Life on the Margin

...Schools don't teach your head to eat...

...But is she a runaway from Detroit...

...We still somebody...

...The police are pessimistic about their ability either to find or to save many of these thousands of missing or "lost" children when they find them...

...He says that white people want us to fight each other then they don't have to deal with us...

...The reasons black children leave home are legion...

...That war, he argues, is the assault of a society which is Willing to let its black youth disappear, die of disease, or de-generate into criminal gang violence which almost certainly brings death or imprison-ment before adulthood...

...People say gangs is bad...

...Not for me 'cause I'm a man...

...Blood is strength...

...My mother told me my father lives in Jersey...

...For the kids, it was a chance at survival in a world where many did not survive...

...From time to time there is mention that nearly all the victims have come from the city's poorest section...

...But according to the U.S...

...In several suburban communities sur-rounding Oakland...

...they were mostly white middle-class teenagers who were "dropping out" of their parents' suburban lives...

...One Washington agency, the Federal Youth Development Bureau, targeted for elimination by President Reagan, does collect information on missing youth and run-aways...

...Then they gone...

...Ernest Taylor, seventeen, and Michael McDowell, sixteen, buddies for several years—had been working all day for the driver of the truck, a mover and contract painter...

...Kids have become a low-priority item," complains Richard Moran, director of a shelter for runaways in Miami, Florida, where almost 700 children and juveniles were taken in last year...

...They are like some of the children murdered in Atlanta, unlike others...

...Or, worse, the children leave home...

...In Cincinnati, two black teen-agers were shot down by an unknown assailant with a .44caliber carbine...

...It was a hot, humid, suffocating day...

...If nobody died, you just didn't do the story...

...the mer-cury would not drop below the 90-degree mark until well past sundown...

...Now we don't have anything...

...In the words of one police detective, "It's as though the earth opened up and swallowed them alive...

...The five—Randy Johnson, sixteen...

...Glancing in his rear-view mirror, the driver shifted into low gear as he saw the last boy hit the pavement...

...One of every seventeen nonwhite men and one of every thirty-two nonwhite women between ages sixteen and nineteen are the victims of a serious crime each year...

...We still here...

...There was nothing unusual about those who didn't...

...they are six times as likely to be living in informal groups, barracks, communal apartments, or abandoned industrial buildings...

...They don't watch TV for that much . . . to that extent...

...Youthful victims, the Justice Department confirmed, are far more likely to be black and poor than white and affluent...

...His gang was called the Savage Nomads: "I been raised in the gangs...

...For young black males, the brutal fact of life is that murder is the leading cause of death...

...Census Bureau, black children under the age of eighteen are three times more likely than white children to be living away from their families...

...There were more black youths killed last year than all the blacks killed in the Vietnam war...

...Newspaper editors on every con-tinent have watched carefully for the latest wire report of another body dredged up from some stagnant Georgia stream...

...I was going to see him [one day...

...They cannot be taken in isolation, however, from what Black Enterprise editor Joel Dreyfuss describes as the all-out "war on black children...

...The odds are not good that Nato will long remain a "somebody...

...They do listen to radio but not generally to radio news...

...And within the last year alone a spate of ap-parently racial killings in a half dozen cities has brought the level of fear and paranoia to new heights...

...That's when I joined the Savage No-mads...

...California, black fami-lies have been subjected to guhfire, fire bombings, and open assaults on their children in the public schools...

...Since then, police officials say, the figures have only grown worse...

...In a contemporary variant of Oliver Twist, children thirteen years old or younger were trained to steal Social Security checks from old people and food stamps from the poor...

...Adolescents were taught how to cash the checks and return the money to the leader...

...Two had their chests carved open and their hearts ripped out...

...In a voice mixed with both sorrow and anger, Hargrove said that for several months suburban Atlanta police departments had disregarded the young corpses that were discovered...

...Like brothers and sisters all together...

...In Buffalo, five black men were viciously murdered, apparently at random, in one three-week period last fall...

...Later in his PBS in- 8 terview, the Constitution's Schaffner told 3 Hodding Carter, "I would like to probably say that we hopefully will do a better job of covering the more disadvantaged black Community of Atlanta...

...Like somebody...

...Not at all...

...The fate of Atlanta's twenty-eight young blacks has captured the attention of the entire world...

...I didn't find him so I just walked around in those big parks over there...

...We rumble cause you have to show blood...

...Gangs are like families...

...In the Bronx, there's a lot of blood...

...He don't want the gangs to fight and he don't let no cliques fight...

...In retrospect Schaffner's admission seems callous and incomprehensible...

...The same thing goes for the vast numbers of children who simply disappear each year...

...So maybe we burn them...

...Number one, these people don't read news-papers in the first place...

...If somebody stole your car," says Hargrove, "you could put all the information you wanted into the Computer about that, serial numbers, license plates, style, model and color, the dents and all...

...The cumulative effect of these renewed anti-black attacks, of the rising death rate among black teen-agers, of resurgent Ku Klux Klan activity, and of the morbid litany pouring out of Atlanta, has been profound...

