Entire community must help with city’s fight against crime
Willie Herenton, the city’s first elected African-American mayor, has taken some pretty serious pushback for his New Year’s Eve speech about violent crime in the black community.
Speaking to attendees at Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s first New Year’s Eve prayer breakfast, Herenton characterized Memphis’ violent crime problem as a black problem and said, “The blacks must take ownership of the problem. They can’t pass it off. It’s up to us to protect us from us.”
He is wrong, of course, but I am going to cut him some slack.
I understand the point he was trying to make, but because of the way he made it, he oversimplified the issue — giving sustenance to the stereotypical comments of folks who write letters to the editor, send me emails or make comments on my columns, maintaining that African-Americans are inherently violent. That is a crock, of course. What Herenton should have said, I think, is that this is a communitywide problem that is having a greater impact on African-Americans in poorer areas of the city and residents of these areas have to take some ownership in helping to stop the carnage.
As a community, though, we all have to take ownership in reducing the violence. I realize this is hard to do, regardless of ethnicity, for those living in neighborhoods where the serious concern about crime usually arises when there is a sudden spate of home or vehicle burglaries.
It is hard to see having a stake in reducing violent crime if you are not frequently hearing gunshots or driving down streets ravaged by blight.
Every once in a while, though, that violence creeps into neighborhoods, where residents generally react by saying, “This is a quiet neighborhood. You don’t expect anything like this to happen here.”
That reaction is understandable, and that is why it is hard for many folks, who live in nice areas of the city, to feel they have a stake in the violent crime fight. The violence is not directly impacting them.
Herenton also said, “My focus is the plight of the African-American male.” He called for 10,000 black men to intervene, through mentorships, in the lives of troubled African-American boys in Memphis. Why limit it to 10,000 black men? Would not 10,000 men or women, no matter their ethnicity, work just as well? The point of mentorship, after all, is to provide young people, whose life circumstances place them at risk of heading down a wrong life path, with dedicated, principled adult guidance.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders investigate why some of America’s major cities had been wracked by race riots since 1964.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission, as the advisory commission became known, issued its report, which concluded the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, and one white — separate and unequal.”
Unless conditions were remedied, the commission warned, the country faced a “system of apartheid” in its major cities.
The report chastised “white society” for isolating and neglecting African-Americans, and called for legislation to promote racial integration and for the nation, states and cities to make investments in poor neighborhoods that would promote job training, create jobs and provide decent housing. The report also criticized the news media for ignoring the conditions that fed the frustration and anger that ignited the riots.
Forty-nine years later, the media is doing a better job of reporting on issues and conditions affecting AfricanAmericans — although there are some folks who will disagree — and AfricanAmericans have made great strides in being part of the American experience.
Still, far too many family black families are living in poverty in blighted neighborhoods, attending schools that have been failing to adequately educate them. Too many 17- 18- and 19-year-olds are leaving high school unprepared to compete for jobs that pay good wages or to pursue postsecondary degrees or certificates of technology. So they remain unemployed or employed in low-wage jobs.
The result is that there are just too many African-American youths who are poor, angry and bored, and feel that they have little to lose or gain in this society.
In the 1960s, those frustrations exploded in rioting. Today, we see it partly manifested in deadly violence. And, like the riots, black neighborhoods being impacted the most.
Now, however, classism and economics share as much blame as racial inequities for creating and perpetuating the conditions fueling the violence reverberating through these communities.
As a community, we have not totally fixed what Kerner outlined and, as a result, the community is paying a stiff price in violent crime, job recruitment and persistent reports that Memphis is one of the most violent cities in the nation.
That is why the violent crime problem here is a community problem, not just a black problem.
Jerome Wright is editorial page editor for The Commercial Appeal. Contact him at jerome.wright@commercialappeal.com.