“Today, I am astonished by the number of murders—particularly the killing of the young and innocent—that keep occurring. I am troubled that there is no national sense of urgency, no clarion call and no end in sight.” – John W. Fountain, Chicago Tribune Reporter, in the July 2012 issue of Ebony Magazine.
I know what Fountain was feeling. I’d read about the June murder of Destinee Clemons, a 17-year-old whose only mistake had been sitting on the porch with her family when a bullet found her and erased her life. Destinee’s life was already extraordinary in that she’d beaten the tough odds so many young African-American people have to face and finished high school and was planning to find the means to pursue her goal of being a nurse.
In her high school graduation speech in May, quoted in the Post-Dispatch, she used her struggles to encourage her classmates to never give up on their dreams. “I am a young woman who has had to chase my success,” she said. “There have been many times that I have felt unsuccessful and want to give up. There were times that were stressful , hard and frustrating, but I had to realize that nothing in life comes easy.”
It was an insight that would have served her well in the years ahead, when she would have likely found it necessary to self-motivate when the going got rough. But Destinee would never fulfill her promise. On June 21, shots fired from a passing vehicle took her life, and injured a 5-year-old as well as Destinee’s older sister. Also on the porch was the sisters’ mother, who in seconds lived through every parent’s nightmare and watched her daughter – her youngest child – die on the porch of their home on Plymouth Avenue in University City.
Police found the car the shooters were driving, but not the occupants. No one has any idea why this particular home, with this particular family, was targeted. Destinee Clemons is dead, and no one understands why.
There are too many stories like Destinee’s, and Fountain – who has covered the murders of African-American children for more than 20 years – has witnessed many of them first-hand. Too many young, promising lives have been snuffed out. Too many parents are forced to bury their children. And there’s too much general acceptance that African Americans dying young is one of the realities of our communities.
All murders are painful, but the murder of a child or young person, like Destinee, is even more so. The fact that our best response to these acts of violence and cruelty seem to be studies and community meetings about the problem, or postulating about “what we need to do” versus doing something tangible about the problem, leaves me cold.
I’ve had enough of the justifications. Times are tough, justifiers of black-on-black crime say. Well, they’re not as tough as they were for our ancestors – slaves who knew true struggle – men and women who valued community and the responsibility each member had to support and strengthen it. They never used their struggles to justify turning on one another. They never feared gangs and guns because the community was always bigger and stronger than anything that would attempt to rise up against it.
And, most certainly, they never allowed their very hope for the future – the community’s children and young adults – to be extinguished in a flurry of bullets.
Neither should we.
© PooleProof Communications, LLC 2012
