THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 5, 1996 TAG: 9601030167
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Ida Kay's Portsmouth
SOURCE: Ida Kay Jordan
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
The focus in the news recently on the high murder rate among black men, and also the comments about revolving doors in the justice system, bring to mind my first awareness of a problem that has gotten worse.
During my college years, in the early '50s, I had a standing summer job at the Daily Advance in Elizabeth City, working on one beat or another as regular reporters took their vacations.
I was still quite naive even though I had been hanging around the newspaper for a long time, starting when I was writing school news for 10 cents an inch. I was so young and innocent that a lawyer who also was our neighbor interrupted one session of court to suggest to the judge that I be asked to leave because of ``explicit'' language he expected in testimony for one of his cases. I was grateful to the judge, who said he would not ask a newspaper reporter to leave the courtroom, because I don't know what I would have done if he had.
Anyway, the very first time I sat through Monday morning court, I came back wondering why ``colored people,'' as Afro-Americans were called back then, could kill each other and get off so easy.
I remember talking to the newspaper editor about my feelings, about the sliding scale of justice for the same crimes: black on white, very serious; white on white, serious; white on black, not so bad; black on black, almost a joke.
To me, the injustice lay in not punishing people for killing or maiming a black person.
It was all taken too lightly, I thought. The testimony in all black cases sometimes brought chuckles through the courtroom as testimony often proceeded in the dialect of the streets.
But that's off the subject. As summer days wore on and I spent more Mondays covering court, I became more agitated by what I saw and heard. Even then there was a problem getting witnesses to testify, and often the police seemed to have done a half-way job of investigating what they seemed to consider just the usual Saturday night activities in the black community.
How, I kept asking my colleagues, could we expect life to get better for ``colored people'' if we continued to treat criminal acts with such derision? It seemed to me that we were acting as if it were OK for blacks to kill and maim each other just as long as they didn't make the mistake of involving a white person.
I believed that every life was valuable, and I kept asking: Why should anybody be allowed to kill another human being without losing something?
It seemed to me that the courts should be sending a stronger message. I wondered why anyone who killed his friend after a night of drinking and gambling (usually the pattern in the court testimony) should be out on the street after a few nights in jail.
Almost a half century ago we were sending a message to young blacks that their lives didn't matter much. It bothered me then. It bothers me more that we still seem to be sending that message.
When I read stories about the high rate of murder among young black men and also about the revolving doors of justice - where people accused, and convicted, of violent crimes seem to go right back on the streets - I think to myself: ``I told you so.''
Sometimes there seems to be a lot of truth in that old saying, ``The more things change, the more they stay the same.''
A lot has changed in the criminal justice system since my early encounters with the then all-white establishment. We now have black judges, black prosecutors, black defense attorneys and black police officers. But somehow we're still sending the same message to young people, although we might be doing it now in the name of justice.
In fact, the attitude of many young black criminals toward human life now seems even worse than it was when I was listening to those Monday court sessions. I still believe it is the message emanating from places like the justice system, whatever the reason, that makes human life so cheap.
I am just as indignant and concerned now as I was all those years ago when I was considered so naive by my colleagues on the newspaper.
When are we going to wake up and make it very clear that when you kill another human being, you pay the price?
Until that becomes a fact of life for children growing up in this crazy world, the massacre of young people will continue. by CNB