“We’re doing this so this never happens again,” he said. I think we need to come together (in) a unified voice and until it happens, nothing will change.”įenger High School, where Albert and his killers had been students, held a peace rally in the cafeteria, attended by Albert’s grandfather. This is about change for all of our communities. “We’ve got to be doing major outreach to parents who need this kind of resource.” The mother of a 13-year-old murdered in February 2007 told the exposition: “The enemy is attacking our young people. “This is how you prevent murders, by empowering parents,” said the Black Star Project’s executive director, as reported in the Chicago Sun-Times. The purpose of the exposition was to link up parents-i.e., single mothers-with social-services and health programs that allegedly would keep their children away from gang life. The studied silence in Chicago about the massive reality that underlies that city’s youth-violence epidemic-black family breakdown-is so complete as to border on perverse.Ĭhicago’s South Side marked the anniversary of Albert’s death with a Parent Resource Exposition, organized by the Black Star Project, a black empowerment group. Since Albert’s death, 78 more youth under the age of 19 have been killed in Chicago, overwhelmingly in black-on-black shootings. Not surprisingly, the federal and local efforts have borne little fruit. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan hurriedly flew to the Windy City promising more federal aid, while the Chicago school system launched a $40-million social-services and security program to connect “at-risk” male students with social workers. The White House was at that moment pushing the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 Games to Chicago, a city intimately associated with the president and his inner circle. The September 24, 2009, mob assault on 16-year-old Derrion Albert was captured on cell-phone video and broadcast around the world, provoking a crisis in the Obama administration. On the one-year anniversary of the beating death of a Chicago teen by his fellow students, Chicago remains in denial about the driving factor behind such mayhem: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. The Daley dynasty in Chicago may be giving way to the Obama-Emanuel political machine, but one thing remains constant in the Windy City: youth violence and a collective refusal to acknowledge its root cause.
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