Band of Sisters United by a Trail of Blood and Tears

This week, truthfully, has been a very emotionally hard week for me. I've gone to three funerals in the last two weeks for the sons of friends ranging in age from 16-19. Although I'm an attorney and author, who has managed to so-call "make it out of the hood" or overcome my environment, many of the women that were my friends in elementary and junior high school still reside in the inner-city of St. Louis, where I was raised.

Since my brother's death 11 years ago, my desire to attend funerals, especially those of our youth, is not great. After all, the pain, anger, sorrow and raw emotion expressed at the funerals of those that die young is just unbearable. If you've ever attended such a funeral, you realize immediately the tears aren't just about the untimely death and loss of life but also about the dashed dreams, hopes, and potential that died with those youth. This week, however, I decided to go back to my hometown and attend the latest one because there had been so many. I knew I could no longer avoid the inevitable realization: chaos and mayhem are pretty rampant. My old neighborhood, and the city at large, have succumbed to and magnify the theory of nature at its worst: survival of the fittest.

I thought I had witnessed it all and felt it all growing up. But honestly, I hadn't prepared myself for the pain, hurt and anger I started to feel the moment I entered the room. There was a room full of women that I went to school with and virtually all of them had lost their first born sons in one way or another over the last two years. The road for most of their sons had ended in violence, and the effect of their sons' deaths had taken an enormous toll on them.

Although I hadn't communicated with most of them since I left the neighborhood to attend college, I kept informed about what was happening in their lives through my relatives, who still reside in the old neighborhood. As they sat in the room comforting each other, I learned that most of them had remained friends and over the last two years they had become sort of a Band of Sisters, traveling from funeral to funeral supporting and giving each other strength: sharing their knowledge with each other about coping with pain and loss and leaning on each other for support many months after the funeral was over.

Honestly, my heart ached because the truth is years ago I cried with many of them when we all lost brothers and fathers, and now I was crying with them as they buried their first born sons. The sadness reminded me of my brother's own funeral, my mother's pain from losing her only son and the callousness and randomness with which the violence strikes in our communities.

I pray that I will never experience the pain from the lost of my first born son or any of my children for that matter. The harsh reality is many of our inner-city communities throughout this country are a war zone, and as with any war, the battle is brutal, violent and unrelenting. Each year, more children die in our inner cities throughout America than that die in Iraq or Afghanistan. The only difference is there are no flags, salutes or purple hearts. Rather, many of them remain nameless and only known to their family and friends.

Many of the individuals inflicting mayhem and causing violence devalue life, theirs and yours, feel self-hatred and often use violence as their route to self-empowerment. Because of this, the violence has become so endemic, and like any war, there are civilian casualties and collateral damage, and this affects good kids as well as bad kids. It also affects kids with dreams and those void of hope, those on drugs and those who are drug-free, those involved in gangs and those in sports, and high school dropouts as well as college bound kids. The battle lines aren't clear and neither is the enemy.

The truth is many of us hear everyday about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, but we've become complacent about the war in our own back yard and very little is done to help stymie the issues plaguing the inner city communities because society often views this as an African-American problem. Although African-Americans must take the lead to get our community back on track, the truth is this is also a societal problem because the violence and loss of life inflicting inner city youth is critical to America's ability to remain a world leader. After all, no society can afford to lose a significant number of its youth in the manner that we are losing our African-American youth. These youth after all represent our future and our hope, and until we step up and say enough is enough, we will continue to have a Band of Sisters bonded by a trail of tears soaked in the blood of their sons.

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