The Desperation and Hopelessness in the American Inner City.

“A young man had been shot at by another teen. He was willing to let it go. Only now he is hanging with buddies who tell him, ‘Man you’re a bitch. You let them pop your ass, and you ain’t did sh— about it.’ They’re harassing him every day, and it’s psychologically destroying him. Now, he’s got to show his friends he’s a man. So one day he gets in the car and goes looking for someone to aggress against so he can come back to his buddies with a story. He sees a group of kids, talking loud. The boy shoots at them, the kids scatter, and now he can go back to his friends and say, ‘We aired them ni--as out.’ But in the process, he accidentally kills an innocent child. That isn’t gang violence. It’s desperation, hopelessness, despair, cultural confusion.” – Essence magazine. July, 2013.

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A Message for Black Leaders.

“I now realize, that we who consider ourselves leaders in the black community can’t just be against racism. We have to also be against a portion of black culture that has become increasingly anti-authority and anti-social to a point of self-destruction. This is an enemy we’ve yet to engage in the black community. But it’s a conversation I think we’re forced to have now.” – As told The New York Times by Brian Willingham, a church pastor and black police officer from Flint, Michigan.

My response: The above message is for Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the other black leaders. It’s high time they began to address some salient issues such as the sky-rocketing number of drop outs among black students, frequent black-on-black crimes, the social malady of “babies” having babies, women having five kids for five different men and the numerous men who are “missing-in-actions” in the lives of their kids.

From Homeless to Harvard: The Story of David Boone.

David Boone was only 14 years old when his family lost their home to gang violence in Cleveland, Ohio. The teenager’s problems arose when he refused to join a gang. In retaliation, their house was riddled with bullets. Consequently, the family split up, causing David to become homeless. Most of the time, he had to sleep in the park but only in the afternoon because it was not safe to do so in the night.

His high school principal, Jeff McClellan, was highly impressed with boy’s constant early arrival in school (he was getting up at 5 a.m.) not knowing that he was homeless. By the time the principal realized the situation, he and his wife resolved to take David in to live with them for over a year. The young man graduated from high school as the salutatorian and was accepted to Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Yale, and University of Pennsylvania among others. He however chose Harvard University on a full scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

David Boone’s life is a classic example of an inspiring “grass to grace” story especially in the black community. In his community, too many young people are lurking in street corners to sell drugs, pimping women or wasting away in jails. Their usual excuses for taking the wrong paths can be as silly as lame and nonsensical. For instance, if the reason alluded to their negative situations in life is not due to the “lack of a father figure” in their lives, it will be because of their skin color or something else that can irritate a sane mind. Yet, in spite of the fact that David Boone could have easily hidden behind similar excuses if he wanted to drop out of school early on or to pursue a criminal enterprise, he worked hard to be where he is today.

When a Laughter Became Very Costly.

What really is this world turning into? A few days ago in Gary, Indiana, a man returned home to discover that the place had been burglarized by some unknown burglar(s). Naturally, he felt violated by the incident. The man was said to be very upset and going on the street, knocking on doors of neighbors to inquire about possible identification of the perpetrators of the crime.

At that moment, a 13-year-old boy named Kobe Jones, who was sitting on a porch, reportedly burst into a raucous laughter as the victim of burglary went about yelling over his loss. And in a violent reaction to the boy’s laughter which he considered very disrespectful, the man reached for his gun and shot the boy nine times. The boy died instantly. The man has since been arrested.

Black America's Invisible Crisis by Lois Beckett.

In America, violent crime is down significantly since 1993, when the nation’s gun homicide rate hit its peak. But there are still neighborhoods in cities like Oakland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey, where shootings are a constant occurrence and where the per capita murder rates are drastically higher than the rest of the country. Some 3,500 American troops were killed during the eight-year war in Iraq. Within the same time period, 3,113 people were killed on the streets of Philadelphia. According to FBI data, between 2002 and 2012 Chicago lost more than 5,000 people to homicide—that’s nearly three times the number of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan…

Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities. They surveyed residents who had been exposed to violence in cities such as Detroit and Baltimore and noticed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, obsessive thoughts, a constant sense of danger. In a series of federally funded studies in Atlanta, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents, most of them African-American. Two thirds of respondents said they had been violently attacked at some point in their lives. Half knew someone who had been murdered. Of the women interviewed, a third had been sexually assaulted. Roughly 30 percent of respondents had had symptoms consistent with PTSD—a rate as high or higher than that of veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.



Experts are only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. Women—who are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—are more likely to show signs of anxiety and depression and to avoid places that remind them of the trauma. In children, PTSD symptoms can sometimes be misdiagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kids with PTSD may compulsively repeat some part of the trauma while playing games or drawing, have trouble in their relationships with family members, and struggle in school. “School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,” says Marleen Wong, Ph.D., the former director of mental health services, crisis intervention, and suicide prevention for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Men with PTSD are more likely to have trouble controlling their anger, and to try to repress their trauma symptoms with alcohol or drugs. Though most people with post-traumatic stress are not violent, PTSD is also associated with an increased risk of aggression and violent behavior, including domestic violence. The Atlanta researchers found that civilians they interviewed who had PTSD were more likely to have been charged with a violent crime and incarcerated than other people of similar backgrounds without PTSD—but the cause and effect behind this wasn’t clear. For some people, PTSD symptoms may have contributed to their involvement in the criminal justice system, while others may have developed PTSD later. “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” the researchers wrote.

Culled from Essence, October, 2014.

 

William S. Scarborough - Too Much Ahead of His Time.

William S. Scarborough was born a slave in Georgia, but went on to become one of the nation’s leading scholars in Greek and Latin literature.

In fact, many consider Scarborough to be the first African-American classical scholar. Born in February 16, 1852, in Macon, Georgia, Scarborough’s father was a freed slave but his mother was still enslaved, thus he inherited her status. Although educating slaves was against the law, Scarborough was secretly taught how to read and write in the classical languages.

He later went on to serve as an apprentice shoemaker, and then worked as a secretary at a well-known Black association because of his studies. Scarborough attended college at Atlanta University before heading to Oberlin where he graduated with honors in 1875.

The following year, he returned to Macon to teach the classical languages at his former high school. Despite his gifts, many were against Scarborough teaching at the school. At the time, both Black and White figures in society believed that the liberal arts were wasted on Black people. Booker T. Washington and other prominent Blacks thought that vocational education was more beneficial to Blacks than learning the classics.

Arsonists set the school where Scarborough worked on fire, and Macon officials allowed it to burn to the ground. After that, Scarborough moved to South Carolina where he encountered even worse treatment and eventually returned to Oberlin.

There, he obtained his Master’s and became a professor at Wilberforce University, then one of the premiere Black colleges. Scarborough published a popular college textbook titled First Lessons In Greek and in 1881, he married Sarah Bierce, a white principal he met while working at the school in Macon.

Scarborough was one of the first Black members to join national academic groups, including the American Philological Association (APA), and was the very first to join the Modern Languages Association (MLA). The MLA has since created a first-book prize bearing Scarborough’s name. While prestigious academic bodies recognized Scarborough, he was constantly bombarded by racism and suffered financially because of it. One of Scarborough’s lowest moments occurred during an APA meeting in Baltimore in 1909.

Archaeologist Francis W. Kelsey rescinded Scarborough’s invitation because the hotel where the event was held would not serve dinner if the Black professor were present. Scarborough remained at Wilberforce until he was appointed to serve in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he worked until his death in 1926.