Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103030184
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Hairston, 21, was Roanoke's first murder victim of 1991. But his death the night of Feb. 1 was hardly the first of its kind. Two years earlier, high school football star Ronny Grogan died the same way at the same spot, on the same date, at the same hour.
Both murders - and most of the other 26 homicides that happened in the two-year interim - represent a problem that has staggered large urban areas nationwide and has even found its way to smaller cities such as Roanoke:
Blacks killing blacks.
Of 13 homicides in Roanoke in 1990, all of the suspects were black. Twelve of the victims were black; one was Asian.
Of 14 homicides in 1989, all but three of the known or suspected perpetrators were black. Eleven of the victims were black, two were white and one was Asian.
All of the 1990 killings happened in the same general area - a small wedge of inner-city Northwest Roanoke. In 1989, all but four of the killings happened there.
So why do blacks, who make up about a fourth of Roanoke's population, account for nearly all of the city's homicides in the past two years?
Community leaders, law enforcement officials, educators, black businessmen and others say the answer lies in a complex mix of socioeconomic conditions, poverty, demographics, drug abuse and racial discrimination.
Perhaps the most common link in all the killings is drugs, especially crack cocaine. Young black men who live in low-income areas seem most vulnerable to crack's lure of money, power and street prestige.
What they fail to realize - or choose to ignore - is that the crack business is, in the words of one Roanoke judge, "such a damn dangerous occupation."
A third of the murders in the past two years were directly drug-related, city police say. Drug or alcohol use played a role in at least another third of the homicides.
"What crack has done is turn the black community on the black community," said Ivory Morton, a member of a city task force studying race relations.
"We're about to bypass an entire generation of young black kids with this drug problem," said Onzlee Ware, the only black criminal defense lawyer in Roanoke.
"Unless something is done," Ware said, "they're going to be under-educated, they're going to jail, or they're going to die." `Sense of hopelessness'
Poverty, broken homes, poor education and drug abuse are just some of the ingredients that contribute to what many say is a feeling of despair that in turn leads to violence.
"A lot of blacks are feeling this sense of hopelessness," said Evangeline Jeffrey, president of the Roanoke branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Add another factor - racial discrimination in the work place and elsewhere - and the feeling becomes more pronounced among low-income blacks.
"Whether it's real or perceived, blacks generally feel that they are being discriminated against, and that perception takes over their whole lifestyle and leads to a feeling of hopelessness," said Julius Debro, a criminology professor at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta.
Debro conducted a nationwide study of black-on-black crime for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which found that, in 1987, black males aged 15 to 24 were almost eight times more likely to die of homicide than white males in the same age group.
Put another way, said Dr. Kenneth Powell of the CDC, young black males growing up in the nation's most crime-plagued cities are more likely to be killed than a U.S. soldier who served a 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam.
Debro's study found that black-on-black killings account for at least 75 percent of all homicides in large cities such as Atlanta and Washington, D.C. - both of which are about two-thirds black.
Those figures also apply to mid-sized cities such as Roanoke, which have the same basic breeding grounds for high homicide rates - low-income inner-city areas and housing projects.
"The infrastructure does not change," Debro said. "It's just on a smaller scale."
Although Roanoke's murder rate is lower than those of larger cities, its young people are still killing and being killed at an alarming rate:
In the past two years in Roanoke, 11 of the 27 murder victims were in the 15-to-24 age group. Of the people charged, 10 were in the same age category. Of both the suspects and the victims in that age group, all but one were black.
In the slayings of young black men in Roanoke, drugs were far more likely to play a role than in homicides involving people 25 or older.
Why? One reason is that crack dealing has become almost synonymous with gunplay. For many young crack dealers, carrying a gun - the bigger the better - seems to be a status symbol, police say.
"When I was growing up, kids used to look forward to getting their first baseball glove or their first car," said Roanoke police Sgt. A.S. Smith. "Unfortunately, we have too many young people today who are looking forward to that first good gun."
