No more excuses for black crime

ON JULY 5, the

Daily News

published

"A Cry from the Heart"

by Chad Lassiter in response to the 32 shootings in the city on one weekend. The shootings were a result of an ongoing assault on the black community in general and black male youth in particular.

Black-on-black crime is a national problem that goes back for more than a century and has become increasingly more pronounced over the last 60 years.

I'm pleased that the DN published this piece, as well as all the responses on the letters page, and I'm told that the dialogue has continued on Facebook and Twitter over recent weeks.

There have been arguments on the cause and effect of this problem, from post traumatic slave syndrome, Willie Lynch Theory, internal oppression, poverty, normalization, education, nihilism, etc.

This dilemma has been compounded by the continuing protracted struggle between the black middle class and black underclass, as well as what I call the crisis of the Negro intellectual.

While it's important for black intellectuals to help the masses have a historical, cultural and political understanding of conflicting world views, it's equally important that they join the black underclass in their fight to protect themselves, families and communities from all attacks from within and without.

After all of the histrionics, philosophy and culturalization, which black men and women are going to stand up to protect and fight with the community against the violence they face every day?

Historically, there has been Nat Turner, John Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King Jr., to mention a few.

In the 1960s, a few of us spoke out against the Philadelphia Black Mafia for its acts of violence against black communities.

In the 1970s a number of us (former gang members) organized against the gang killings in the city and were able to literally bring the killings to a halt.

In the 1980s, the black community united to fight against police abuse, as it had also in the '50s, '60s and '70s.

In the 1990s, 500 black men and women marched in Grays Ferry against racism.

In 2007, my son was shot by two black men who were trying to rob the 7-Eleven he was managing, and I organized some family and friends from the old Black Bottom, along with a few members of Men United to find the perpetrators.

We printed more 5,000 fliers offering a $5,000 reward and distributed the fliers for four weeks in a five-block radius of where the shooting happened until the killers were flushed out. I wasn't thinking of any "cause and effect" that might have caused their action. I was acting as a father.

This notion that "Black folks shouldn't air their dirty laundry in public" is grounded in "Don't Snitch," both of which keep the underclass unprotected and allow members of the group to prey on other members of the group with impunity.

It is time for the intellectualism to turn to action and join with the black underclass and stop making excuses while waiting or depending on someone else to free us from ourselves - or anyone else, for that matter.