Black Lives Matter: The Lost Generation
I spent this past weekend in the presence of some of the strongest women I’ve ever met. They were the kind and loving and wise and gave the best hugs, but their spines were tempered steel. That’s a primary effect of having your child murdered by the police and never having the killer brought to justice.
One woman, Brenda, spoke poignantly about her son’s murder back in the early 1990s. She called that generation…my generation (Gen X)…the lost generation because so many black men were either dead or in prison by the time they were 25, her son included. Their absence from society today is a direct result of both the War on Drugs instituted by Nixon and amped up by Reagan, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act pushed by Bill Clinton.
As she spoke, I thought back to my time in Washington, D.C. in the early to mid-1990s. I was a white girl living at First and W, NW and that neighborhood was in no way “gentrified”. For a ten block radius, there was probably only one other white woman who lived there, and we were the “untouchables” for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time. The First Street Crew was heavily into selling crack, and we had a stream of cars from Maryland and other parts of the city coming into our neighborhood day and night to buy and sell. Because Clinton was a Democrat and because WDC is a heavily Democratic city and because many black leaders were calling for help in dealing with the violence and the loss of life, Clinton’s Crime Bill was initially heralded as a good thing within the community. One of the direct results of the “safety initiative” was that the National Guard was regularly deployed to my street corner from about 6pm to 10pm to run their generators and put spotlights on the street. It was a joke because the dealers just waited until the NG had to leave because of the city’s noise ordinance kicking in at 10pm and also because most residents were never in danger from the dealers.
Brenda’s words hit home as I thought about the stupidity of the War on Drugs and the many unintended consequences of being tough on crime, that in retrospect should have been obvious but at the time in communities, which were reeling from violence and death on all sides, seemed like a legitimate respite. Her son and I were peers. He probably would have been a father by now and perhaps would have had grandchildren. His death is an unnecessary and tragic void in the fabric of his family’s life.
The reason I was listening to Brenda is due to a Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati road trip to St. Louis to celebrate what would have been Cary Ball Jr.’s 30th birthday with his family and friends. Brenda is related by marriage to the Ball Family, and she spoke at the welcome dinner as a way to show other grieving mothers that they could find purpose in helping others. While I was impressed and awed by her, it was Cary Ball Jr.’s mother, who blew me away with her strength.
Toni Taylor is tiny, but powerful. Her son’s extrajudicial execution by St. Louis police was a precursor to Mike Brown Jr.’s murder. Cary Ball Jr. was killed on April 24, 2013, after a car chase by police. His hands were in the air. He’d surrendered his gun. Two St. Louis police officers fired at him over thirty times, hitting him twenty-one times with hollow point bullets. There were dozens of witnesses. Some were calling 911 begging to get different police on the scene because the police there were murdering Cary. All the witnesses were traumatized, including many children. One little girl has since been unable to be in the presence of law enforcement officers without urinating on herself.
Ms. Taylor narrates the events of that lead up to her son’s killing as if she’s telling the story for the first time. There’s still wonder in her voice that the officers could have seen her child as such a threat to have unloaded both their clips into her son’s body and then reloaded to shoot him some more while he was already down. She’s also justifiably angry. Her son’s death was wholly unnecessary. The police executed him because they could. After they executed him, they lied about everything that happened and discounted the multiple witness statements. The US Department of Justice sided with the police and neither officer was held accountable for his actions that day.
On the weekend of her son’s 30th birthday, Ms. Taylor hosted several events to honor his memory. One of the things she did for my contingent with Black Lives Matter: Cincinnati was organize a “surprise tour” of St. Louis starting with Ferguson and the places around the execution of Mike Brown, Jr. It was beastly hot and humid that Saturday morning, when we met at the McDonald’s on Florissant where protesters and journalists had gathered to rest during the uprising. We walked next door to the Ferguson Market and saw that the official narrative of Mike Brown abusing the store clerks there was impossible. We drove around the block to Canfield and stopped at the memorial to Mike Brown and then walked further down the road to see where he died. The pavement where his body had lain had been soaked with blood that couldn’t be washed away, and we could see where the county ripped up the asphalt and put down a patch that is about 4’x12’.