For many young people, selling crack "is what they're seeing as a way out, and it's leading to an early grave," Jeffrey said.
Philip Trompeter, a Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court judge, says many of the youths he sees on drug charges have no prior criminal records, and many are not using the drug - which leads him to believe that selling crack is often viewed solely as a way out of poverty.
"How can you begrudge anyone for making an attempt to climb out of those conditions, even if it is illegal?" he said.
But drugs are by no means the only reason blacks are killing each other, Jeffrey and others say. "As far as blacks going after other blacks, there seems to be less value placed on black life by the judicial system and by society at large," Jeffrey said.
"These blacks feel it's easier to victimize other blacks because the overall system views black life with less esteem."
Of the defendants sentenced in Roanoke Circuit Court for murders that happened in the past two years, two people have received life terms for killing blacks. The average sentence for the rest of the cases involving black victims was 11 years.
The average sentence for people convicted of killing whites during the same period was 40 years.
"We've always said that if you kill another black, you might get two years in prison, but if you kill another white, then you're facing the electric chair," said Lawrence Hamlar, president of the Hamlar-Curtis Funeral Home.
"It's just the way things are perceived, and you almost have to believe it."
To a certain degree, Jeffrey said, the lesser value placed on black life by society can be traced back to the days of slavery, when blacks were viewed as less than human. "It hasn't been completely washed away," she said.
Morton agrees. "It's hard even in 1991 for any black individual to really taste the American dream," he said. "We still have this thought in the back of our minds that we're second-class citizens."
John Canty, a dropout prevention counselor for city schools, says many young blacks feel their chances of getting a good job in Roanoke are severely limited.
For that perception to be reinforced, Canty said, all young blacks need to do is walk the sidewalks of downtown Roanoke. "They don't see too many black role models walking around in suits," he said.
"Blacks know that," Jeffrey said. "They know that if they are going into an interview and all things are even, unless there's a push a fill a minority spot, they're not going to get the job."
After awhile, she said, "It sort of becomes a retarding factor. They won't necessarily go the extra mile because they know that even at the end, there's no rainbow."
Discrimination on the job can even play an indirect role in black-on-black violence, Jeffrey said. For example, if a black feels overpowered at work, he might come home and vent his frustrations on a spouse or family member, someone he has control over.
With so much crime happening in the lower-income areas of the city, it's easy for some residents to begin to accept it as a way of life.
"I'm not saying that they're bad people," Ware said. "But if you see something day in and day out, sooner or later your mind starts to say, `OK, that's the thing to do.' "
Even though most blacks don't turn to crime, they end up turning their backs to it instead of fighting back, Jeffrey said.
"People become sort of resigned," she said. "They just don't react anymore. They feel it's no use in really getting pumped up about it."
\ `Someone's dead'
\ Some say Roanoke's black community is too complacent about crime - whether it's housing project residents numbed into a sense of acceptance by nightly gunfire, or the middle- and upper-class blacks who feel removed from inner-city problems.
"We live in that area, we have murders happen all around us, but we just sort of write them off," Ware said. "It's in the papers, it's in the news, and then it's over.
"I think we're too quick as a community to say it's drug-related and it's out-of-towners. We nix them off as black-on-black crimes and drug-related crimes.
"But it doesn't matter if they were on crack or not - someone's dead."
Although Northwest Roanoke is predominantly black, Ware said, that section of the city has several economic classes that don't seem to pay enough attention to one another.
"If something happens in Lincoln Terrace and someone lives in Wilmont Farms, it doesn't affect them, even though it's still in Northwest," Ware said.
"The people in Wilmont Farms are more concerned about getting a nice park or something, instead of worrying about a 15- or 16-year-old kid who gets killed at Lincoln Terrace."
One reason may be that it's hard for some people to get worked up over a couple of drug dealers shooting at each other.
"Nobody really feels a lot of sympathy for people who are dealing in drugs and get killed, and understandably so, because [dealers] seem to feel that life is cheap and they're preying on people that are worse off than they are," said Hugh Ennis, a federal probation officer.
