O. Wayne Ellerbee, Esq., Juvenile Court Judge (Ret.), Lowndes County, Georgia
Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress’ recent comments regarding juvenile crime are well taken. It is indeed a strike against our community that within one week two young men were murdered and two more will undoubtedly spend a lot of time in jail for those murders. Yet four more black lives were destroyed.
The other observations Chief Childress made are equally noteworthy. These kids need to be “taught what’s right and wrong”, he said. He’s also concerned about their loitering and truancy. And he wonders “where are the parents and why aren’t they instilling values on their children?”
Exactly. Where are the parents?
Unfortunately you won’t find many “sets” of parents in today’s impoverished black community. You may find mothers and grandmothers (the same ones that raised the teenaged moms) but you’ll be hard pressed to find dads. There’s a reason for this, too.
The illegitimacy rate among blacks is about 72 percent—approximately three times the level of black illegitimacy that existed when the War on Poverty began in 1964. While the rate of black teenage pregnancy is declining, these girls are still twice as likely to have adolescent pregnancies as their white counterparts.
Children having children who are then raised in fatherless homes by either a mother or grandmother who have no respect for the sanctity of marriage or family is no way to reduce poverty or crime. It is certainly no way to break the “cycle of poverty”, the incubator for a criminal career on the streets.
For over forty years as a juvenile court judge in Lowndes County I watched this sad tragedy unfold. I took the bench 8 years or so after LBJ’s “War on Poverty” was launched and it became clear that this well intentioned program was a failure and a waste of tax dollars.
Rather than discourage behavior that led to teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births the program had the effect of actually encouraging that result. The numbers speak for themselves.
Instead of saying, “Here’s a helping hand to motivate you to stand on your own; to motivate and educate yourself to improve your situation” the program sent a message of “You can’t help yourself or your child so here’s some money; if you have another child we’ll give you more money.”
The families that were to be helped were instead destroyed. With the end of their family structure came the end of their community structure which then spread to the community at large.
You see, there was a time when kids were disciplined and taught values at home by loving and responsible parents which values were reinforced at church and then reinforced again in the schools. Once the link with the family was shattered, the entire system collapsed, even to the extent that discipline, much like faith, is now prohibited from public education.
Sadly, the chief’s clarion call for parental help is several generations too late. There are no parents to answer the call.
But all is not lost. What we can, and must, do is return to policies that strengthen families. This starts with programs with goals of ending teenage and out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births and, where there are births, getting fathers back in the home.
Responsibility and integrity in the home is the key to building a responsible teenager with integrity. Black or white, rich or poor, it’s important to do this because black lives, like all lives, matter, even though the black community has not accepted its responsibilities