Moving on, she took us to the scene of Darren Seals assassination in a quiet apartment complex near the Mississippi River. He’d died with a gunshot wound to the back of his head and then his car had been set on fire. The accelerant used was so strong that it took the fire department four attempts to fully put out the flames. Mr. Seals was one of the six Ferguson Uprising activists to have been murdered since Mike Brown Jr.’s death, and since he’d been a leader in the movement, his killers sent a clear message to all the area activists. The fire from his execution was so strong that part of his vehicle is permanently melted into the pavement of the complex’s parking lot.
We then drove to where her own son was killed closer into to the city of St. Louis. On the corner is a senior living residence and the street is lines with town homes and apartments that all face out onto the scene. She told us about how petty the city of St. Louis had been in regard to her son’s death. Police officers have come to her work to harass her and they’ve also driven by when she’s been working on her son’s memorial and yelled, “Hey, mom!” to antagonize her.
The Balls have used their son’s death as a way to organize the surrounding community. To give back to traumatized residents, they host and annual picnic on the day of his murder and offer free food to anyone, who stops by. They’ve also planted a tree in his name, though unlike Mike Brown Jr. in Ferguson, the city of St. Louis won’t allow the Balls to put up a memorial plaque. The city has also tried numerous times to kill the tree planted for Cary Ball Jr., though residents water it and care for it. The informal memorial on a street lamp to their son has been set on fire multiple times with a powerful accelerant that sent flames halfway up the lamp.
Finally we drove to South St. Louis to the site where VonDerrit Myers, Jr. was murdered. There’s a small memorial, a tree planted at the site, and a plaque in the pavement. Ms. Taylor tells the story of how VonDerrit was killed by an off-duty police officer, who was working as a security guard at a building about five blocks
from the scene. VonDerrit was eighteen when he was killed, and he was his parents’ only child. On his plaque are these words: “Let us be open-hearted and work together to appreciate each other and live in our own good nature.”
As the tour wound down, I thought once again about the Lost Generation. Back in the 1990s, The Washington Post had run a series of articles detailing how teens and young adults were planning their funerals. They would describe what kind of casket they wanted, the type of music to be played, what food they wanted to be served, the flowers they requested for their arrangements. President Bill Clinton invoked the name of eleven year old Jessica Bradford, a young girl mentioned at the beginning of The Washington Post article, in his speech touting the importance of his crime bill. These were my peers, lost.
Later that evening, we all gathered at a Rec Center in Ferguson to celebrate Cary Ball Jr.’s 30th birthday. There was delicious, home-cooked food made by his father, Cary Sr. There was dancing. There was laughter. There was a birthday cake. Cary Ball Jr., at the time of his murder, was an honor student in college and looking to get into social work. He’d never been in trouble with the law. His dreams are now deferred by the grave, though in death we are freely able to celebrate his life. That’s a cruel irony.
The families, who have had loved ones killed by the police, always have a part of themselves missing. These extrajudicial executions are a form of domestic terrorism, and the fact that the killers are never held accountable makes the victims’ families well aware that we all live in a corrupt and unjust system. As you study these cases, you realize how little the state cares about poor people or people, who are black or brown. The state doesn’t care if we live or die, and ideally, it’s to the state’s benefit if some of us are dead and the rest of us are too afraid to speak out.
Which leads me back to Toni Taylor and her incredible strength…she’s not afraid to speak out. As we stood over the pavement where her son’s body had lain, she said with her voice shaking, “There were many other people killed by police before they murdered my son, but no one spoke up. If anyone had spoken up and challenged the system, my son might be alive today.” Those powerful words resonated with me and were the lesson we all needed.
Speak truth to power. Don’t allow the police to tell your loved one’s story; they won’t get it right. More importantly for the rest of us, believe the victims’ families. Believe that their children died unnecessarily and in vain. Believe that the state executed them for no other reason than the fact that they could. And then? Get mad and stay mad. Direct that anger toward the state and hold it there. Let them feel the pain that they’ve caused for us.