"So when they're killed, most people don't shed a lot of tears."
Still, efforts are being made to get the community more involved in fighting black-on-black crime.
Jeffrey says the NAACP is planning a series of meetings in the next few months to establish a way for "black people to become a community watch group rather than just a number of neighborhood watch groups."
The Rev. Alfred Prunty, a member of the city Community Relations Task Force, agrees there should be more community-wide concern - and more action. "The thing that disturbs me is that we seem to be accepting it as if nothing can be done," he said.
But unless the community perceives a major crisis, Ware said, it's hard to get people involved.
"Let's face it: It's a black situation," Ware said. "The only way that things are going to change is that if there's a rallying of black people to unite on some of these issues.
"As a black attorney, I often get pushed to spearhead things," he said. "But when you look around, nobody is with you."
\ Wearing blinders
\ Some Northwest Roanoke neighborhoods have high crime rates, but the sources of criminal activity cross all segments of society. That's especially true of the open-air crack markets, where passing motorists are served by what amounts to curbside drug-selling service.
Many of those who buy the drugs - creating the demand that keeps the crack markets in business - are middle- and upper-class whites who quickly return to their homes in other parts of the city or surrounding rural counties.
But when whites drive away from the crack markets, they leave inner-city residents to cope with the festering crime problem.
"A lot of criminals, for the sake of convenience, just don't go outside their own area," Jeffrey said. "So they prey on the folks around them."
Meanwhile, drug users seldom get arrested, and the drug problem is portrayed as a Northwest Roanoke problem.
"Everyone in a five-county area is truly adopting blinders," Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said. "The drug activity that is going on in inner-city Northwest is there because of the demand that is in the surrounding suburban and rural areas.
"If that four-block area relied on itself to sustain the trade, I don't think we would see that kind of activity down there."
Just ask Hamlar. Every day on his way to his Moorman Road funeral home, Hamlar passes hot spots such as the 11th Street area, where whites often come to buy drugs.
"You can see the drugs change hands, black and white, but the whites don't even have to stop their cars," Hamlar said. "They buy the dope and they keep going."
Ennis, the federal probation officer, sometimes watches the crack markets for federal probationers who have been ordered to stay away. He sees the same thing.
He's seen well-groomed business types, who look like they're on their lunch breaks from downtown Roanoke, cruising the open-air crack market at 5th Street and Harrison Avenue at midday.
Canty, who tries as a counselor to steer students away from drugs, says many of the youths he deals with are frustrated that so many blacks are going to jail on dealing charges, while so many users go free.
Regional Drug Prosecutor Jeff Rudd agrees that law enforcement efforts in Roanoke, like other cities, are directed more at sellers than users.
"In theory it's true," he said of Canty's observation. "If you eliminate the demand, the dealers will no longer be selling. But it's a much more complicated equation than that."
Because there are so many users, it isn't practical to expect law enforcement alone to deal with the problem, Rudd said. Better anti-drug education and more treatment alternatives are needed to fully combat the problem, he said.
Still, some blacks are frustrated because the small percentage of law-breakers in the community seem to attract most of the attention.
"I would daresay that 90 percent of the black community is crime-free," Jeffrey said. "But there's a general perception to the contrary because of the high visibility of that 10 percent."
And that can lead to resentment among the law-abiding citizens.
"Two or three incidents do not make all of the people in Northwest hoods or thugs or criminals," Prunty said.
"I don't try to look at this strictly from the standpoint of blacks," he said. "It's offensive to many people because blacks are being singled out as if they were the only thing involved in the problem."
Although societal problems can be used to explain crime in the black community, some say, they shouldn't be used to excuse it.
"Some people don't want to try another way," Ennis said of the defendants he sees in federal court. "But they have to take some responsibility themselves."
Blacks need to stop blaming outside forces, Morton said, and find a solution from within.
"Crack will not defeat us, and the other vices in society will not defeat us," he said. "If we are defeated, it's because we defeated ourselves."
Keywords:
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by CNB