Black clergy call for peace
Vow to be 'agents of hope'
Boston clergy met to say that they had been “M.I.A. for 20 years” but now need to step up as a group to make the city take action on the swell of youth violence in the city.
“We have people in our community, parents and young people alike, who are deeply traumatized. And they’re feeling a sense of powerlessness,” said the Rev. Gregory Groover from the basement of his church, the Historic Charles Street A.M.E. Church in Roxbury Wednesday. The evening before, two men were shot — one fatally — only a mile away in Dorchester.
“We believe,” he continued, “as persons who have been called by God to serve as agents of hope, that in times of despair, it calls for pastors to once again resume our role as productive vessels and voices.”
Groover spoke following a weekly meeting of local clergy, community members and law enforcement called the Violence Reduction Task Force.
Crime statistics released Tuesday evening by the Boston Police Department showed that there had already been five fatal shootings in 2023, which is four more than during the same time last year. But those statistics only ran from Jan. 1 through Sunday, and there had already been two more fatal shootings since that data was released.
Factoring in the 17 nonfatal shootings for the year up to that date, that leaves 22 total victims — eight more than during the same point last year — across 18 total shooting incidents, which could have one or more victims. There were 10 shooting incidents during the same period in 2022.
In 2022, the number of shooting victims dropped 8.1% from the year before, though at 33 fatalities, there were eight more deaths. Both 2021, at 25 fatal shootings, and 2022, with 33 fatal shootings, were below the five-year average of 35.6 shooting deaths.
Groover said that he understands the data shows a decrease in gun-related fatalities over the past two years, but that “those numbers do not tell the whole story.”
“They do not communicate the terror that children feel in elementary schools … when we reached an alarming and a senseless point of 13-year-olds intentionally being targeted and young women being stabbed,” he continued.
Rev. Eugene Rivers III, speaking to the press following the meeting, said that the group is calling for “the mobilization of the faith communities” — and not just black community churches, he said, but all local faith groups — which he said has “been sort of M.I.A. (missing in action) for the last 20 years and not done the things we should have done.”
Both pastors spoke about the powerful relationship between the police and city administration in the 1990s, which Groover said created a national model for local outreach to quell violence and one to which the community needs to return.
Rivers compared public schools in Boston to the elite universities in and around the city, as well as government buildings. At those institutions, where violence is rare to strike, they have armed private security or police forces.
“Now, if the State House, if City Hall, Harvard, MIT and BU can have armed security forces where there name do you make the ar- is no crime, how in God’s gument, therefore, that in the most violent neighbor- hoods, there should be no security? I don’t. It’s inexplicable.”