Body Counts, ‘Walk-Ups’ and
the National Rifle Association
By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, April 12, 2000)
Every generation, it appears, makes a contribution to the national vocabulary with a word or phrase aptly appropriate to its time. Those my age, for example, born during or immediately following World War II, were dubbed the “War Babies.” The 1960s saw at least two terms originated by my generation that became part of the national vocabulary.
The first of these -- “Make Love, Not War” – spoke to the spirit of those years: Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, Janis Joplin accompanied by Big Brother and the Holding Company, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District – itself a metaphor for the drug culture of the times with Sergeant Sunshine – the Flower Children, Watts Summer Festival and Wattstax, Woodstock, George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic and, of course, the Beatles.
We had Vietnam going on; America’s undeclared “Police Action” in Southeast Asia. Before it was over, ‘Nam would claim the lives of 58,000 American troops while providing our country with its first real “defeat” overseas. It was Vietnam that inspired the term used each night by newscasters when reporting the number of Americans and “VC,” or Viet Cong, killed in action that day: bodycount.
The fact is that even while Dr. King and a host of Civil Rights demonstrators marched, sat-in, protested, rode Freedom buses throughout the Deep South, bared their heads for that “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama while singing “We Shall Overcome,” the Movement had to compete for space on the evening news where the “Bodycount” for that particular day was concerned. The competition was with the grisly, black-and-white action footage from the jungles and rice paddies of ‘Nam showing Tomahawk helicopters moving in to evacuate our soldiers while B-52s conducted pattern bombings that seemed to crater miles upon miles of land with no results.
We watched this, all of us, we watched what was happening in the American South and what was happening overseas in a nation none of us had ever heard of while knowing that somehow, someway, the world as we knew it was never going to be the same again. I was a student during the Sixties attending beautiful Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, several hundreds miles to the north of Los Angeles and the community of Watts that I grew up in during my adolescent and teenaged years.
Like so many of us across the country, I was swept up in the political events of the day. I was a founding member of Stanford’s Black Student Union, not so very far away from San Francisco State where Jimmy Garrett, Leroy Goodwin and a number of other African American students captured the nation’s attention in their confrontations with President S.I. Hayakawa and the shutdown of that campus.
San
Francisco State Gives Birth to 1st Black Studies Department
It wasn’t easy, what Jimmy (a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School in Southcentral Los Angeles and today an attorney) and his friends did at that time. To shut down San Francisco State meant taking on the colorful, outspoken Hayakawa who would later move on to become a State Senator. When the BSU-led student strike was over, they had succeeded in bringing the nation’s first Black Studies Department into existence. The Department was headed by sociologist Nathan Hare (The Black Anglo-Saxons).
The actions of these black students drew national and international headlines. More than that, their deeds drew the attention of then-Governor Ronald Reagan who sent in the National Guard which surrounded the campus and its Administration Building. The black students were slowly joined by members of the Chicano community (later to be known as MECHA) along with the white-dominated Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was an action that would be repeated across the country, with Stanford being one of the few campuses not to have National Guardsmen occupying its campus.
“Without
Struggle, There Is No Progress!”
At what was then called San Fernando Valley State College, the black students had taken then-President James Cleary hostage in the Administration Building where they were soon joined by the Chicano students. Again, the National Guard swept down on the campus followed by print and electronic media. Out of the actions taking place at SF Valley – today called California State University, Northridge – came Southern California’s first Black Studies Department. But that birth came at a heavy price as these students did jail time. Many lost their chance at a college degree in this struggle to establish a minority presence and right to representation in higher education as they provided that “Without struggle, there is no progress.”
For all of this activity, it remained for that generation of the 1970s – this being the “Disco Era” of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor – to make their contribution to the national vocabulary. That contribution was a term no generation before this one knew of nor had heard expressed – and that includes the BeBoppers of the 1940s. This was a concept that proved very specific to the events taking place in the urban areas, what the late African American writer Jimmy Baldwin called “the cities of destruction.”
The term was a deadly as it sounded: drive-by.
Drive-by spoke to the “undeclared war” taking place within the inner cities amongst African American youth. This was a war that began in Southcentral Los Angeles and then spread across the country, to places as far removed as New Orleans, Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Bronx in New York. Listen to the words from one of the “soldiers” in this war, Sanyika Shakur:
A Street
Soldier’s Account of the Undeclared War
“On April 29, 1992, the world witnessed the eruption of South Central Los Angeles, the concrete jungle-battlefield of the Crips and Bloods. The scar of over twenty years that had been tucked out of sight and passed off as ‘just another ghetto problem’ burst its suture and spewed blood all across the stomach of America. People watched in amazement as ‘gang members,’ soldiers of the Crip army, pelted cars with rocks, sticks, and bottles, eventually pulling civilians from their vehicles and beating them.
