The Cedar Avenue Incident — 25 Years Later
One Person’s Story; A Whole Community’s Perspective (written by Kyle Dalton)
Last summer Candice Wade-Cooper thought nothing of it when she dropped off her 14-year-old daughter and her friend at the local public swimming pool to meet a group of friends. Why should she? It’s what kids do for fun and relief from the blazing Texas summer heat. But on that particular summer day in Austin, Texas, as she entered the pool area with the two girls, the comfortably familiar scenario of young kids having a good time experienced a sudden shift the moment a white lifeguard approached the African-American mom and told her she was about call the police on a group of black teens sitting at a picnic table nearby who she thought were playing their music too loud and being disrespectful. A jolt of anxiety pierced throughout Candice’s body. She didn’t wait to hear another word. She immediately informed her daughter and her friend they were leaving. There was no time for questions. Within a minute they were in the car headed home.
To anyone at the pool, Candice’s visceral reaction to the possibility of police being called might have been perceived as an overprotective African-American mom trying to protect her child and avoid the type of incident that appears all too often on the local news in cities across the United States. For Candice, that was not the case. That moment resonated because it struck on a much more personal level and was a portal back in time to 25 years earlier.
February 11, 1995 is a day 14-year-old Candice Wade will never forget.
It was a day of firsts. It was the first time she had been invited to a party in her new neighborhood in East Austin and a chance to make a good first impression. And it was the first time she would be attending a teen party.
To overcome her newness to the teen party scene, the McCallum High School freshman planned out everything she could possibly imagine from her clothes to the appropriate time to arrive at the party.
“I didn’t want to be the first person there because none of the cool kids show up on time. I picked out my outfit and I was ready. I had a friend of mine come over to the house and I remember telling my mom I don’t want to be on time. I want to make sure I get there a little bit later so I can kind of make an entrance.”
Several hours later and after the time that most kids had already arrived, they made the short drive from her house on San Benard to Cedar Avenue. On the quick five-minute trip Candice gently reminded her mom about the specific set of ground rules they had agreed to that explicitly instructed her mother to stay inside the car when they got the party. No exceptions. She couldn’t have her mom embarrassing her in front of all these new people.
When the three arrived at the house, everything went according to plan. Candice and her friend Asia gracefully exited the car. Her mom, as much as she probably wanted to get out, did not. Instead, she rolled down the car window and struck up a conversation with Ira Bedford, the owner of the house. The two girls impatiently stood by for a couple minutes as the two adults exchanged small talk. As the chat winded down, Bedford assured Candice’s mom the girls would be fine. In typical overprotective mom fashion, Candice’s mom insisted she call if they needed anything. She would be there at a moment’s notice. The youngster acknowledged she understood her mom and reassured her that she would be just fine as the two drifted closer to the house. Candice’s mom slowly began to drive off as she watched the two girls fade into the house.
Inside the house, it was exactly what you would expect to find at a party with teenage boys and girls. Boys gathered in one area of the house. Girls congregated in another, specifically the kitchen. Candice and Asia made their way into the kitchen where four or five other girls were hanging out and chatting.
Not even a couple minutes in the kitchen and before either girl could get into a conversation with any of the other girls already enjoying the festivities, the excitement in the air vanished almost instantaneously.
“I hear commotion in the front of the house that was happening outside in the front yard. And then I saw that there was a police car,” Candice recalled. “It was a very small house and they had a huge picture window so you can see outside.”
Candice’s mind raced. Less than 10 minutes earlier she had confidently told her mom she would be fine. She had no reason to think otherwise. And now, something was happening outside and the police were involved. All those feelings of enthusiasm and security she had experienced moments earlier when she walked in the house, were gone. Candice grabbed the phone in the kitchen and frantically dialed the home number.
The answering machine picked up. Her mom hadn’t even had time to make it back home, which was located less than a mile away. Standing there holding the phone in her hand, she prepared to leave a message when the first of numerous Austin police officers rushed through the doorway into the kitchen with guns drawn. Candice froze, the phone clutched in her hand.
“I could not move. I was just standing there holding the phone and he puts the gun up to my head and ordered me to get down. So I got down on the ground in a fetal position. It’s me and a couple of other girls on the ground in the kitchen. And as I’m looking up he’s got the barrel of the gun and is kind of scanning over us. I’m thinking I could die at any moment.”
“Shut the fuck up, bitch,” Candice said the officer repeated to the girls as they lied on the floor, most of them crying.
Moments later police officer Charlie Cardona walked into the kitchen with blood pouring down his face. Investigators would later determine that Cardona was trying to break up a fight between two adults outside the house and got injured while trying to intervene in the altercation.
