Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (13 page)

“Sometimes tears are shed,” he tells me. “I take time, because I want every kid that I come into contact with to know that Mr. Black told [them]. I hope a light will come on and steer them in the right direction. . . . I also tell ’em that as a teacher in their lives, I don’t want to hear what I heard about Stanley.”

Toshiba fears that few of Stanley’s peers are ready to heed Mario’s lessons. When I ask her what it will take to get them to understand what’s at stake, she says, “I’m asking myself the same question, because they’re still out there hanging out.” She imitates their macho intonation, a low, gruff drawl: “‘He gone. But we’re still gonna thug on the corner.’ I don’t know. I just don’t know. Mario is really trying to get the youth to understand that [they] could really have a good life.”

A year after she received the candle, the MYMOC held its second annual Give Back Day. It rained heavily, and only around twenty children participated. This time the event was dedicated to one of Stanley’s best friends, Ajewan Jones, who was shot dead six months after Stanley
was shot. The night Stanley died, Ajewan’s brother was with him, and Ajewan was in prison for a parole violation. This time, Ajewan’s mother, Toshiba’s friend Shimona, was there to take the candle.

W
HEN SOMEBODY GETS SHOT
dead in Charlotte, Judy Williams knows about it. The organization she runs, Mothers of Murdered Offspring, has arranged vigils for murder victims for more than two decades. When they started, the police would contact them and let them know when there had been a shooting. Now MOMO is such an institution in the city that victims’ families usually go straight to them.

Judy, a friendly, devout, engaging woman with a short crop of silver hair, organized a vigil for Stanley, which she remembers as a regular affair with a large crowd in Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Park. On the anniversary of Stanley’s death, she helped Trey organize the balloon release.

Judy started the support group after her goddaughter, Shawna Hawk, was strangled to death by a serial killer and left floating in the bathtub at her home in Charlotte. The murder occurred on February 19, 1993, during the year with the highest number of homicides in Charlotte’s history to date.
⁴
Judy was worried that Shawna’s mother wasn’t going to make it. Shawna and her mother had been more like sisters. Judy wanted to contribute in some way following Shawna’s death, and she came up with the idea of holding candlelight vigils and balloon releases for bereaved relatives.

If a family needs funds for burial, then she might hold the vigil as soon as possible after the death and take up a collection. (They’ve collected more than $1,000 in one night.) If not, they try to stage the vigils the night before the funeral. That’s when most relatives and friends are in town, and it offers a release before the more formal occasion. “We thought people were gathering anyway, so why don’t we take advantage of that,” she says. “Why don’t I get those people together, because they were still at the family’s house, allow them to express what they were
feeling while we light candles, and talk, cry, read poems, sing, whatever they wanted to do. Things they usually wouldn’t be able to do at the funeral the next day.”

Judy is a deeply religious woman. One of the many posters on the wall of her office, where she works as an administrator for the housing complex in which she lives, declares, “Your relationship with God is as strong as the person you like least.” The balloons they release have scripture printed on them as well as a phone number and email address so that those who receive them can respond. One made it as far as Canada. When I met Trey, a couple of weeks after the balloon release he’d held for Stanley, he had yet to hear word from anyone who found one.

When it comes to the fallout from gun violence, Judy is in the trenches—dealing with bereaved families and friends at the very moment when their grief is most raw. She has assisted in several thousand vigils and, when reaching for an anecdote or illustration, can generally remember the name of the victim and the cross streets where he or she fell. She is politically aware and engaged and freely shares her views on everything from American foreign policy to the Constitution. Ask her what is the primary reason for gun violence, and she barely hesitates. “People are not going to church anymore. People are not being taught God. You can tell that by the respect that’s given when you pray. You have to remind people to take their hats off. You didn’t used to have to do that.”

This failure, she believes, has its roots in a fundamental crisis within the black family. “The homes are not the incubators they need to be. To actually nurture children and give them all the tools they need to begin in the world without robbin’ and stealin’ and killing. A lot of them are mimicking what they see. We have a lot of teenage mothers who don’t know anything about parenting. Who don’t have the help to help them parent because their mothers are very young. You’ve got grandmothers who are thirty-two and thirty-six years old because kids are having babies so young. And nobody knows anything about being a parent at that age. And these children aren’t getting the help that they need, and they’re growing up pretty much on their own and being taught that the world pretty much owes them something.”

I
T IS AN ARTICLE
of faith among right-wing commentators that African Americans refuse to take responsibility for the problems in their communities, preferring instead to blame their woes on racism and poverty. Obsessed with a sense of victimhood, the pundits claim, they refrain from the hard, introspective work of social and economic revitalization in their neighborhoods.

