(Marie Johnson; Former Staff Writer of The South Street Journal News and Black Wall Street-Chicago)

Chicago - There is no way to turn your head or cover your ears regarding the unneccessay violent epidemic being waged against our children by our children. Teen violence and murders have been reported by various newspapers across the nation; one independent of another, however right now in Chicago Illinois within our communities, our schools, our backyards; children are slaughtered regularly and fear for their lives.
Danielle Jones of Chicago’s southside stated that she would rather stand on the street in the pouring rain and wait for her father, rather than take a bus or walk home, because she fears a fight may break out after school, even tough it began during school hours. In the month of August and September 2009; teen violence in Chicago has claimed five teens; three were public school students. And if we are to look back on previous years as an indication; we can predict dozens more will die. As for the Police Department or Fenger High School officials; who are well aware of the tension and unrest in the school, have been able to do nothing that will quell this rise.

CBS found that 58 school students were killed in a 17-month period.
The CBS story stated:
Public school students in Chicago aren’t as worried about making the grade as they are about making it home alive …
“You can’t go nowhere without being shot,” said Juston Gant. “It’s crazy.”
Since September (of 2007), 24 students have been murdered, most of them shot.
The dead amount to a classroom of kids. Among them, 10-year-old Arthur Jones, who was on his way to buy candy when he got caught in gang crossfire. As did 15-year-old Miguel Pedro, who went out for ice cream and never came back.

Deceased Fenger High School student, 16-year-old Derrion Albert, whose after school death was captured on a cell phone video, should never have happened.
First-degree murder charges were dropped against one of the four teens accused in this brutal beating of a Chicago honor student. Eugene Bailey, 18, was arrested Sept. 26, two days after 16-year-old Derrion Albert was killed after classes during a fight at Fenger High School on the city’s South Side.
Prosecutors dropped the charge against Eugene Bailey, with a light explanation:
“While the charge against Bailey was brought in good faith based on witness accounts and identifications, additional information has developed during the ongoing investigation that warranted dismissal”.

However in the aftermath, teens are anxious to speak out about what they witness and endure on a daily basis.
"People fight everywhere – in front of the lunchroom, outside of school," said Jones, 15. "It's terrible, and nobody's doing anything to stop it."
Some Activists say that violence among Chicago teens may be an ambitious plan to improve education, where rival gangs are thrown together in an often-volatile daily mix.

Derrion Albert’s death and footage of the beating attracted attention of The Obama Administration, who sent Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Chicago to meet with Fenger students, parents and administrators. However Mayor Daley was at this particular meeting and it was not at Fenger High School, but at a safe secure downtown facility. The meeting served no solutional purpose. Perhaps the children would feel a little secured if these dignitaries had met at “Troubled Fenger High School”. Were the people sent to evaluate the problem, afraid themselves? Perhaps these students would have felt assured that there was going to be something “Really” done about this epidemic of self inflicted genocide that plagues them. Perhaps teens would not have walked away feeling that the- powers -that- be, are doing it again...talking a good game with no substance behind their words!

The comparative figures indicating murder of black teens between the periods 2000-01 and 2006-07 show that the numbers have risen by an alarming 39 percent. The cases of homicides that involved African-American teenagers have increased from 666 to 927 during the seven year period; while the overall number of homicides rose only by 7.4 percent.

A study, conducted by criminal-justice professors at Northeastern University, Boston, reveals that the more than five times increase in the killings of black teenagers resulted primarily due to cuts in funds for law enforcement programs and activities geared toward youth.
James Alan Fox, a Northeastern criminologist, who is the co-author of the study, said: "Although the overall rate of homicide in the United States remains relatively low, the landscape is quite different for countless Americans living, and some dying, in violence-infested neighborhoods."
What is more startling is the fact that a large proportion of the killings are black-on-black crime. Many criminologists, who have debated on the reasons underlying high rates of violence in black communities, say that such crimes result from migration of prison culture, with large numbers of imprisoned young men coming back to their communities.
With the incoming administration of the President-elect Barack Obama, who will be the nation's first black president, Fox opines that there could be a chance of increase in law-enforcement funding. Fox said it is of utmost importance that should be reinvestment in children and families, and added: "In essence, we need a bailout for kids at risk."

