DC Talks

Many of the Black children in throughout Paris school systems are being tormented, documented and not given proper due process before being thrown out of the county.
It was also reported that Lamar County District Attorney Gary Young and school officials are making a mockery of justice by yielding big sticks of discipline around trying to intimidate Black kids and families into submission. It is also apparent that there are defined abuses of power going on and Lamar County is probably not the only Texas county attacking Black youth. It is happening all over to Black youth.
Prosecutors attacked Creola Cotton and took her child out of the home simply because she was doing the job that preachers and other community leaders would not do. She was persecuted for being a Black activist, speaking out for Black youth, “scary cowardly preachers” and other Black community leaders and people being mistreated in the system.
Cotton is a victim of a new Jim Crow system intimidating young Blacks and telling grown Blacks in the county to be good “Negroes” or else.
“The message here is simple. Negroes don’t complain or question us or this is what will happen to you,” she said. “They want to get to us by going after our children.”
What is wrong with that picture? We are talking simply of a mother watching out not only for her own, but also concerned about the future of the “African village”.
That my friends is an outrage!!!! Do you preachers and community leaders realize that your lack of outrage and silence on Black youth attacks is an endorsement that it’s O.K. to target you next?
We know that cases have occurred in Dallas and Tarrant County where the “juvenile train” has run through, ripped children from families and railroaded several Black youth out of town. What is happening is no different than the old slave auction. The slave was separated from husband, wife, and children, marketed and wholesaled off like cattle and pigs without ever a hope of a family reunion.
Slavery was instituted to meet the growing demand for labor. Virginia instituted slavery in 1671. From that time 'til slavery's abolition in 1865, millions of African slaves were shipped to North America. White fortunes were made, banks and businesses founded, towns and cities built, and independence gained in the hundreds of years slavery existed, according to Discovery School.com.
Like slavery, the prosecutors and judges in the juvenile justice system are the new auctioneers and with the help of the school system have marked certain Black children for “auction” and using that system to take Black kids from their homes, families and separate them from their environment and relatives until adulthood. “Master” takes control, but does not care about the eternal damage inflicted on the psyche of a child already exposed to the racism, discrimination and indifference of a society dominated by white decision makers.
It is tragic that pastors, preachers and community leaders sit still and remain idle and silent while the “hanging judges” destroy the hopes, dreams and will of our Black youth. They may say it is not my kid or not a kid in my church, but do they not realize that we are all connected. The way Lamar County looks at its Black youth is the way Dallas County sees it and the way Tarrant County, Harris County and other counties call it also. The question is when will there be enough outrage to stop the madness and attacks against our children.
A vile and ugly form of racism is attacking Black and Hispanic youth’s innocence, infecting it and consuming them before they are capable of blooming and developing defenses against it. The community, the church and family are the only defenses a child has against it. However, it is going to take united outrage, protest and demands that the racist white juvenile system be investigated and reformed.
I can remember going to school during the era of integration. When we met “white folks” for the first time, parents and community leaders were there. It was no secret that no pastor, no grandmother, no Black teacher was going to allow white folks to mess with the Black kids. They don’t care if “Chakeila” or “Tre’” gets labeled by a white education system, ends up in the hands of juvenile officials and later herded through a criminal justice system that will jail them, mark them for life and make them wards of a system unable to vote, unable to work a job or function in society.
Where has that been lost today? It is an outrage and a testimony that too many Black pastors are “out sunning by the pool” or “cruising the beltway” instead of fighting for the future of our youth. Many of today’s preachers and pastors apparently don’t want to be bothered with shaping the minds of our future Black leaders, educators, businessmen and women and political leaders.
There is no way that Ms. Cotton should have had to take on the juvenile justice system and the school system alone by herself. This writer is calling for an outcry from communities statewide that sends a strong message to legislators, judges and prosecutors to Stop Messing with Our Black Children!!!