“Another day, another death”

The above was the title of Saturday’s editorial in the Virginia Pilot. The subject matter was the murder of a 15 year old Norfolk boy, whose death was chronicled on the front page last week. Four teenagers – 13, 14, 15 and 18 – have been charged in the killing. On the opposite page, the Pilot reprinted this Leonard Pitts column, retitled for our paper “How Black Men Die.” Pitts’ article is influenced by the death of Sean Taylor and at the time of its writing, the assailants were unknown. We now know that four charged consisted of two 17-year-olds, an 18 year old, and a 20 year old.

Norfolk School Board member Billy Cook was on On the Record this morning talking about the local case. He has been contacting everyone he knows, calling for a community-wide effort to protest the violence. Cook’s email to me, the Pilot editorial, and Pitts’ column all wind up in the same place:

How did young teens get guns so easily? Where were the parents? Why didn’t anyone intervene? And, most importantly, just how badly has society frayed?

Some of the answer to those questions lie in understanding what happened to the black community. Last Sunday, the Pilot had a front page article about Cascade Boulevard Park, in Chesapeake.

Had integration unwittingly destroyed Cascade Boulevard Park, burying forever a place full of South Norfolk black culture?

Today, Cascade Park and Cascade Boulevard Park sit little more than half a mile from each other.

Back then, during segregation, many people knew the parks simply as the white Cascade and the black Cascade.

The story lays out the number of black athletes who played sports at the park, including pro football player Ken Easley, NSU basketball coach Lonnie Blow, and pro basketball player Alonzo Mourning. The facility is now in disrepair, having sat empty for some 25 years.

Cascade Park is just representative of what happened to black neighborhoods across the country after integration. In so many respects, the black community was torn asunder. Gone from the neighborhoods were many of the role models. Left behind, mostly, were those who couldn’t afford to get out. It is no wonder, then, that we have young men growing up not knowing how to be men and young women growing up not knowing how to be women ~ because there are few left there to show them the way. There are not enough mentors, not enough role models to combat the imagery of every day existence for so many folks.

Hillary Clinton was laughed at when she talked about how it takes a village. Well, it does take a village, and that village is all of us. That village was one that I grew up in, one in which the neighbors took responsibility for raising each others’ kids. I can recall walking home from elementary school (two blocks away), getting into a fight with another kid and having nearly every parent who was home stop us along the way. And you can bet my mother knew about the fight before I got there. In the village I grew up in, going to school, getting an education was just expected of everyone. No one was counting on a football scholarship or a basketball scholarship to lead them to the promised land. I remember one person from my high school getting an athletic scholarship while tons more got academic ones. In the village that I grew up in, there were no guns, few unwed pregnancies, and drugs were still socially unacceptable.

And I ain’t that old.

So while we may know why (or at least, part of why) we ended up here, that doesn’t solve the problem. We are not going back to the days of segregation. What we do have to do, however, is to get back to that sense of community, that sense that we are all in this together. As the Pilot editorial says:

The real and lasting solution is much cheaper, and much harder. Individuals, families, schools, churches, local institutions — in other words, all of us — have a stake in stemming the violence. We must all work harder and longer to help turn our young people away from these dangers.

Amen, brother. Amen.