"The number of children who are dying here in the city of Chicago is astronomical," says Black Star's director Phillip Jackson, quoting the figure of 605 children shot – wounded or killed – in the city over the last year and a half. "Stop and think about it: these are children! This is a catastrophe. And it's happening right in front of our eyes."
By his reckoning, some 13 soldiers from the city have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of children lost to violence in the city during the same period is 290.
These are war zone numbers. People are being killed, one by one by one. Children are traumatized, living in fear. Yet, we are growing immune to this level of slaughter."
Seventeen teenagers are crammed into a room. The air is stale and hot. A fan whirrs overhead, pushing the air around like a food mixer stirring dough. The room is dark, illuminated by a single lamp that casts an orange glow. It's broad daylight outside, but the teenagers sweat it out indoors. It's safer that way.
"They call us the lost generation," Aisha Latiker, 18, says. "It's depressing because by the time I'm 30 there are going to be no men to take care of me – they will either be in jail or dead."
"Most people are scared of summer. It used to be 'Yeah! The summer's here we're gonna have so much fun!' We'd go to the pool, have water fights. Now it's 'Oh my God the summer's here,' because there's so much killing and shooting. When it gets hot, the gangbangers want to come out."

I ask for a show of hands around the room. How many of you have been involved in, or been close to, a shooting? The group shuffles a bit, then the hands start going up until there are 17 raised in the air. If you know anybody who has been shot, put your hands up. They go up, all of them. If you know of anyone who has been killed. Seventeen hands, pointing at the whirring fan.
Four of the 17 have themselves been shot. At the end of the group is Defrantz Harrison, sitting in a wheelchair. He was 19 last August when he had "an altercation" with some other teenagers who lived about four blocks from him. One Friday night he drove to the local store to buy crisps and cigarettes. Another car drove alongside. Suddenly, he felt as though he had "zoned out". His body felt loose. He had a piercing pain in his head, put his hand on his scalp to see if there was blood and was surprised to find none. He tried to get out of the car but his feet wouldn't move. He grabbed his legs but he couldn't feel them. The bullet had entered under his shoulder blade and cracked his spine. He is paralysed from the waist down. I ask him what he'd say if he came face-to-face with the people who deprived him of the ability to walk. "I don't know if I have the words. There don't be no words," he replies.

Harrison and all the other teenagers are here because of Aisha Latiker's mother, Diane. In 2003, when her daughter was 13, she decided to do something about the lack of amenities for kids. So she turned her house into an impromptu youth centre where Aisha and her friends could meet, play music and keep off the streets. She called it Kids off the Block, or KOB.
"I had no idea what was going on," Latiker says. "I just wanted to help kids on my block. But then I started hearing about the gangs and the deaths and the friends being lost. It was crazy."

Two summers ago, Blair Holt, a 16-year-old who lived about 10 blocks away, was killed riding a bus back from school. He had been caught in the crossfire between two teenage gangs. The incident so enraged Latiker that she wanted to shout out about it. Across the road from her house she set up a memorial for all the dead children. She bought some paving stones from a local DIY store and wrote on them the names and ages of the victims, starting with Holt and adding on any new death since May 2007. She bought 30 stones, thinking that would be plenty. There are now 153 stones in the memorial, and she has fallen behind – there should be 161. Arthur Jones, 10 . . . Marquise Jackson, 11 . . . Lazarus Jones, 13 . . . Laura Joslin, 12 . . . Troy Law, 10 . . . Gregory Robinson, 14 . . . Enrique Chavez, 14 . . .
Latiker says that the bloodshed is about "what it's always been about: territory, drugs, money. There's nothing going on for the kids in this city – no jobs, nothing to do." She has written two letters to the White House pleading for help to stop the killing. She is angry that she hasn't heard back: "I ask President Obama can he not see what's going on?
Is his staff not relaying the message to him? Does anybody want to know why the youth are killing each other?"
Obama directly referred to the slaughter of Chicago kids in a sermon at a South Side church in July 2007, two months after Blair Holt was killed. "Our playgrounds have become battlegrounds. Our streets have become cemeteries. Our schools have become places to mourn the ones we've lost," he said. In his famous "a more perfect union" speech on race in March 2008 he also talked passionately about the economic shame and frustration that led to the erosion of black families, and the lack of basic services in black inner-city areas that "all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us".
But since entering office he has been largely silent over the issue of African-American youth violence. His speech to the NAACP was his only major address on race over the last six months. That is less than surprising for a president engaged in two wars and global economic meltdown. With the fate of the whole nation, and much of the globe, on his hands, he is hardly going to have much energy to focus on his old stomping ground of Chicago's South Side.

But even for Obama the killing in his own back yard underlines the mountain still to climb to achieve that more perfect union. And from the perspective of Chicagoans engaged in a war of their own, there is a frustration in being so near and yet so far to such greatness. Yes, Obama has his hands full, but from where they are sitting, the struggle is not just about their neighborhood but about the ongoing despondency of an entire generation of black teenagers. "Youth violence has reached pandemic levels with no response from the White House," says Phillip Jackson of the Black Star Project. "We don't expect him to take his eye off the Middle East for us. But if he just nodded to one of his advisers, and said, 'I don't want this happening in Chicago or in America,' his people would figure out a way to stop this. We can't get him to say that."