“I have a dream that today’s black leadership will quit blaming racism and ‘the system’ for what ails black America,” said Tea Party Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, mimicking Martin Luther King on his radio program. “I have a dream that black America will take responsibility for improving their own lives.”
⁵
Black political leaders who raise issues of racism are branded “race hustlers” who “play the race card” in a bid to leverage white guilt for their own ends and to their community’s detriment.

Such arguments were particularly prevalent in the wake of disturbances and demonstrations after a series of police killings of unarmed black youth and men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Eric Garner, who was videoed being choked to death by New York police as he uttered, “I can’t breathe.” In both cases grand juries refused to indict the officers. “President Obama should provide some leadership,” insisted Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, “[by saying], ‘You know what, we fight the injustice and we realize it’s there, but we love our country, we applaud the progress we’ve made, and here is a pathway to success. You know, don’t abandon your children. Don’t get pregnant at fourteen. Don’t allow your neighborhoods to deteriorate into free fire zones.’ That’s what the African-American community should have on their T-shirts.”
⁶

In a discussion about Ferguson on
Meet the Press,
former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We’re talking about the exception here. . . . So why don’t you cut [black-on-black crime] down so so many white police officers
don’t have to be in black areas? White police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 percent of the time.”
⁷

The notion that raising the issue of “black-on-black crime” is taboo has gained currency beyond the Right. In her granular account of policing homicides in Los Angeles in
Ghettoside,
Leovy claims that African Americans avoid discussion of the topic precisely because they know how conservatives will distort such a discussion. “Some black scholars and advocates fear providing white racists with further ammunition—of giving them yet more ways to stigmatize poor blacks,” she writes.
⁸

My research for this book suggests that at a grassroots level, almost precisely the opposite is true. In the scores of interviews I conducted with family members, community activists, and others, the shootings of children and teens in the black community by other black teens were often discussed, and those conversations made almost no reference to poverty, racism, or other broader structural issues. They focused instead almost entirely on personal responsibility. “White society”—whatever that is—didn’t even get a look in. Most described things pretty much the way Williams did, though with less emphasis on religion and more on family.

They didn’t frame it as a problem of “black-on-black” crime. But that’s because it is a nonsense term. America is very segregated, and its criminality conforms to that fact. The victims of most crimes are of the same race as those who commit them. Eighty-four percent of whites who are killed every year are killed by whites.
⁹
White people who buy illegal drugs are most likely to buy them from white people.
¹⁰
So the fact that black people are killing each other conforms to, rather than contradicts, America’s criminal patterns where race is concerned. What is particular to the black community is the level of violent crime. The rate of black youth homicides is falling, but it remains four times the national average and ten times the rate of white youth homicides.
¹¹

The source of this problem, most African Americans I interviewed argued, was the breakdown in parenting and the absence of basic values being taught in the home—a state of affairs, most concurred, that has deteriorated significantly since they were young. “A lot of the problem is kids raising kids,” says Mario, echoing Judy’s point about teenage parents.
“When I was at elementary school, my mother was active in my school. A lot of parents were active in my school. But today a lot of kids are raising themselves. Parents are younger these days. They’re think[ing] they can get their support from their peers out on the streets, because they’re not getting their support at home.”

I’ve always found this line of argument odd because, having been parented in England and been a parent in the United States, I don’t think Americans make worse parents than the British or any other nationality. Indeed, in Britain, where public drunkenness is far more common, the culture feels both far more violent and far less deadly. But no other developed Western nation suffers child gun deaths at the level of the United States. It’s not even close. In 2013, the United States suffered eight times the per capita rate of gun murders as the average for Western Europe.
¹²
The US rate was more than five times higher than the one for Portugal, the nearest contender in Western Europe. Even if Americans did make worse parents, they couldn’t be
that
bad.

But this reasoning runs so deep that black parents say parenting is the problem even when they are criticized for being the very parents they themselves believe to be the problem. Shimona had Ajewan when she was fourteen years old, and he was in and out of prison before he was shot. On paper, certainly, she is the archetype that Mario and Judy are referring to. Ask her what she thinks the source of the problem is that took him from her at such a young age, and she says, “I think it’s got a lot to do with your home. Your parents. These kids, their mamas don’t love ’em like that. The streets raise ’em. They don’t have nobody to tell them. To say this ain’t right. You know you can’t go and take nobody’s life like that. You know better. You know right from wrong.”

At times, the contradictions are painful. While I was in Indianapolis looking for Kenneth Tucker’s family I met DeAndra Yates, who wore a T-shirt bearing the face of her thirteen-year-old son, DeAndre Knox, who was paralyzed after having been shot in the back of the head at a party just a few months earlier. DeAndra was at a Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense demonstration protesting the policies espoused at the National Rifle Association’s national convention being held in the city at
the time. So there’s no question she had a view about the bigger issues at play and their connection to DeAndre’s fate. When I asked her what she thought the problem was, she didn’t mention guns. “Parents,” she said. “That’s where it starts. With the parents.”