“I remember officer Cardona coming over there and he looked down at us and the officer holding the gun over us saying to Cardona, ‘Is this nigger that did this to you? Did this nigger do it?’ I remember Cardona waving him off basically saying no. They were literally going room by room saying that while this officer still stood over us with the gun.”
Candice said she can’t remember the exact length of time all the girls lied on the kitchen floor under the supervision of the officer waving the gun above them, but it seemed like forever. Eventually the officer ordered the girls to get up and leave the house. Each girl quickly rose up. Because there was so much activity in the front yard and it was all but impossible to leave through the front door, the girls quickly ducked out through a side door. What they witnessed next was hard to imagine much less describe.
“Oh my goodness. It was really bad,” she paused. “Once I hit the door there was pepper spray in the air. I witnessed a woman who was pregnant at the time being hit with a baton. Other people were being hit. It was awful. It looked like there were thousands of police cars because all I could see were lights. And they also had dogs they were using to escort us out of the area.”
Being asthmatic, Candice struggled to breathe coughing and choking on the pepper spray-filled air. Her eyes burned. As she hastily made her way out of the area, she watched in complete disbelief as police officers readily and almost indiscriminately wielded their batons on teenagers and multiple members of the Bedford family.
As she gradually escaped the smell and sting in the air a few blocks away, she encountered her friend Asia who she had separated from when they had left house several minutes earlier. The two navigated their way to a nearby convenience store where Candice spotted a pay phone and immediately called her parents. Her dad answered the phone and a couple minutes later both arrived at the store. Obviously upset, Candice composed herself enough to explain to her parents what happened. Both parents recognized they needed to get both girls away from the situation as soon as possible. As they prepared to get in the car for the short return trip home, a reporter from a local television station approached them.
After some thoughtful deliberation, Candice’s parents consented to the interview and she explained to the reporter what had happened. Minutes later when she finished the interview, one of the many officers who had remained in the area and intently watched her interview, approached the girl and her father. The officer handed her father his card and told them if they wanted to file a complaint, they should head downtown to the police station. He took the card and then they all walked back to the car and left.
When they got home, Candice and Asia were in a state of shock, both of them trying to somehow make sense of what they had just seen and experienced. What happened to the police officer? Why were so many police cars there? Why were they pointing guns and cursing at a bunch of teenagers? None of it made any sense.
“I went home and washed up. I was shaking. I was hysterical. I finally got myself together and my parents and I talked. My dad said if I wanted to go to the police station, he would take me. I decided to go.”
A few minutes later after Candice and her father dropped off Asia at her house, they arrived at the police station to give her statement.
Inside Austin Police Department headquarters and after informing the front desk why they were there, a police officer came to the front, greeted Candice and her father before guiding the pair to an open office area filled with cubicles. Inside the officer’s cubicle, Candice tried to give her statement. She only tried because she was so distracted by what was happening around her.
“While we were in the cubicle and I was giving him my statement there were police officers high-fiving each other about the incident. I could hear them over the cubicles talking about what occurred. And I was in tears because I was telling my dad that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened. You could hear them kind of joking about it. And so here I am, a victim of this incident that just occurred and we’re at the police station trying to make a complaint and I hear joking about the incident. And then in addition to that the police officer did not take my statement as I stated it. So I never signed it. My dad said this is a waste of time so we got up we left.”
Life After Cedar Avenue
Following that night, as is often the case following a traumatic experience, Candice was a changed person. For the first time in her 14 years on earth, she had an understanding about the racist world in which she lived. Unfortunately, her education into this dark side of society was just getting started.
Upon her return to school the following week, it was apparent her appearance on the news and being quoted in the newspaper had struck a chord with some people and they made that abundantly clear by voicing their disapproval directly to the teenager.
“Several of the teachers I remember them asking me — why did you lie? And, you’re a liar,” she remembered. “And it wasn’t just me. It was several of the other students as well.”
When she had arrived at McCallum the year before she was an honor roll student in the Gifted and Talented Program. She was always social and outgoing. She was even the teacher’s pet. Following the incident with police and subsequent treatment by school staff, she rebelled.
“I didn’t like school because it reminded me of authority. I was afraid of the police. Even my parents, there was a sense of why didn’t you protect me? Why didn’t you tell me? I was raised to believe that the police were there to protect and serve and to help you. If you need help, that’s who you go to. My world, my innocence kind of flipped upside down. And this was my first realization of racism. That was my awakening to what it looks like, what it feels like. So I went through years of therapy.”
