For sake of kids, society, dads must step up
By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
P-I COLUMNIST

  VIOLENCE HIT HOME this summer -- teen thugs at Third and Pine, gunshots that claimed lives on city sidewalks, a barrage of bullets during a fracas near Pike Place Market.
  What was behind this wildness in Seattle?
  Angry, rootless young people who more than likely come from families in which their parents either failed to instill positive values -- or weren't around at all.
  But now, a group of Seattle scholars, justice officials and church leaders are addressing issues such as violence in the community by working to restore a fundamental unit of society -- the family.
  That explains why more than 100 people gathered this weekend at the First AME Church on Capitol Hill. It was a wake-up call with a tough-love title -- "SOS: Dad, Where Are You?"
  Bottom line: Fathers need to be a part of families, raise their children and provide emotional and financial support. Otherwise, the negative cycle of wayward kids falling to crime or becoming neglectful parents will go on.
  "There are ways you can come together and support your child, regardless of your circumstances," King County Juvenile Court Judge LeRoy McCullough, one of the speakers, told me during a break.
  Standing at his side was Margaret Spearmon, an associate dean at the University of Washington School of Social Work, who echoed the importance of role models at home. Saturday's gathering, she said, also was a way to show support for parents who are "doing the right thing."
  Their on-point perspectives came the day before entertainer Bill Cosby took to national airwaves. Continuing to keep the plight of young African Americans in the spotlight, Cosby just co-wrote, "Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors."
  "For the last generation or two, as our communities dissolved and our parenting skills broke down, no one has suffered more than our young black men," the book states.
  The book also points to a statistic that captures the bleakness: "In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. ... There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership."
  Why is this significant?
  "Because children need the guidance," Cosby said in an interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Because the other parent needs help as well."
  His co-writer, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers in the United States each year, and studies show that the involvement of fathers with families is important for healthy child development.
  Which brings us back to Seattle's First AME on Saturday, where experts offered a dose of straight talk. Around several tables, the discussion centered on the need for parents to stay involved in their kids' lives even if the mother and father aren't together.
  Several men stressed the importance of an estranged couple not bad-mouthing each other around their children.
  "Boys see this," one man said. "That's where they learn how to treat women."
  And one woman had a reminder for other women to support the father's involvement: "My ex-husband is not an ex-father. He's still my children's father."
  At one table a linebacker- sized man broke down and cried, describing the challenge of being a good father and provider.
  Seattle has lifelines -- programs such as First AME's FRESH Start (Fatherhood Responsibility Engagement and Services in Head Start) offer parenting classes, job training referrals and counseling assistance. DADS (Divine Alternatives for Dads Services) supports fathers so they can support families.
  Cosby gets it right when he says the glorification of gang culture and anti-intellectualism have created a crisis, and now, dads are sliding away from personal responsibility.
  But Cosby gets it wrong by suggesting that people across the board don't care.
  They do -- just ask those who sacrificed a sunny fall Saturday to find a positive path and challenge the victim mentality.
P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. can be reached at 206-448-8125 or robertjamieson@seattlepi.com.

Paul Harvey Writes:

You call it a "prank," but I call it terror

Leonard Pitts Jr.,
The  Miami Herald
October 14, 2007
A history of rope -- and shame

  It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their African American classmates? Now it's happening all over.

  A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. Go back a little further and you have incidents at the University of Maryland, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.
  Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center told USA Today, "For a dozen incidents to come to the public's attention is a lot. I don't generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year."
  Jena's superintendent of schools famously dismissed the original incident as a "prank." It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past.
  But watching this trend unfold, it occurs to me that maybe what we need is the opposite of ignorance. Maybe what we need is information. Maybe what we need is a history of rope.
  A history of rope would have to include, in 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife, who had their fingers chopped off and handed out as souvenirs. Holbert was beaten so badly one of his eyes came out. It hung by a thread. A large corkscrew was used to bore into the couple's flesh. It tore out big chunks of them each time it was withdrawn. A rope was used to tie them to the tree.
  A history of rope would have to include, in 1917, Rufus Moncrief, who was beaten senseless by a mob. They used a saw to cut off his arms and otherwise mutilated him. The mob hanged Moncrief. Then, for good measure, they hanged his dog. Ropes were used for both.
  A history of rope would have to include, in 1918, Mary Turner, burned alive in Valdosta, Ga. A man used a hog-splitting knife to slash her swollen stomach. The baby she had carried nearly to term tumbled out and managed two cries before the man crushed its head beneath his heel. A rope was used to tie Turner upside down in a tree.
  A history of rope would include thousands of Turners, Moncriefs and Holberts. It would range widely across the geography of this nation and the years of the last two centuries. A history of rope would travel from Cairo, Ill., in 1909 to Fort Lauderdale in 1935 to Urbana, Ohio, in 1897 to Wrightsville, Ga., in 1903, to Leitchfield, Ken., in 1913 to Newbern, Tenn. in 1902. And beyond.
  You might say the country has changed since then, and it has. The problem is, it's changing again.
  It feels as if in recent years we the people have backwards traveled from even the pretense of believing our loftiest ideals. It has become fashionable to decry excessive "political correctness," deride "diversity," sneer at the "protected classes." Code words sanding down hatred's rough edge. "State's rights" for the new millennium. And now, out come the nooses. Just a prank, the man says.
  Mary Turner would argue otherwise. I find it useful to remember her, useful to be reminded of things we would rather forget. To remember her is to understand that there is no prank here.
  A history of rope would drown your conscience in blood.