Black liberals finally getting the message
Gregory Kane is a noted black American columnist
Originally published Jul 25, 2001
MARK THE date: Thursday, July 19, 2001. It is a day that will live in glory. After years of prodding, cajoling, scolding and exhorting from black conservatives, black liberals and their black nationalist cohorts are finally getting it.
Oh, you should have seen 'em, standing at Preston and Caroline streets in East Baltimore around sixish in the evening. Former state Sen. Larry Young - now a talk-radio personality - was there. So was John Anderson, Baltimore's sheriff. Eric Easton, a local activist who's also vice-president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Action Network - headed nationally by one Rev. Al Sharpton - was on hand to remind those assembled why they were there.
"I want to introduce a woman who's Rosa Parks and Sister Souljah rolled into one," Easton announced to the crowd. If the Parks-Souljah combination throws you, it's probably because one helped launch a new wave of activism in the civil rights movement and the other specializes in ofay-bashing rants. But the idea was that Easton was talking about an unusual woman. Let's tell a bit of her tale.
Malinda Moore and her 9-year-old son moved into a house in the 1300 block of N. Caroline St. about a year ago. Her dad bought her the house. Moore works at the post office - various shifts, it seems. Because of the odd hours, when no one was home, local drug dealers figured no one lived there and they could cop a squat on Moore's steps whenever they pleased. They openly dealt drugs in front of her house.
Moore found the poot-butts pushing drugs in front of her door when she came home from work one day. She told them not to deal dope in front of her house. When she found that they would use her back yard to stash drugs, she ordered them to stop that, too. Tensions between Moore and the neighborhood dimwits mounted. She called police several times. She was threatened and hit in the back of the head with a bottle. Her son was harassed on his way to school. The last time she called police, the drug dealers told her they had had enough and that for her own safety, she had best leave the vicinity.
For three weeks, Moore stayed away from her home. Thursday was the community's response to the drug dealers. Moore, they told the criminal element, was back to stay. The local chapter of the National Action Network, representatives of Nation of Islam Mosque 6, the Vanguard Justice Society, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, CURE (Clergy United for the Renewal of East Baltimore) and other groups all came together to say, in a refrain they repeated constantly, "Enough is enough!"
"Never again will we allow a member of our community to be beaten, attacked and harassed simply because she said, 'Take it somewhere else,' " the ministerial alliance's president, the Rev. Gregory Perkins, told Moore's supporters.
Young expressed his outrage at people who had "the audacity to tell someone: 'If you tell the police, we're going to run you out of the community.'"
Oh, yes, it was an angry gathering. But it was a good anger, a sense of outrage that's been long overdue. Because these protesters, although right about many things, were wrong about one: Malinda Moore and her situation are not unique.
For years, black Baltimoreans - the law-abiding, hard-working ones, the ones in the majority, despite what Baltimore County Officer Paul Hoke says - have faced Moore's problem. They come home from working eight hours, or 12 hours, or a double shift, and find ensconced on their front steps drug dealers or users, either doing business or resting up.
I experienced the same problem in the mid-1980s. I lived in the 4200 block of Pimlico Road. Drug dealers decided to open for business on a corner across from the house where I, my wife and two children lived. It wasn't long after that this group - I immediately dubbed them "trifling Negroes" - started camping out on my front porch and steps. They'd leave whenever I asked them, but I procured a shotgun for those who might be uncooperative.
I didn't plan to kill anyone, of course, just shoot off a few kneecaps. Trifling Negroes, I had determined, don't really need or deserve kneecaps. But they do serve a purpose. Because of them, I went from being an advocate of gun control to being a staunch adherent of individual gun ownership for self-defense. When it dawned on me that liberal black leadership on a national scale had far more sympathy for the trifling Negroes than they did for me or other black folks who had both jobs and home training, I became a conservative. For years, I uttered the mantra few black liberals or nationalists wanted to hear: Black criminals weren't victims; they were victimizers.
It took more than 15 years, but the black conservative message is starting to seep through. It's a pity it took the terrorizing of Malinda Moore and her son to do it.