Baby, it’s murder in Detroit

Press, 4 August 1987, Page 16

Baby, it’s murder in Detroit

Lindsay MacKie,

of the ‘Guardian,’ in the city mnnliinG-nim

of the six-year-old with a suo-macnme-gun

DETROIT IS the city where 365 children under 16 were shot last year. Fortythree of them died. This year the figures are bowling along at much the same rate — 190 children fired on, 19 dead. No other city in the United-' States comes close to this nightmare. To get some idea of Detroit’s present agony it is necessary to define the dead children. They were not victims of child abuse or family madness. They realty were children — ranging in ages from one to' 16 — and of last year’s victims the police have positively stated that only five were involved in drugs. For the rest, they were junior deacons in Baptist churches, clarinet players, choir girls, amateur photographers, weightlifters and members of the Detroit Police Athletic League. If babies, too young for such activities, they are described as Lorenzo Fortner (13 months) who was “always peeking into things like his mother’s purse, to see what things were there.” They were killed in fights over shirts, imagined insults, cat calling at petrol stations, random revenge for being refused entry to parties: they were killed all over Detroit - Detroit is not unused to violent living and dying; Therewere 646'' murders in the city last year and by and large the police department hardly bother to investigate non-fatal shootings. But the spectacle of kids killing kids has transfixed the town.

This is partly due to 36-year-old Clementine Barfield whose 16-year<-old son Derrick was killed in a quarrel with some other teenagers last July. . A finance clerk with the city’s fire department, Mrs Barfield started calling other mothers who had lost children to see if these stricken families could offer each other support

Out of those tearful and terrible phone calls grew an organisation called Sosad, Save Our Sons and Daughters, organised

by the mothers, which started as a support group in January and has widened its scope to campaign for gun control, tougher court sentences and changes in the way people behave in their neighbourhoods. On Saturday, in Detroit’s broiling and empty streets, the mothers marched. It was a largely black march, with a few whites from churches. Groups of nice banner-carrying teenagers were happy to describe shootings. Harvey Allen, aged 16, had a cousin, Charles Elmore, also 16, who was shot to death last summer just passing in the street. And the boys all knew Chester Jackson, “He was shot for being a bully” by Michael Schofield, aged 14. Then there was Calvin Sterling (these stories coming from a group of four boys) who was 16 as well, and selling drugs and refused to sell some to this other boy, and he just shot him and put the body in the garbage dump.

There are thought to be more guns than people (1.2 million) in Detroit There are a number of Uzi sub-machine-guns (a six-year-old got hold of one of these with 27 bullets in it and brought it into school not long ago) but even in Detroit they get written about The most common weapons are 9mm and 357 magnum handguns, powerful weapons which make .38s and .22s look weedy. These killing weapons come into the city with drugs. “The average male in Detroit is very heavily armed” says Gregory Hicks, a vice-president in the city’s Urban League. He doesn’t himself, though he is academic, intellectual, liberal, go along with the Sosad call to ban guns in the state. He believes in the right to bear arms in self-defence. So does Mayor Coleman Young, the black mayor, who has said in the past that he does not see why blacks in Detroit should give up their guns while the white suburbs are armed to the teeth. On Saturday he spoke to the march — a sign that this most canny of city bosses believes that the mothers may be the beginnings of some powerful grass-roots movement — and ignored the issue of guns but did close off the argument that the shootings are in some way excusable because of Detroit’s other nightmares. “I know that crack and heroin and unemployment and helplessness are reasons — but they are not excuses for shooting each other.”

This week Detroit will see a new television series about the 1967 riots in which 43 people died and some SUS6O million worth of devastation was effected. Mayor Young is furious about it, the harking back. “In 1967 we learnt that there is no profit in burning down our own communities.”

Since then Detroit has acquired a police department that is over 50 per cent black, the highest proportion in the United States, a black mayor and a big black middle class that manages much of the car industry at middle ranking level. But it also labours under huge black teenage unemployment, a high school drop-out rate officially put at 41 per cent but unofficially acknowledged to be much higher, a third of the population on some form of public assistance, and — most catastrophic of all — an average family income that, in the heyday of the automobile industry before the oil crisis of 74 was SUS2O,OOO a year, is now around SUSI 1,000. At the Saturday march against the killings the firmest impression was of a terrible confusion among good people about how to be effective against evil. Pastor Milton Henry, minister of a wealthy black Presbyterian parish, former flier out of Tuskedee in the war, veteran of the civil rights movement, mused that a call to civil rights would have filled Woodward Avenue. How to deal with the drug dealers and the killers that were now causing havoc in the black community? "I suppose that in the time of civil rights, those dealers would just have been taken out by the revolutionary guys and shot for what they were doing to their communities.”

Gregory Hicks, whose childhood and teenage was dominated by civil rights, said: “While I was growing up the role model of the pimp was losing ground fast, it was disappearing, and now here it is, back again, the criminal who doesn’t work, who domihates the streets by fear.” Clementine Barfield, one of 13 children from the Missisippi' delta, calm, determined to save

other children from a shooting death. Vera Rucker, whose daughter Melody was shot when a teenage gunman sprayed a crowd of school children with shotgun pellets. Geraldine Ray, whose military cadet son was shot at a party because somebody was angry about something else entirely. Ann Shelton, whose boy died by a bullet, are all spiritual women. They take responsibility on themselves.

Their Ronebed pamphlets and their speeches tell other parents to take action, to get rid of neighbours’ dope houses, to 'maintain good relationships with their children, to “value each other as a precious human being — much more valuable than designer jeans, gold chains and expensive gym shoes.”

The messages that flood into the Sosad office show life in Detroit, and not just in the “worst” areas. How do I get rid of the black dope dealers, asks one woman, my son Is in a bad crowd, says another, how can I get him out? There is crack all around, where to get help, asks ,one. It is women who run Sosad, with help from one or two young men. Fathers are not very visible. “Men. We Need You. You are precious to our children,” . read one placard at the march. In a recent study of young male offenders in Detroit when the question “whom do you admire most,” 90 per cent of the youths named their mother or grandmother. Most never mentioned their fathers, and had no positive male role model.

But the children being killed in Detroit are not all offenders. .Even if they are, a violent death 'is not their just reward. “We are fast becoming a city of victims," Clementine Barfield told the week-end marchers. “It’s time we declared war on drugs and guns. It’s time we took our neighbourhoods back.” But the question how was neither asked nor answered.