Promise unfulfilled: A critical look back at the death of Marcus Smith via 'I Ain't Resisting'
I found it quite impossible to review Ian McDowell’s book, I Ain’t Resisting, at the time of its release. Although I received an advanced copy, and promised to review it, I failed utterly to live up to the promise.
The simple reason was that I could not envision a way to write about the book without absolutely ripping apart the people involved in the circumstances described. Not the police who were as considerate to Marcus Deon Smith as I’ve ever seen from law enforcement officers up until the time they murdered him. Not the lowly communications officer who wrote the superficial press release in the hours after Smith died when police officers hogtied him face down on Church Street.
No, those events were understandable. Smith’s death was 100-percent preventable. It was an outrageous abuse of police power and the City of Greensboro escaped becoming the epicenter of BLM riots only due to the ineptitude that infects the city at all levels. Smith’s death was a gut wrenching end to a life of missed promise.
McDowell is a gritty member of the city’s literati. He’s a warrior that’s fought to shed light on the Smith case from the beginning. I Ain’t Resisting is meticulous in its approach to the facts. McDowell is well-versed in the city’s history and he places the story of Smith’s 2018 death at the hands of eight Greensboro police officers in the flow of time.
For those not familiar with the city’s dark history of police controversy, please make note. The Greensboro Police Department is certain to have had foreknowledge in November 1979 that a caravan of Nazis and KKK members were driving into the city to attack a planned Communist Workers Party march and did nothing to stop the terror that followed. Five caring and much loved people were murdered that day.
The anger and distrust of 1979 remains alive on the city’s streets. There is an activist industrial complex that feeds on this negative energy. City leaders forever looking to get a slice of the finance, insurance and real estate sectors that dominated Greensboro’s economy for decades were incapable of creating positive social change.
By the late 1990s, Greensboro’s position astride major interstates running from Atlanta to New York City made it a hotbed of drug trafficking, prostitution and associated vices. Following the tenure of two political chiefs of police, city leaders decided to put GPD in the hands of a local boy in 2005. He just happened to be white. As Chief David Wray got his bearings and began to target perceived corruption, he ran afoul of existing power structures within the department. They happened to mostly be the interests of black officers and commanders empowered in the previous administrations.
What followed was one of the purest power plays ever witnessed in North Carolina municipal politics. The festering wound of racial animosity in Greensboro boiled over and Wray resigned in January 2006. In the first decade of the 21st century, just when it seemed like the black and white memories of the Greensboro Massacre might fade away, the Wray affair rocketed this division into the future.
It’s a rite of passage in the city for young activists from Guilford College and UNCG and NC A&T to flex on authority. Rev. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of Nov. 3, 1979, remains just on the edge of downtown ready to wash over all he sees with a righteous power. Negative police interactions that would go unnoticed in most bustling urban spaces become the rage du jour for the protest prone. It’s a manufactured ecosystem born of tragedy and fueled by wealthy white intellectuals stumbling over themselves in performative splendor.
Post-Wray, and with the spread of national police accreditation standards, GPD has managed to heighten professionalism and command. The end of the Wray affair coincided with the genesis of Downtown Greensboro’s resurgence. What were once desolate streets in the 1990s had, by 2007, begun to show signs of life. The poor were always there. Everyone knows this. But it wasn’t until money and commerce remained active after dark that anyone became concerned about it.
And now we come to the case of Marcus Deon Smith.
Smith was, by all accounts, a vibrant, creative man who could have lived a very successful life. After the 38-year-old died at the hands of Greensboro police officers, his family rushed to the city from South Carolina to stand next to a lawyer and say for the cameras how much they loved Marcus. But his family, and the feel good, do-gooder liberals in Greensboro who enabled his lifestyle for years, are as much to blame for his death as anyone.
I can say this because I was in the same position as Marcus Smith when I was 25. I was a dysfunctional man living to abuse drugs and alcohol in my free time. Before I was incarcerated in solitary confinement for 145 days after a black district court judge in Forsyth County gave me a punitive $500,000 bond, I had lost tether with reality. I lived solely for the next high, for the next opportunity to abuse alcohol.
For 145 days in solitary confinement in the Forsyth County Detention Center, black jailers made it clear they wanted me to just flex one time so they could bust my head open. Jenkins put the ankle chains on too tight on purpose when they would let me out of the cell for an hour every few days. When I stood up, the ankle chains would cut into my leg. Saunders would rip the handcuffs over my thumb knuckle when I stood at the cell door and put my hands through the slot so he could take the cuffs off. He would smile when he did it.
People literally don’t believe me sometimes when I tell them I’m a convicted felon and that I had this five month experience in solitary confinement. Almost 30 years after it happened, I often find it hard to believe myself.
But it shapes my world view and what I’m about to write next.
A society that allows adults to walk around in circles all day, collecting enough money to buy street drugs because their food and sanitary needs will be provided for them by the day center downtown, is a completely failed society. The alphabet soup of government and non-profit service providers that exist to “end homelessness” is a cauldron of failure. There is no remedy to help people that do not want to help themselves.
McDowell paints this portrait clearly, although I am sure that was not his intention. When he interviewed people like Michelle Kennedy, then the director of the city’s Interactive Resource Center, and allowed her to reminisce about Marcus Smith and his struggles, I’m certain neither of them thought it would come across that way.
But it does.
You can read the book for yourself and decide if you believe Chief Wayne Scott and City Manager David Parish and Mayor Nancy Vaughan all were smart enough to collude on a press release in the early morning hours. You can ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, it was a poorly written press release sent out in the spirit of informing the public in a timely manner about a tragic event. If you know the history of the activist class in Greensboro, then you can see clearly how they pounced on these bureaucratic processes and the failure of civil servants acting under pressure and sculpted them into the malevolent conspiracy of the age.

Smith could be alive today and thriving within the creative spirit he possessed. But instead of leading this man to the fulfillment of his dreams, the people around him refused to hold him responsible for his actions. They patted him on the head once in a while and sent him back out onto the streets with no direction, no sense of larger purpose.
One can now see where this feel-good policy view leads by following the news from Oakland and Asheville, and dare I say, Greensboro itself. The acceptance of purposelessness is a failed policy driven by failed people who are incapable of leadership. Even now the elected leaders in Greensboro will blame the state or the county for the city’s inability to alleviate the growing problems that stem from allowing the purposeless to wander about in the central business district.
I’ve known three homeless people in Greensboro during the last decade who are now dead. A woman was murdered last year in the abandoned newspaper building downtown, just two blocks from the IRC, which ostensibly is there to address just this state of being. I guess now is a good time to mention that the current director of the IRC was arrested this month on multiple cases of larceny from a Target store in Greensboro.
To seem, rather than to be. That is the problem.