Initially, those years of therapy were ineffective. She wasn’t ready for it. She was still processing it all and going through what she described as her angry phase. That all changed four years later after she endured another instance of racism, this time at the hands of the justice system.
It happened at the conclusion of the federal court case where Wade and more than a dozen other plaintiffs sued the City of Austin for police brutality. They lost the case but shortly after the ruling it was discovered that the bailiff had made a racist comment to the jurors. A mistrial was declared.
Wade said following that incident in court she returned to therapy and this time the results were dramatically different.
“I finally understood that I’m going to be black my entire life. And I understood that I cannot be that scared little 14-year-old girl anymore in a corner. I now have to be able to not only speak out against these acts, but I also have to be a part of the change and the solution. And so that’s when I really kind of dedicated my life to community service and activism and being an advocate. I wanted desperately to be a part of the solution.”
Over the course of the last two decades, Wade has been just that. After graduating with a degree in political science and mass communication from Huston-Tillotson College, she has worked at several jobs including a stint working for the civil rights attorney who represented her in her police brutality case against the city of Austin. For the last ten years, ironically, she has worked for the city of Austin as a department manager.
She said it all came full circle in October 2019 when she was tasked to lead a project for the City of Austin that was created to determine how the city can better enforce civil rights ordinances and what type of services the city can provide to the protected classes including disabled, race, age and LGBTQ.
“Because my background was in civil rights and I sued the city for civil rights, they thought she would be that person to do it,” Cooper laughed.
While Cooper wakes up every day and goes to work with the mindset of being part of the solution, she understands there is much work to be done in a city where racism is still quite problematic as evidenced by the recently released report revealing how racial profiling is still a persistent problem within the Austin Police Department. Wade said that report is not necessarily a reflection of racism in the police department as much as it is on the city as a whole.
“I have a lot of amazing working relationships with the Austin Police Department. I work side-by-side with them and partner with him and on certain projects. And so when I speak about the Austin Police Department as a whole, there are some amazing police officers in the department. But I also know that when you talk about racism, it is a systemic issue. And what I do know is just like any organization there are bad apples. My hope is that there are more good apples than bad, but I do know that racism exists and we still have a lot of work to do.
“Just as a nation when it comes to issues as far as communities of color. Data does not lie. My story and the stories of those that were with me that day says that it’s real. In Austin we have a history and it’s a system of communities of color being treated differently than other communities and until we have that conversation I don’t think they will be able to resolve it but it starts with identifying that there is a problem and working to fix the problem. And it starts with making sure that if you see something wrong you don’t go along with the problem, you address it.”
Cooper said she can only speak for herself, but she knows many in the African-American community who agree with her when it comes to feeling unwelcome in Austin. Interestingly, that deeply held belief isn’t as much a direct result of the Cedar Avenue incident as much as it is what she has experienced living in Austin her entire life.
“When it comes to just African-American culture and being able to walk into a facility and see other people that look like you, white people can pretty much walk in anywhere and see other white people. There’s not a lot of African-Americans that are here and so even something like going to the grocery store, there’s not a lot that live here anymore. Our population of African-Americans is declining. Quite frankly I see more black people in Manor, Pflugerville, Cedar Park and Round Rock than I see in Austin. I think that a lot of that is when people do not feel welcome in a space then they leave that space. It’s kind of like having an uninvited guest.”
She said it’s no secret Austin has an established racist history with its redlining and how Interstate 35 has always been the divide between white people and people of color. Despite all the history and the obstacles even present today, Cooper is hopeful.
“The way that Austin can be more friendly to people of color is to provide more opportunities not only for a cultural experience, but also in terms of being able to grow wealth. Certain neighborhoods that you go to you can see that black people don’t even live in the neighborhoods. That’s just how it’s been. We need to focus on making sure that everyone in this community, that everyone’s quality of life matters. That everyone is being viewed in the same light. We should want to make sure that everyone feels safe and welcome in this space.”
Welcome in this space includes young teens being able to enjoy a day at the pool in the Texas summer heat without fear of the police being called just because of the color of their skin. In hindsight Cooper said she may have overreacted to the lifeguard’s threat of calling the police, but in the end, it became a teachable moment that allowed her, for the first time, to explain to her 14-year-old daughter what had happened to her more than 20 years ago when she was that same age. She explained to her daughter that racism does exist, but that she should be proud and confident in who she is as a young black woman and not fearful of the hateful ignorance of others. She should, instead, be part of the solution.
It’s that message and people like Candice Wade-Cooper not only proclaiming it but acting it out on a daily basis that will help Austin overcome its racist history sooner rather than later.
