via:blackamericaweb.com
Wanted: A rebirth of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. You’re needed in Trenton.
The original Deacons were formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana in the summer of 1964, after the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Ku Klux Klan types who were determined to see that the law was never enforced engaged in a campaign of terrorizing civil rights workers in Jonesboro.
Like their forebear, Robert F. Williams, in Monroe, North Carolina, the Deacons decided to meet force with force. After one of the Deacons shot a white man who was part of a mob attacking black demonstrators in 1965, KKK attacks and harassment came to a standstill.
Nearly 40 years later, another group of black folks are being terrorized. The city isn’t the country town of Jonesboro, but the big city of Trenton much farther north in New Jersey. The terrorizers in this case don’t wear the white robes and hoods of the KKK, but the gang colors so common to many American cities. And these terrorizers aren’t white, but black.
That should in no way change the principle of self-defense. In Trenton, residents of the apartment building known as Rowan Tower are in need of some defending.
The headline in an Associated Press story says it best, but a back-story is in order. This one is rather heinous and disgusting, but you probably already know about it. BlackAmericaWeb editors ran a news story on it when it first happened.
A seven-year-old girl was gang raped in the building. She attended a party with her 15-year-old stepsister, who had sex with the rapists for money. Then she let them touch her younger step-sister for money. Soon, the touching turned into forcible rape.
Notice that I didn’t, as some news stories have, refer to these rapists as “men,” because men they are not. Dogs, maybe. Swine, definitely. But I’m sure there will be those who claim I’m being really unfair to dogs and swine.
Perhaps I am. There is really no name to give to a bunch of degenerates who would gang rape a seven-year-old – or a girl or woman of any age, for that matter. This is one instance where the language simply fails us. But the persons who gang raped that little girl are in the same category as the ones in West Palm Beach, Florida, who, in 2007, gang raped a Haitian immigrant woman and then forced her to perform oral sex on her then-12-year-old son.
When horror stories like this keep happening, it’s time for a revival of the Deacons, especially in the Trenton case.
“Fears of retaliation hamper investigation into Trenton child rape,” read the April 3 Associated Press headline. In the body of the story, residents of Rowan Tower elaborated on why they’re afraid.
“If they identify the men responsible,” the story reads, “they risk retaliation from the street gangs that stalk this neighborhood.” Aaron Morrison, the AP reporter, quoted resident Shawntel Abner directly.
“We are mothers,” Abner is reported as saying. “If we aren’t there, there is no one to watch our children. You are asking a lot of us. You are asking us to put our lives on the line.”
What Abner said is certainly true, but so is this: If no one puts his or her life on the line, then another little girl stands the chance of being gang raped. Could they live with that?
They shouldn’t have to. Outrage in black America should be at such a fever pitch about this incident that droves of black folks – especially the men folk – should be heading to Trenton even as you read this, offering to protect residents of Rowan Tower who come …..forth, point out the rapists and testify.
Three years ago, thousands of black folks from all across the country couldn’t wait to get themselves down to Louisiana to march for justice for the so-called “Jena Six.” Mind you, no one disputed that the “Jena Six” did, indeed, give an old-fashioned schoolyard beat down to the white boy they were accused of attacking. But they got plenty of love from black America nonetheless.
That Haitian-American mother and her son in West Palm Beach? Not so much.
It remains to be seen whether that seven-year-old girl and the terrified residents of Rowan Tower get any of our love either.
