City event targets domestic violence
From the Civic Center, down a few blocks and back, the yells were nonstop on a sunny Tuesday.
“S !( S !) T !( T !) O !( O !) P !( P !) Stop the Violence! Stop Domestic Violence!”
“(When I say) Love (you say) don’t hurt!”
“P-U-R-P-L-E! Purple! Purple!”
Those were the sounds of Pine Bluff High School spirit group members leading chants just behind a banner imploring the public to “Stop Domestic Violence.” The young women traded in their cardinal-and-white pom-poms for purple, the theme color for Domestic Awareness Month. They joined several adults, many of them community and elected leaders, during the noon hour marching from the Eighth Avenue steps of the Civic Center to Tennessee Street, to 12th Avenue, up State Street and back to Eighth.
This was the 15th annual march organized by the Pine Bluff Police Department.
“And every year, it grows and grows,” Deputy Police Chief Shirley Warrior said. “Every year, we have different organizations come. It’s always on [the] third Tuesday in October at noon.”
The stories that are shared after the walk impact everyone in attendance, Warrior said. Even the students who listen to the stories share them with their classmates, she added.
Some of the vendors in attendance have been impacted either directly or indirectly by domestic violence.
Dominique Graydon’s cousin, Lashonda Price, was shot while sitting in her car at a gas station on Walnut Street and died during surgery on March 6, 2010, according to a news article. Curtis C. Hampton III, who was reportedly supposed to pick up his and Price’s child at the gas station, pleaded guilty to the shooting in May 2011 and was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
“I worked for the police depart
ment for 10 years and I still continue to volunteer,” said Graydon, now the operator of a health food store on State Street in Pine Bluff. “I opened Great Nutrition about three years ago, and since then I made sure to establish a tea in her name because domestic violence is real, and it hit my family. It hit home. It’s not what somebody told me, what they said or heard, it’s what I know. I had to experience.”
The Herbalife-brand tea was purple in color and sweet in taste.
Graydon said Price was working her way out of an abusive relationship, including going to a women’s shelter, but was pulled back in because she and Hampton had a child together.
“She ended up losing her life, but her children — Lashonda has three children — they are all survivors,” Graydon said. “Each and every day, we live on to make sure her name is still remembered.”
Coffy Davis of the Little Rock-based March for Black Women & Girls offered startling statistics on domestic violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the domestic violence survivor said the highest rates of intimate-partner violence are among women ages 18-20 and 25-34. In Arkansas, women are 37.3% of victims of domestic violence and 40% of Black women will experience intimate-partner violence, she said.
Community members, Davis said, can help prevent domestic violence by noticing signs of it, including mental and emotional abuse, erasing stigmas and making victims feel comfortable reporting acts of abuse to police, raising awareness and creating safe spaces for those who need to talk.
“Somebody constantly making you feel terrible, making you cry, calling you names, that’s unacceptable,” she said.