'Coerced Together and Unequal': Eric "My People" Holder Fails to Remember the 1987 (All-Black) Detroit Public School Violence

So we know Eric "My People" Holder, with the consent of President Barack Obama, has just issued guidelines for how to administer discipline in K-12 public schools that amounts to nothing more than a racial quota system.

In Eric "My People" Holder's America, K-12 public schools are nothing more than a case-study in the legal term "Coerced together and unequal" -- the official policy of the education system in Black-Run America (BRA)

Justice is no longer color-blind. 

The almost exclusively black "school to prison" pipeline must be cut-off, for it's producing an overflow of individuals that's overwhelmingly the prison-industrial complex (and irritating those professional members of Organized Blackness who must never, ever allow us to forget America's racist past, for it holds the key to implementing the nation's non-white future).

So why not pull up an incident from 1987 Detroit, a city whose public system was almost exclusively black. It's an incident (the closing of all every school in the Detroit K-12 system for two days) that needs to be brought up in the aftermath of Holder's declaration that we must be vigilant in noticing white and Asian student behaving badly too [Teen-age Gangs Turning Detroit In City Of Terror, Orlando Sentinel, 5-16-1987]:

My friend, who works for the state, commutes to this capital from one of the better sections of Detroit: tree-lined, lovely -- and deceptively dangerous.

He told me about the recent morning he was awakened by the sound of automatic gunfire and went outside (after things quieted down) to see what he could see. What he saw was empty space where his front-door car windows had been. Uzi submachine guns, witnesses told him; and, no, it had nothing to do with him. It just happened that when the gang fight erupted, combatants had used his car for cover, firing through its windows at each other.

``The police came,`` he said, ``but when we mentioned Uzis, they gave us a telephone number and told us to call in a report. The only thing they had was service revolvers, and they had no wish to mix it up with teen-agers armed with Uzis.``

You can`t blame the police for being scared. Everybody in Detroit is scared. The city is going to hell, and nobody seems to have the faintest idea of what to do about it.
City officials suspended classes last Monday and Tuesday and held special assemblies for high school students and their parents. Students are being reminded of the Student Code of Conduct, which says that children won`t bring weapons to school.

Parents are being asked to check their children`s belongings for handguns.

The proposals seem almost ludicrous in view of the city`s crisis. Detroit is in the midst of a reign of terror in which both the perpetrators and the overwhelming majority of the victims are black teen-agers.

The numbers are stunning. So far this year, 102 Detroit youngsters aged 16 or younger have been shot, 10 of them fatally.

Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who said a while ago that he wouldn`t support efforts to disarm Detroiters because the predominantly black city was surrounded by ``hostile suburbs`` whose citizens were armed, is changing his mind. He, too, believes now that something has to be done. But like his fellow Detroiters, he doesn`t know what. The latest outburst, in which a Murray- Wright High School student was killed and two others wounded, prompted State Rep. Alma Stallworth, D-Detroit, to draft emergency legislation giving school boards broad police power to search classrooms for weapons and undertake any procedures which protect the general welfare of students and teachers.

``I`m tired of attending funerals for children,`` she said.

And even her proposal has run into opposition from the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which calls it an infringement of rights and a ``waste of time.``

Howard Simon, executive director of the Michigan ACLU, said school boards already have the authority to conduct ``effective, vigorous searches of students`` to get rid of guns. ``If you lack the willpower to impose punishment on those caught bringing weapons into the schools, you`re just not sending the right message to students,`` he said. ``The Detroit school board has simply refused to impose the punishment that it said it would impose.``

It isn`t clear just what sort of punishment might prove effective. As an official of the the National Urban League said a few months ago, speaking of a similar (though not yet as desperate) problem in Los Angeles, jailings alone won`t do it.

``If that worked,`` said Garry Mendez, ``the black communities would be the safest places in the world.``

He said the black community must undertake to enforce its own sanctions against black-on-black crime. ``We know who violates the rules. Our young people are floundering now, and I think the adult community has let them down.``

Has the school system in your area ever had to shut down for two days so the teachers could (in a non-violent teacher/parent conference) hold assemblies to go over the Student Code of Conduct and plead with their students not to bring weapons to the classroom? 

In an article that did more to illustrate why pre-1954 Brown v. Board of Education America existed, the New York Times did some stellar reporting into the type of culture/climate/environment black students created in the once promising Detroit Public School system. Albeit a public school system that once considered black students separate (but unequal), this article from 1987 is a powerful tribute to why racial segregation of public school students once was state policy. [DETROIT CRIME FEEDS ON ITSELF AND YOUTH, 4-19-1987]:

Shootings are so commonplace that they are the subject of local songs and school essay contests. On the average, a child was shot every day in 1986. But if residents were becoming anesthetized to such violence, a killing at a high school in the middle of Holy Week has once again awakened them.

