Editorial: Suburban memorial could keep alive issues of justice in Sandra Bland's death

A Naperville woman has a street in Prairie View, Texas, named after her as a civil rights reminder. Shouldn't something be done in Sandra Bland's memory close to home in the suburbs?

Bland, we readily acknowledge, is not the archetypal civil rights heroine. She is not resolute Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white racist. She is not fiery Martin Luther King Jr. preaching on the evils of racial injustice. She died after a confrontation with a police officer during a minor traffic stop led to her arrest and, authorities say, her suicide in prison.

But, as we've emphasized in two previous editorials, her tragic experience does represent a continuing, central conflict of our era - the challenge to balance civil rights, especially but not exclusively for minorities, and police authority. In that context, it may even be particularly fitting that the 28-year-old black woman was just an average person with an average person's interests, aspirations and flaws.

As a noteworthy start, the DuPage African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Lisle church Bland attended while growing up in Villa Park, did name its 2016 Diversity Institute in her honor last January.

"Everyone has something to contribute, and Sandy contributed her voice to issues of civil rights in her blog content ('Sandy Speaks') and her interactions with church members," Kamarrie Coleman, the co-chairwoman of the annual event, said at the time. "She presented a face of concern and a face of compassion in regard to some of the things in the community,"

That's an important face for us all to see. It will no doubt also be a big part of the "Sandy Speaks" memorials planned for Chicago this July.

Bland's mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, told our Katlyn Smith in an interview we published last week that no act can ever bring her closure for her daughter's death, and she pleaded for accountability from those most responsible. We understand both those sentiments in a mother, and we know that no belated show of respect by itself can address them. But we also know that we all have short memories; we swing from controversy to controversy, news feed to news feed. Today's issue can too easily be lost tomorrow.

An appropriate memorial, perhaps as simple as a plaque in a park or, at least in keeping with the town in which Bland died, a new name for a suburban street could be valuable. It could acknowledge that while the suburbs cannot provide closure to Sandra Bland's family or accountability for her death, we can work toward justice, a justice she was denied, in the suburban Chicago region she called home.

And, more to the point, in her name.