Black community speaking out against black on black violence

Houston Chronicle:

LaTia Addison watches with knowing eyes as police cars race down Scott Street, sirens shrieking. She feels the menace in her gut when she spies idle teens trading insults or blows. Addison, now 41, once was a gangbanger and she knows the ways of violence and death.

Violence has cut a swath of sorrow through Houston's gritty Sunnyside neighborhood.

Charles White, long active in helping troubled kids, mourns the death of his own son, Jarius Elon White, 21, gunned down in a pool room parking lot in August. Neighborhood mortician Ed Grimes shakes his head in puzzlement and dismay. In less than a month late last year he conducted services for two young adults, a man and a woman, who came to untimely, violent ends.

On Tuesday, a delegation of African-American clergymen, representatives of the 300-member Houston Ministers Against Crime, met in Sunnyside to demand that city officials create an expert panel to address escalating violence among black youth.

Their request came one day after Police Chief Harold Hurtt's call for churches, schools, businesses and others to join his department in finding ways to battle bloodshed at the hands of young African-American males. A recent study found Houston at the top of a list of 28 major cities in at least one measure of youth violence.

"We're going to scream this from the roof," said the Rev. Robert Jefferson in calling for creation of a violence commission. "We're tired of black-on-black violence."

Jefferson, a ministers' group official and pastor of Cullen Missionary Baptist Church, said he all too often is called to officiate at the funerals for victims of violence. The case of one young victim troubles his mind.

"He looked beautiful," Jefferson said. "He looked like the picture of health ... intelligent. He was lying there dead because he and another boy got into a squabble."

"We're crying for help from our elected officials," the Rev. James Nash said inside Sunnyside's Marcie L. Keys Activity Center. "It's time for African-Americans to step up to the plate as well, to monitor youths ourselves, to hold parents accountable. But we cannot do it by ourselves."

...

I am glad to see some people are finally speaking out on an issue I have been commenting on for years. One of the reasons this problem has reached epidemic proportions is the culture in the black community that was hostile to the police and looked at them as the enemy.

Part of that culture was the attitude of hostility toward those who cooperated with the police calling them snitches and ostracizing them. That has to change and these ministers should have the moral authority to get the community to change.

People have the choice between tolerating murder or tolerating locking up the killers and thieves. The more of them who are locked up the fewer murders and crimes will take place.