As we near the one-year anniversary of Trayvon Martin's death on Feb. 26, Children's Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman echoes Harry Belafonte's recent call for action on the Huffington Post, discussing the number of gun deaths in the black community.
Shortly after President Kennedy's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that it was time for our nation to do some soul-searching, and while the question "Who killed President Kennedy?" was important, answering the question "What killed President Kennedy?" was even more critical. Dr. King believed the answer was that "our late president was assassinated by a morally inclement climate": "It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence. It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder. It is the same climate that murdered Medgar Evers in Mississippi and six innocent Negro children in Birmingham, Alabama." Dr. King further noted that the undercurrents of hatred and violence that made up this morally inclement climate were fueled by our cultural embrace of guns: "By our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes."
The same winds of hatred, storms of violence, and easy access to and glorification of guns that Dr. King believed killed President Kennedy would soon also kill Dr. King. Fifty years after Dr. King described our morally inclement climate, the outward signs of racial intolerance and hatred have undoubtedly diminished but there are still far too many reminders of the dangers lurking everywhere that devastate us all — like Trayvon's senseless death for walking home while Black. Between 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and 2010, nearly 60,000 Black children and teens were killed by guns, over 1,200 every year for 48 years. This is 17 times the number of reported lynchings of Black Americans of all ages since 1882 but we have not had an equivalent Black community anti-lynching movement to save our children from gun violence.
Read Marian Wright Edelman's entire piece at the Huffington Post.
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