Victor McElhaney. Say his name. We should all know his name. Say his name: Victor McElhaney…
He was not a statistic. Not just another headline soon to be discarded from memory amid the so-called breaking news on the morning after. Not just another young black male slain.
Not a nameless, faceless murdered brother claimed by the homicidal swell that leaves far too many black mothers to wail.
Say his name: Victor McElhaney…
He was not a son of Chicago but a son of Oakland, California. And yet, we should all know his name.
Victor, 21, was fatally shot in Los Angeles on March 10, during a robbery outside a liquor store near the campus of the University of Southern California, where he was studying jazz percussion. His mother, Lynette Gibson McElhaney, an Oakland city councilwoman, is a longtime outspoken activist against violence.
It was during a visit a few years ago to my friend Pastor Zachary E. Carey’s True Vine Ministries, where the McElhaney’s are members, and where Victor grew up playing drums, that I witnessed firsthand their fervor and fight. I stood with the church on the city’s streets where they have marched each Saturday for years to bring attention to the scourge called murder.
And yet, here we are. No clear and easy solutions. No end in sight. Only a trail of blood and tears, and senseless slayings that steal even sons of promise by an evil that is no respecter of persons and that runs rampant particularly in black communities, and where Chicago stands as a microcosm of a larger sorrow.
We lift our eyes to the hills as they run with a river of tears. From whence cometh our help?
It will not come from politicians and assorted poverty pimps whose allegiance is to the powers that be. It will not come from the church, which has lost her prophetic zeal, her voice and purpose. Not from some coming Messiah, or by prayer alone. Not by sitting on our hands.
The tally of African Americans murdered across the U.S. from 1976 to 2017 alone proves that. That number, according to the FBI: 343,780. More than three times the capacity of Michigan Stadium, the nation’s largest. Eighty-three percent, or 285,164, black males.
Say his name: Victor McElhaney…
Victor doesn’t have to be from Chicago for me to get that “we” have lost this son.
I don’t have to live in Washington, D.C., or New York, in East St. Louis, Gary, or New Orleans to understand that we are all in this together. That “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
America doesn’t have a murder problem. America — black and white America — has a heart problem. A heart whose arteries are diseased and calcified with disregard, dispassion and cold callousness when it comes to black lives.
Our communities are in crisis. And yet, the cavalry ain’t coming.
Therefore, the faithful remnant of community soldiers must fight on, working to create a cultural paradigm shift in our hearts and minds; teaching a new generation almost in utero conflict resolution and the sanctity of human life.
We must dismantle the culture of misogyny and self-hate — from songs to the dehumanizing words we call each other — while continuing to renounce the murder of black lives at black hands as vehemently as we do black lives taken by white hands.
And we must humanize our loss. Let us say their names. For if this many dogs had been slaughtered, America would declare a state of emergency.
Say his name: Victor McElhaney. He was flesh and blood, and heart and soul. He was America’s son. Say his name.
Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
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