...In Salt Lake City, two young joggers were shot and killed while they were out running...

...I am some-body...

...In the wake of the Atlanta killings, con-cern about disappearing children is be-ginning to rise in other cities as the enormity of the problem becomes more clear...

...What Galea was saying is that while blacks in Atlanta had reason to fear for their children's safety, the threat of death and violence may be just as great in most other large American cities...

...Most of the children who have been found dead in Atlanta lived with families...

...The rising death rate of American blacks—one recent Chicago study found a 300 per cent increase in black homicides between 1964 and 1973—has spawned new fears among blacks throughout the nation...

...With parents unable to support them, they leave home or show up rarely...

...That's it...

...It leads to the percep-tion that it's suddenly hunting season on blacks again...

...He had paid them off, and they each had a few bucks in their pockets as they headed down the pleasant tree-lined street toward their parents' homes...

...The British even entered the act when the detec-tive responsible for catching the Yorkshire Ripper hopped the ocean, a jet-set Sherlock Holmes, ready to help solve the most gruesome series of crimes in the city's history...

...If somebody died, they were worth a graf or two...

...Even-tually she led police to the head of the ring, a young man in his twenties possessed of almost hypnotic powers...

...Denied Jobs, or even the prospects of Jobs, they find the best way that they can to survive, often as not in the street gangs that have become re-surgent from New York's South Bronx to the Chicano barrios of Los Angeles...

...Atlanta, first city of the American South, has taken its turn as the first city of American Macabre...

...Not to me...

...It estimates that between 1.3 and 1.8 million children were listed as missing in 1980...

...One sixteen-year-old girl came to the shelter to escape a crime ring into which she had fallen...

...Before he became director of the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services in Washington, Stephen Rorke, an Episcopal priest, operated a shelter for run-aways in Buffalo, New York...

...These kids were all from a respect-able black neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, just across the river from New York City...

...One of the dilemmas facing parents in Atlanta and elsewhere is that they cannot keep their children at home—even youngsters of six or seven— because the children must work to bring money into the family...

...But for little children growing up here...

...There's no way we can check it out...

...Yet for the nation's press, Atlanta has not been the story of life on the margin...

...If Atlanta-area police initially failed to find anything unusual in the murder of young blacks, they were not the only ones...

...If his figures are cor-rect, several hundred thousand may simply have vanished...

...Then you think, 'Why can't I have that?' But what good does thinking do...

...You asked me who I am...

...Had those initial bodies been white, we believe the action would have been taken quicker and more intensely," he said...

...Another episode in the grizzly tale of Atlanta's disappearing black children...

...We might know that it's a twelve- or thirteen-year-old black girl...

...Gangs help each other, but we fight if there's static...

...School don't mean nothing...

...About 30 per cent of all black children in the United States come from families in which neither parent works...

...More likely he will go to jail, as his brothers have, or like 8,621 other children in New York last year, he will disappear onto the missing persons list...

...Face it: in this country there's a lot more emphasis on saving property than there is on saving human life...

...The local police had performed sloppy preliminary investiga-tions and in some cases had lost valuable evidence...

...It was not until the next afternoon that all five families realized that something unusual had happened, for by then all five boys had vanished...

...More recently nearby Rochester police brought a sealed indictment against a white man who was overheard in Georgia boast-ing of blacks he had killed in that northern city...

...Two years ago Nato, an eight-year-old boy in the South Bronx, told Ianthe Thomas of Pacific News Service what it was like to be a black survivor...

...More and more black adolescents are discovering that they are marginal members of American society...

...Down East 139th Street they say, 'No trouble in stores.' Then they throw you out...

...Say we find a skeleton in some lot up in the South Bronx," says Jimmy Hargrove...

...high school kids of-ten stay out late with their friends in the summer months...

...Did her parents abandon her...

...It's just wrong...

...You've got to start with the fact that more young blacks are the victims of homi-cide than of heart disease, cancer, and the other major diseases combined," says Jimmy Hargrove, President of the National Black Police Officers Association...

...In fact, it is Standard operatirtg procedure on most metropolitan dailies...

...If we had one million cases of chicken pox in this nation, the government would be going crackers to come up with a new serum to stop the spreading epidemic, but this national tragedy of more than one million missing children remains a minor priority...

...Our values are all screwed up...

...All we know is that the problem is getting worse, that the kind of stuff we've had for a long time is starting to show up in the rest of the country...

...Soon there may be a major motion picture—but if so it probably will not note that there are twenty other American cities whose youth murder rates are higher than Atlanta's...

...From Louisville in 1965 to Atlanta in m 1981, little has changed...

...It is the sort of all-pervasive fear suggested by Kennel Jackson, a black historian at Stanford University: "When you pick up the newspaper and read about this black being killed here and another black being killed there, it does something to your psyche, something bad...

...He drove down Clinton Avenue, and, he says, that is the last time he saw any of them...

...But the Single fact that has turned Atlanta into a Big Story is that it is psychologically exotic...

...Life on the margin may be cheap and dangerous, but for the modern newspaper editor it is clearly not creative...

