City’s youth need to feel their lives have worth
Invest in communities to help address violence
This column is part of a occasional series on how and why youth violence has flourished in Memphis and what solutions could help curb the epidemic. Go to commericalappeal.com to see previous columns, video, more photos and other interactive features in the series.
In January of 2020, the Memphis Police Department had more than $263 million to keep communities safe.
And it still wasn’t enough to save Jadon Knox.
Jadon was the 10 year old who, along with 6-year-old Ashlyn Luckett and 16-year-old Laquan Boyd, were shot and killed on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend that year; at a time in which King’s words of peace didn’t resonate with people trying to get their message out with guns.
Jadon lived in the 700 block of Josephine Street in Orange Mound, the first Black residential community in the South and one where King once dined and got his hair cut under the protection of the Orange Mound Mobilizers; Black men who sought to stop racists from silencing him.
Now, more than 50 years after King’s assassination, too many Black children and young people are dying from the violence he sought to end.
The man charged with Jadon’s slaying, 23-year-old Martavis Ayers, said the child got in the way as he was shooting at someone who was shooting at him.
But here’s what might have saved Jadon’s life – and Ayers from possibly spending the rest of his life in prison: Living in an Orange Mound free of blight and disinvestment.
Or rather, living in a place that isn’t so devalued that young people like Ayers prize getting even over the lives of children who might get in the way of their getting even.
“It [blight and poverty] lowers their self-esteem. It makes them feel like
they aren't valuable,” said Claudette Boyd, a retired MPD officer and longtime Orange Mound activist. “They look around themselves and think, ‘They don't care about us…and it's a dog-eatdog kind of world.'
“That creates violence, because if you throw one bone into the midst of a pack of dogs, everyone is going after it.”
Boyd isn't wrong.
Violence linked to communities deemed unworthy of investment
A Brookings report published last year, in fact, found – or rather reinforced – findings that violent crime is fueled, in large part, by communities beset with a history of redlining and deemed to be unworthy of economic investment. Such communities, it found, were “more likely to be the places where violence and violent injury are more common.”
It also found that “concentrated poverty, densely crowded housing, and a high density of alcohol outlets, mortgage foreclosures and vacant buildings and lots are directly associated with higher rates of violence.”
Though certainly not Memphis' poorest and most violent community, Orange Mound's struggles reveal how such neglect can be lethal for young people's esteem and, in Jadon's case, their chances of growing up.
“There are streets in Memphis where most of the children are born into violent families, violent households, and violent communities,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder and president of Equal Justice Initiative, a social justice organization based in Montgomery, Alabama.
“They're dealing with the sounds of gunshots, the sounds of people shouting, or addicted or intoxicated, or acting threateningly. These kids are constantly being threatened or menaced, so by the time they're four or five, and start school, they have actual trauma disorders…
“The treatment for this kind of trauma is that you have to create an environment that make these kids feel safe.”
“I know what that lived experience is like,” said Britney Thornton, a K-8 grade teacher and founder of JUICE Orange Mound, an organization that is working to reseed the neighborhood with activities and businesses.
“I know that if you're a youth, a young adult, a homeless person, and an unemployed person, there's just not a lot of recreational space, resources, and amenities here… Youth are going to be looking to be engaged in something that is either positive or negative, and we don't have enough positive outlets for our youths here…
“Kids in other neighborhoods are going to ballet rehearsals, to different events that are centered around youths and young adults…they are able to go to parks where the swings and the water fountains work, and where they have walking paths where their parents can walk with them.
“It's just a stark contrast with what kids in Orange Mound get to experience.”
Blight reigns just steps away from prospering neighborhoods
Of course, bringing amenities to a community like Orange Mound is a challenge when, over the past decade, its property values declined by nearly 30 percent. It is pockmarked with vacant lots – which make up 70 percent of the area.
Yet even as blight and disinvestment reigns in Orange Mound, nearby neighborhoods – Cooper Young and Chickasaw Gardens – are prospering.
“The [Mid-south] coliseum is being renovated, and the area around it [Liberty Park] is being renovated, but Orange Mound is not,” said Shelby County Property Appraiser Melvin Burgess.
Said Boyd: “We're investing $200 million in the Fairgrounds, which is north of this location. We're separated by the railroad. But we're on the southside of the railroad tracks…we can look at all that [the new construction] from here.”
The differences in the neighborhoods that border Orange Mound are so glaring that Austin Harrison, a visiting professor of urban studies at Rhodes College, has made the question “why and how Orange Mound looks the way it does, and Chickasaw Gardens looks the way it does,” a discussion topic of a course on Orange Mound.
So, think about that for a bit.
Think about how a young person growing up in Orange Mound, a community with the 13th and 5th highest child poverty rates in Shelby County, feels when he or she walks streets lined with weed-choked lots and buildings beat down by bad weather and neglect, and steps a few streets over into a world where the houses are refurbished, the lawns manicured, and stores and businesses – places where teenagers could maybe get a job – are thriving.
Just not for them.
Environment impacts how young people value themselves, others
It's not unusual for cities to have affluent areas next to impoverished ones. But most other cities don't have a child poverty rate around 40 percent.
That makes Memphis' child poverty rate, according to the latest data from the 2022 Memphis Poverty Fact sheet, the second-highest in the nation.
Meaning that this kind of poverty and neglect, and the feelings of worthlessness that it brings, also invites the kind of violence that traumatizes young people – some to the point where they believe they must partake in it to survive it.
“I had a liquor store [in Orange Mound] closed, and other nuisance properties closed,” Burgess said.
“The guy across the street from one of the properties said: ‘Burg, every day we had to get on the ground to make sure we don't get hit by the gunfire from Ak's…every day, we have to get on the ground.”
That environment alone can have an obscene impact on how young people value themselves - which is why any serious work about stemming youth violence must be rooted in transforming where many Memphis youths live.
When young people live in stable communities, in places with small businesses where they might work and glean knowledge from the business owner, or where parks and amenities reinforce a sense of self-worth, many will no longer look to violence to assert themselves.
But when their environments don't bolster their faith in their own futures, many young people won't care about the futures of others who get caught in the crossfire of them using guns not as a means of defense, but as a means of expression and assertion.
And that's a conundrum that Memphis will never police its way out of.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw
“There are streets in Memphis where most of the children are born into violent families, violent households, and violent communities.”
Bryan Stevenson Founder and president of Equal Justice Initiative