matter. The names put upon him weren’t very pleasant. But he wanted to see a healing point. David had made peace with this before he died … his main concern wasn’t himself, but for everyone in this town. This [lawsuit] was about damag[e to] his reputation, but all of us who knew him knew what his reputation is. He had a good heart and helped everyone he could and that was priceless.”

...This is the man Oberlin students and faculty vilified as a racist, who Oberlin College punished by cancelling his cafeteria contract, and who is now accused, even in death, of attacking free speech for attempting to clear his family name. The Gibson family aren’t racists, they were just grist to a political mill. And as I watched all this all unfold in court, I was stunned by how unnecessary and senselessly destructive the whole episode had been.

Read more here.