...Frank Browning is the author, with John Gerassi, of "The American Way of Crime" and an associate editor at Pacific News Service...

...I know that some people have money and cars and food...

...I been raised here from the time when buildings were more pretty and parks had trees...

...Like the no-torious Zodiac killings on the sidewalks of San Francisco, the brutal murder of young women in New York City by the "Son of Sam," or the sexual assaults of the Los Angeles Hillside Strangler, Atlanta's child killings fall into a famili?r American saga of grotesque real-life crime dramas...

...Thousands disappear in New York alone each year...

...Arecent report from the Wash-ington-based Children's Defense Fund outlines the grim profile...

...In Indianapolis last January, two men were murdered by sniper fire as they stood before large plate glass st?re Windows...

...If the children can't work (and in Detroit, estimates of black youth unemployment r?nge from 56 to 80 per cent)—if they can't earn money carrying groceries at the supermarket, shining shoes, or collecting soda cans for recycling centers—then the whole family suffers...

...That night, most of the boys came home for supper...

...For every white male teen-ager murdered in America, five young non-whites are killed...

...The most basic is money...

...Big Man took me in...

...They don't really care that much about the news...

...There is not enough money to support the whole family, and stresses are too severe...

...Unless they are spectacular, ghetto killings—blacks killing blacks—are almost never considered news...

...But you get with-your clique and you talk and party and get high...

...There are a lot of things that we've got to consider in that...

...For the most part these people are not what I—and it's probably not a good term—but what I term creative newsmakers...

...Was she kid-napped in Miami...

...36 per cent of these crossed State lines and were beyond the Jurisdiction of State and local police agencies...

...Rorke believes that the estimate of 50,000 missing children per year is low...

...They don't teach your head for jobs and for living...

...Missing black children were seldom discussed...

...Sometimes I think this is wrong...

...John Schaffner, managing editor of The Atlanta Constitution, told public television interviewer Hodding Carter, "It was not immediately recognized as being a terrible problem because of the fact that five or six deaths among that Community . . . among children even in that Community, in that given year or in a given year's period of time . . . is not necessarily considered an abnormal number...

...And, say black police officers, it is increasingly likely that those who stay lost are from black or Hispanic communities in impoverished neighbor-hoods...

...Yet what unites gangs like the Savage Nomads and the Atlanta murder victims is their proximity to death, their visceral knowledge that one of every 2,000 young black males will be murdered before he cele-brates his twentieth birthday...

...And they, like scores of others who have died or vanished from the streets of Boston, Buffalo, Salt Lake City, and Oakland are victims of what some investigators fear is a national epidemic of violence committed against young, black Americans...

...Ten years ago, children who were missing from their homes won national attention as a sideshow of hippie counterculture...

...Those figures do not include murder, but data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics show a similar pattern...

...But as John Galea, a black New York detective, told me recently, "Kallings, mug-gings, and disappearing kids have been com-monplace for us for a long time...

...It was like the fender-benders that big city papers never report...

...They are perhaps more desperate, just as the South Bronx is more desperate than even the worst districts of Atlanta...

...Despite the fact that the Federal Government maintains a com-puter-based national crime information System, the System is not designed to locate missing persons...

...Almost fifty of every 100,000 nonwhite youngsters under the age of nineteen are murdered—and almost seven of every 100,000 nonwhite children under the age of four are murdered, according to a 1975 report of the U.S...

...Now the job was over...

...Department of Justice reported this spring that the violent crime rate against children twelve to fifteen years old was 56.5 per thousand—eight times the rate against the elderly...

...That was three years ago this summer...

...These are the children who see no future for themselves, who see American society at war with them and see themselves at war with society...

...They see nothing and then they feel nothing...

...According to Hargrove and other police authorities, there are.at least 50,000 missing or runaway kids a year in the United States...

...Like my brothers were, only they're in jail now and one got on junk [heroin] so my mother said he's dead...

...Melvin Pittman, eighteen...

...Since then no one, not their parents, not their friends, not their contractor boss, not even the police investigators, has heard a word from them or found any trace of what happened...

...Indeed he may already have' disap-peared since he gave his interview in his mother's waterless flat...

...In the vernacular of the city room, black violence—so long as it does not involve whites—is "cheap crime...

...Alvin Tuner, sixteen...

...Their killer, convicted this spring, is a self-confessed white supremacist who was also questioned in connection with the shooting last year of Vernon Jordan, President of the National Urban League...

...Maybe he had some money for me...

...He speaks like a law thinker does 'cause he done heavy time...

...In 1980 alone, he says, there were two million missing juveniles—1.6 million of whom turned themselves in within seventy-two hours of disappearing...

...A newspaper colleague who began his career at the liberal Louisville Courier-Journal recalled recently how in 1965 police-beat reporters al-ways counseled him not to worry about the "black shoots" or the "black Stabs...

...This is just how we live...

...Department of Health, Education and Welfare...

...Tired, dripping with sweat and grime, the boys jumped down from the back of the truck into the street...

...That would not be news any more than it was news when the Statistical office of the U.S...

...You can feel good...