The city canceled classes Monday and today to hold assemblies on youth violence. And some residents, especially inner-city blacks who are most likely to be victims of crime, are urging hard-line strategies, like resurrecting old-fashioned reform schools and the death penalty, and a return to school prayer. 

Chased Through the Halls 

Just before spring break on April 16, a 14-year-old student firing a .357 magnum pistol chased a star football player through the halls of Murray-Wright High School, past the gymnasium and physics laboratory, as others looked on, helpless and in horror. The football player, Chester Jackson Jr., was killed by a bullet to the head. Two other students were wounded.

Why this seemingly motiveless shooting has infuriated Detroiters, who live with a nation-leading homicide rate of 58 for every 100,000 residents, triple that of New York, is not entirely clear. But among other reactions to the killing of the 17-year-old athlete, parents are demanding metal detectors and searches for weapons in the schools.

Seeing other people break the law is disinhibiting,'' said Robert Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, co-author of the book ''Crime and Human Nature.''

Moral Development Can Lag

Teen-agers, whose moral development lags behind their physical and psychological maturity, are vulnerable. ''They are the people closest to the edge, particularly when they have shallow emotional attachments to people and society,'' Professor Herrnstein said.

Such anger is contagious, he said, adding, ''People who would have broken the law trivially are breaking the law seriously, as the whole population is being pushed toward lawlessness.''

Detroit stands apart in the frequency of shootings involving youths - overwhelmingly, poor inner-city black males - in apparently unprovoked attacks.

Florist Sees Grim Trend
 

Emergency room physicians say they cannot take all the gunshot victims on the busiest nights, and some high school teachers say they are afraid to go to work.

''Sometimes, it seems all I do is children's funerals,'' said a florist, Denise Robinson.

''I stand over the coffin, decorating the room and I think to myself, 'Please don't let it be me or my child.' ''

Violent crime has mocked efforts to contain it. There is a new mandatory jail sentence for gun violations, and the city has imposed curfews for teen-agers. Red ribbons are tied around tree trunks and lamp posts in symbolic pleas for an end to the bloodshed.
Homicides rose nearly 20 percent over all in the first quarter of this year, to 168, as against 142 in the first three months of 1986. For all of 1986, there were 646 victims.

Shot While Sitting in a Car

There were 43 children under the age of 17 killed last year. Clementine Barfield's son, Derick, was one of them. The 16-year-old was shot while sitting in a car at a gas station. A 19-year-old was found guilty of using a firearm in a felony and sentenced to three years in prison.

For Mrs. Barfield, teen-age murders became an obsession. ''I started hunting down other mothers whose children had been killed,'' she said. ''I called funeral homes and asked if they got a certain child's body. Sometimes I wouldn't even have a name, just a corner where the body was found.''

Now she calls the morgue twice a week to see if there is a new victim and attends wakes to console the families. Last January she and several other mothers started a support group, Save Our Sons and Daughters, the local equivalent of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, for mothers whose children have been shot.

The group has a 24-hour hot line for words of encouragement. Group members attend the almost weekly trials of people accused of killing teen-agers, and they hold meetings, often interrupted by uncontrollable tears. New Wounds and Old Wounds Kay Streeter's 15-year-old son, Andre, was killed last September, and there are no suspects. She and her 17-year-old son live in terror. ''He's afraid he'll come home one day, and I'll be in a closet dead,'' she said.

At Detroit Receiving Hospital, the city's main emergency center, it is not unusual for 16-year-olds to come in with fresh gunshots to the neck and old wounds in the stomach.

''We're seeing more assaults and more homicides over trivial arguments,'' said Dr. Cynthia Shelby-Lane, an emergency room physician at Detroit Receiving. ''I call it the knife-and-gun club.''

 Not 33 years after the Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision, the Detroit Public School system had reverted to something far more macabre than just "regression to the mean."

Prayer in school couldn't save these students (it wasn't implemented anyways).

Metal detectors couldn't save these students (they were implemented, and the Detroit Public School system is still hell on earth).

Reform and harsher penalties for those violating the Student Code of Conduct (cancelling classes and trying to teach white morality to an almost entirely black student body in assemblies) didn't save these students, and can't save these students for daring to notice that black students misbehave at a disproportionate rate is what caused Eric "My People" Holder to demand a racial quota system in discipline to begin with!

"Separate but equal," has become, "Coerced together and unequal."

Desegregation is mandated as official education policy (with forced busing a form of biological warfare on otherwise safe school environments), though the appearance of any patterns that might be considered grounds for a disparate impact suit calls for an addendum to this state policy.