6 January 2022
Dear Mayor Jones:
Epiphany (or Twelfth Night or Night of the Magi) began at sunset yesterday. According to Christian lore, last night, 2022 years ago, three regal and holy wise men knelt and offered their riches to an infant born in a barn and wrapped in rags. This night is a reminder that even the poorest of us is a child of God and has the potential to redeem the world.
It is no great surprise that in our modern world, where “holy days” like Christmas are nothing more than consumer shopping frenzies, that Epiphany is almost completely ignored. Even the churches that do heed it perform little more than lip service to the idea that all humans are equal in the eyes of the God they worship.
And many churches and religious organizations are little more than corporations themselves. In news only from the last few weeks we see that St. Jude has hoarded billions, that Goodwill’s CEO is paid $800,000 while workers in their stores often do not make minimum wage or are performing court ordered “community service” for free.
And how many resources do these churches steal from the communities, especially school districts, with the tax breaks and exemptions they are granted?
And many Christians will only champion the “unborn.” The moment an infant “crowns”, however, the concern for their welfare ends. In fact, any welfare the “born” might need is cut off in favor of welfare in the form of tax breaks and low wages for rich businessmen and corporations.
STL’s own “savior” of the homeless, Larry Rice, who is worth millions himself, requires a lot of free labor and whose downtown shelter made your average slumlord seem like a saint, was promised a whopping $18 million by your administration! Once again, I must ask why funding for the unhoused is opaque? For $18 million there should be beds year-round for at least 1800 people, based on previous funding for Biddle House.
An Epiphany is a bright illumination of thought, a “Eureka!” moment that allows us to see something new or see it in a new way. Epiphanies startle us and leave us changed. In Saint Louis there needs to be an Epiphany about our “roses that grow from concrete.” I ask especially the Christians among your administration and among city leaders, aren’t the young black men spilling blood on the streets of this city children of God, too?
What of the promises to find solutions to the gang youth violence and crime? To defund the police, to fund more social workers and outreach in the areas of the city where young men so often spend their days killing each other? Year after year funding for police is increased and NOTHING CHANGES.
What is this city offering its’ youth other than the possibility of working at a Dollar General, or the rag factory, and being treated with contempt for being poor and dark-skinned? A life where becoming homeless always hangs in the balance?
And even if they do manage to dodge the gangs and the drugs and homelessness due to poverty, even if they work every day, provide for their families, and do their best with what they are given, what about the Kevin Strickland’s and the many other young black men that are picked up and sent to prison because even if they aren’t guilty of the crime they were arrested for, they must be “guilty of something” (i.e., being Black) as our Governor put it? And with for-profit prisons, there is a direct incentive to lock up as many people as possible, isn’t there?
And let’s talk about crime in St. Louis for a minute. I am very weary of city leaders and the media spinning the fairy tale that impoverished young black men in the poorest areas of St Louis city and county are in charge of large-scale drug operations and other criminal endeavors. Yes, there are a few- like Black Family Mafia, and there are some local Black families, too.
But I am expected to believe that they operate under the radar? Invisible to police because “no one in the neighborhood will snitch?”
The parking lot of the apartment building where Darren Seals body was found inside of his torched Jeep used to be the home of a woman, a grandmother, that frequently reported crime in that neighborhood. She had been murdered just a few weeks prior to Seals’ death. This was ruled a suicide, of course. It’s funny how the people that love their communities so much they will put themselves in danger to protect it seem to so frequently become suicidal, isn’t it?
There are many people that do not believe that Seals was killed because of Ferguson, and that he and this murdered grandmother, and Deandre Joshua, were actually killed by the same drug lord and covered up by city officials. I’ve heard that activist Eddie Crawford was also murdered because of a crime syndicate.
I’ve spoken with family members of drug dealers, and alleged drug dealers, who tell me that they cannot risk so much as a parking ticket, or they have been or will be forced by police or federal agency to turn informant or face going to jail themselves for minor charges. Several of these people had no contact with these family members. (And if this is happening, then all the more reason for community policing. If the police can’t solve crimes without the community, the community should get some of the police funding.)
In spring of 2014 a young man named Terry Robinson actually recorded two Hyde Park police officers threatening him with jail if he didn’t come up with “some names of people to plant a gun on and frame”. Nothing was ever done about it.
One of the most shocking murders ever committed by white policemen against a black man, that of Kajieme Powell, is surrounded by suspicious circumstances. Watch the video. Powell is dead before the driver’s side door of the police car closes. It is as if they came to shoot him. A woman that filmed one of the videos was rumored to have been harassed and later died under suspicious circumstances. The hair salon that Powell died in front of is rumored to be the reason for his ranting- he was going to reveal something about it or someone that was in there. And it is rumored that Dotson was convinced (possibly paid off) by a city official (or other powerful politician) to drop the investigation.
It is a well-founded rumor that Castle Point is the recruiting area for city drug distribution gangs. There is a prostitution syndicate that runs from Hyde Park to Riverview that has been in operation since before 1980. I’ve heard rumors that one of the biggest waste management companies in the state is run by a crime syndicate and that they are untouchable for crimes committed as much as 75 years ago. And that the real rulers of the East side strip clubs are all located in the wealthy white counties on this side of the river.
The ATFE and DEA have been here for almost 15 years, supposedly working to break up drug and gun distribution, but nothing changes. In fact, there are a lot of well documented reports that the ATFE sting operations make things worse. And despite extensive research by the DEA that there are over 240 gangs in St. Louis, the mostly white agents that live out in middle-class suburbs have done next to nothing to change the situation. (Again, particularly regarding the Black Family Mafia, they have made things worse.) Both agencies spend a good portion of their time (and the FBI’s) investigating their own agents and operations.
I have heard these stories and rumors from many different people in different places and from different cliques in St. Louis in the last 12 years. I don’t know if they are true or not, but I know they are believed by a lot of people. City officials and police have no respect in poor communities because they don’t earn it. Not just the city. Many municipalities have their own police force simply to generate income for salaries via a traffic court. And crime pays for lawyers (who also mostly live in the counties) and judges.
In a city where the first question asked is “where did you go to High School?” does it not seem the height of hypocrisy that so few schools remain on the North side? Or to give TIFs to corporations and developers that rob our school districts of much needed funds?
Until real outreach and real community-based policing is put in place, until schools in poor, urban, and black neighborhoods are given the same resources as in wealthy areas, nothing is going to change. And there needs to be more job training, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and more unions for retail and fast-food.
(And not just in Saint Louis, but nationwide, jury duty and simply observing the courts needs to be a paid community service, required of everyone, not just elderly white people that live in South city zip codes. Everyone should have to serve on a jury, or at least be required to sit in a court room and observe the judges and procedures. Community involvement is the key. I have a more detailed draft letter on these issues for a later time, but they bear mentioning here.)
I hope that this letter will bring an Epiphany, and that you will shine a light in the hidden and most corrupt parts of our city, and that, especially, you will show real care for these roses growing in the cracks of our concrete. That they flourish at all is a miracle given what they face, imagine what miracles a little light could bring.
