By Mansfield Frazier
On Tuesday, July 1, WUAB (Channel 19 & 43) hosted a Town Hall session entitled “Take Back Our Streets” in response to the increase in gun violence in Cleveland and the surrounding inner-ring suburbs. The live-broadcast, two-hour event was hosted at the Boys & Girls Club on Broadway and was attended by approximately three-dozen invited citizens, and featured panelists and moderators.
As to be somewhat anticipated, many of the citizens in attendance saw solutions to the violence we’re witnessing in terms of the field they operate in, not in terms of what’s actually happening out on the mean streets: Members of the clergy suggested prayer would work to ameliorate the problem, while community organizers put forth ideas of strengthening neighborhoods to provide a stronger social safety net, while law enforcement types (which included a couple of elected officials) tended to favor more and stronger enforcement as the answer.
In other words, solutions were viewed through the prism of the individual putting it forth, in spite of the fact some of their solutions have little — if any — chance of impacting the madness plaguing our neighborhoods. By way of example, prayer only works for those who are already religious; those perpetrating the violence in our communities don’t pray, and if they did, it would only be to Beelzebub.
However, there are some individuals and organizations operating at the grassroots that have a keen understanding of the problems and are attempting to implement real solutions. Former football great Reggie Rucker, who works tirelessly as the head of the Peace Keepers Alliance, engages directly with those youth who, absent his intervention, would be at risk of becoming violent gang members. Nonetheless, he struggles for funding. Why he — and others like him — can’t gain financial support to carry out their important work borders on the criminal … it’s actually mind-boggling.
Ironically (or, perhaps not so ironically) one of the moderators, Romona Robinson, got closer to the real long-term solution than anyone else when she stated that far too many young parents simply don’t know how to raise children. This is a position I’ve been espousing for years, even before I knew of Geoffrey Canada’s splendid work at the Harlem Children’s Zone, where they take young mothers (and fathers too) by the hand and show them the proper way to raise a child … and it’s been working in a spectacular fashion for over 20 years now. If we start a child off on the right foot at the beginning of life, rarely do we have serious problems to attempt to fix later.
Nonetheless, hers is a long-term solution; the question on the minds of the attendees (and the audience tuning in) was, what do we do, right here and now, to stem the bloodshed? The answer of course is … there is no good answer. There are no short-term quick fixes and to mindlessly pursue such instant answers only subsumes — diverts — our efforts in terms of identifying real solutions.
But know this … whether we blacks like it or not, whether it’s fair or not, the eventual solutions will have to come from our community … in spite of the fact the problem is not of our own making. We didn’t put ourselves in this hole we have to dig ourselves out of … centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, and years of untrammeled racism are what created this violent underclass within the black community, and, since we know it best, since it impacts us most, the solutions will have to be of our own making. I’ll be putting forth a number of potential solutions in future columns.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.