Face To Face Times May Have Changed Since Jim Crow, But The Fear A Black Mother Faces Every Day Hasn’t
How did my grandmothers feel, I used to wonder, bearing eight boys in the Jim Crow South when a black male child’s social birthright was condemnation and vilification?
I used to wonder what they and the old black mothers before them thought, watching their beloved little boys running off to the fields or to town, and knowing that beyond every bend they could meet with unprovoked violence and horror.
These days I know.
I am the mother of two boys and I have the fear, the soul-saddening ache that comes with realizing that my precious angel babies are at serious risk of harm and death in the United States. It was the fear of the slave mother and the sharecropper’s wife. And now it is mine.
Looking at their small oval faces, with the wide eyes fanned by long, curly lashes, and the hennaed, still baby-soft skin, I hardly can fathom the truth: Because of their race, because of their gender, my little boys are at risk.
They’re at risk of being beaten by cops who act first and ask for identification later; of being run down in traffic trying to flee a mob in a white suburb; of being shot point-blank, stripped of their belongings and left to die, victims of some impulsive adolescent act.
These are the kinds of things that have happened - and are happening - to young African-American males. If you’re the mother of a black boy, you know the fear.
To be sure, many of the problems my sons Cam, 10, and Chris, 7, will confront because of their race and gender are less deadly.
A teacher may expect less and not challenge them more. Taxi drivers likely will ignore their hail, given that they already wear baggy pants and baseball caps turned backward. Some women may clutch their purses when my boys stride by. A shop owner could refuse them entry when they try to apply for a summer job.
None of the bigots will know them as the wonderful individuals they are.
My boys are happy, normal kids, but they also know how to dodge a bullet.
It happened in the alley behind their grandmother’s house in Washington, D.C., the same place their father Michael grew up building soapbox cars out of junk and occasionally settling disagreements with neighborhood guys in fistfights.
Those were days, in the 1960s, when the loser in a serious row got a good butt-kicking - but made it back outside the next day.
Three years ago, when Cam was in second grade and Chris still in preschool, they scrambled to the ground during a random spray of gunfire in the alley, creeping behind a parked car and running in the house when it was over.
Not long ago, when we heard the popping sound of automatic weapons around the corner from the alley, they froze.
“Was that real?” Chris squeaked.
In good weather, Cam and Chris are in the alley when I pick them up after work. I’m reminded of my fear when I see the idle young men, as I drive over, in expensive Jeeps and cars.
Last summer, playing basketball on an isolated court just south of the U.S. Capitol, two young men who drove up in a car asked Cam and Chris - the only ones on the court - to shoot their ball. They did, and the men sat down to watch the Latimer boys go one-on-one.
Within minutes, police vehicles surrounded the court. The two men were handcuffed and taken away.
Chris and Cam’s casual, nonchalant telling of the tale chilled me, even though the incident pales in comparison to the shooting at a public pool in D.C. that injured six children the summer before.
And it’s trivia compared to the bloodied scene at a local high school last January where a 16-year-old boy was fatally shot in the back three times in an argument over a girl.
By today’s standards, my family is remarkable in its normalcy, its lack of pathology. The boys were born healthy and wanted, have a strong father in the home who devotes much of his time to them. They go to Sunday school and sing in the youth choir at the church I grew up in, and live in a black neighborhood with a low crime rate.
They want for little, except, most recently, a cat.
In 1909, when my grandmother was starting her family, a black mother’s fears were woefully well-founded.
“One of the biggest fears, I think, was that black boys would get in trouble,” my paternal Aunt Margaret says, recalling the concerns of the parents who reared her and 13 siblings on a farm outside Courtland, Va.
They lived not far from Nat Turner’s slave uprising and the site of at least one lynching when my father and his siblings were little.
The 1960s and ‘70s in the nation’s capital where my mother started her family was less treacherous for black boys.
In our working-class neighborhood, where we safely left the door unlocked at night, my mother’s major fear for her only son was mostly about drinking and being in cars.
My brother made it through to young adulthood without involving the police or emergency rooms. But my mother insists even now, “Black boys - the police will always pull over a car full of black boys.”
Today hate crimes, drinking and driving and police brutality continue. The homicide rate for black teenage boys, age 15 to 19, tripled between 1985 and 1991, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which attributes virtually all of the increase in death to guns.
Black youngsters accounted for nearly 60 percent of the youths arrested for murder in 1992. A survey at 10 inner-city public high schools by the National Institutes of Justice, released in early 1995, showed that one in five students had been shot at, stabbed or otherwise injured at school or en route.
Every day in America, 15 children of all colors die from guns, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. And the arrest rate for white youths on murder charges has skyrocketed 204 percent since 1970, compared with 72 percent for blacks. White mothers have their worries too.
Much of the violence is clearly the result of poverty, crack cocaine and big drug money, the easy availability of guns and seemingly nonstop violence in the media and some homes. Some say the latest threats are the result of teenage mothers and many absent fathers, and a society that no longer sets high moral standards.
Also to blame is the lack of self-worth in young people when all those factors come into play with a lack of academic skills, jobs and dreams for the future. If we accept these as the causes of today’s youthful chaos, we should be bracing for a tidal wave of it.
The number of school-age children is about 25 percent higher than in the 1980s, partly the result of a baby boom among recent immigrants. This larger group of children, many with more access to guns than books, will hit the troublesome teen years by 2005 around the same time my son Chris will.
We all should be moving to act on behalf of these youngsters, because it is right to do so and because all of our children’s lives are intertwined.
MEMO: Leah Y. Latimer is senior editor of Emerge Magazine and a former Washington Post editor and reporter.