“This was hours after they had routed a contingent of LAPD officers. Troop movement escalated, and Los Angeles was set ablaze. All this began on Florence and Normandie in South Central, the latest Third World battlefield.” (Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, iii)
It was a war that in 1996, for example, found 1,300 lives taken on the streets of Los Angeles with all of these victims of street gang warfare being fought over colors and turf (but nobody, of course, owned any of the motels, apartment buildings, homes or businesses, like the liquor stores clustered in Southcentral LA, more to be found there than in the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined!).
I was in my 12th year of teaching at Cal State Northridge in 1996. I related what those 1,300 murders meant to the students then enrolled in the PAS 300 “Contemporary Issues in the African American Community” class I was teaching that Fall semester. I commented that every 11 hours and 51 minutes, someone was slain on the streets of Los Angeles by a so-called gang member. I made note that those whose lives were taken ranged in age from the unborn in an expectant mother’s stomach with the lives of both mother and fetus taken by an errant bullet (seems the gang members never hit their intended targets!) to a 71-year-old man waiting at a bus stop for a ride home from the Senior Citizens Center he had gone to for a hot meal.
Drive-by. With all that has taken place in Los Angeles of late -- and this includes the rightfully deserved attention now being given to the LAPD Rampart Division Corruption Scandal as well as the foul practice of racial profiling – the term drive-by seems to have fallen out of public view. On the surface, you and I might ordinarily breathe sighs of relief while saying, “Well, that’s great! Maybe these people have finally started to get the message straight. Maybe they’ve stopped the violence? Maybe they really have stopped killing one another!”
But then, some strange occurrences happened in the last week or so when this column was first written (sic, April 5-10, 2000) that I had to report on. The first looked at the $500,000 “contribution” made by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to the Republican Party for this year’s Presidential campaign. That money, plain and simple, is a buy-off of the Republican Presidential candidate to oppose any laws or efforts that would control the proliferation of guns in our society. It must be mentioned that in all previous campaigns, the NRA has made its cash contributions of much-coveted “soft money” to local and congressional candidates. No effort has ever been made, at least to my knowledge, to “buy” the Presidency of the United States. Again, the words of Sanyika Shakur resonate:
“I’ve found that unless you have children you’ll never know what it’s like to lose a child. I’d had to open my eyes and ears to hear the sounds of clips being pushed in and weapons being cocked, screeching car tires, running feet, the hunted and the hunters, the sudden blasts of gunfire; to see the twisted, lifeless bodies, the wounded still trying to crawl or run, the yellow homicide tape being strung, the tears over a family’s lack of funds for a proper burial, the drugs, the alcohol, the angry faces – this process, the way of life for so many, repeated itself over and over. Two sides, each violently throwing itself against the other. These are the scenes that contributed to my awareness: a firsthand knowledge of life and death on the front lines of all-out war. (376).”
The second occurrence made headlines in last week’s WAVE: ‘Walk-Up’ Shootings Escalate! The headline related to how a 16-year-old was the victim on March 29th of a “walk-up” shooting on the corner of 54th Street and Fourth Avenue in Southcentral Los Angeles. This youth was waiting in his older brother’s car along with his 9-year-old brother. The oldest brother was in a liquor store talking to a childhood friend.
As recalled by Keith Morris, the victim’s father, “My youngest, who was sitting in the back seat, is pretty shook up. He watched as one of the suspects put the gun to his brother’s head. He watched the shooting take place. He said that the suspect tried to shoot at him as well, but that the gun ran out of bullets.”
Sgt. Moe Batts of the LAPD’s 77th Street Precinct, itself now part of the expanding Corruption Scandal within the department, said that “walk-ups have increased.” He commented, “The numbers are small (in walk-ups), but we have seen a decrease in dive-bys. Now, we’re seeing more and more walk-ups.”
Item: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, law enforcement agencies arrested approximately 2.8 million juveniles in 197. Of that number, 2,500 were arrested for murder and 121,000 for other violent crimes. That year, juveniles accounted for 14 percent of murder arrests and 17 percent of all violent crime arrests.
Item: In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary prepared by the Majority Staff, a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – the same agency that tracks flu outbreaks and the AIDS Pandemic – showed that 18 percent of all high school students now carry a knife, razor, firearm, or other weapon on a regular basis, and nine percent of them take a weapon to school.
From bodycount to drive-by to walk-up, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in a gang or not. You’re the victim, the prey. Yes, there are some very real internal problems that plague our police department. Yes, here is a definite design to put pressure on the governor (i.e., Gray Davis) to sign into law State Senator Kevin Murray’s bill on racial profiling.
But no, we don’t need the NRA attempting to “buy” the next President of the United States before he ever steps into the Oval Office – especially where “buying” the White House equates to thousands of more innocent lives being lost on our streets for these next four years.
(This article was edited and revised from the original version published by the WAVE. It includes websites that have been embedded by the author to provide readers with additional, current information and data – JS)
