From: barnhart@netcom.com (Aaron Barnhart)
Subject: Anti-Gang Ad Controversy #1: The Story
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 92 21:01:14 GMT
Organization: Netcom
Reply-To: barnhart@netcom.com

Debate grows over city ad campaign
By Bob Seidenberg, City Editor
Evanston Review / August 13, 1992

Despite new opposition in the African-American community, Evanston
Human Relations officials announced plans Tuesday to proceed with a 
controversial ad campaign aimed at deglamorizing street gangs.

At a press conference yesterday, the Human Relations Council released
details of the "hard-hitting advertising campaign" designed to
deglamorize the appeal of street gangs, but amended one segment in
hopes of abating the controversy over the ad.

"The campaign's target audience is teens who might join gangs," said
Owen L. Thomas, the commission's executive director in a release 
issued Tuesday.

"The purpose is to provoke them to change their perception that gangs
are cool or hip, by using dramatic facts about gang murders."

"White people already thing that black people are no good.  You don't
need this," Dollie Martin emphatically told the council members
yesterday.  She advised more job training rather than the campaign
against gangs.

New community leaders have joined Alderman Rochelle Washington (5th)
in voicing opposition to the ad campaign drawn up by Tom Riley, a
creative director at a major Chicago advertising firm.

Riley offered to do the campaign pro bono after learning of community
efforts to fight street gang membership through a publicity campaign.

In a letter to the _Review_ Tuesday, members of the Consolidated
Committee of Concerned Black Men called the proposed advertising 
strategy -- using images of the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis/Skinheads to
deter gang violence -- "not acceptable."

The group's executive committee includes former police chief William
Logan and former NAACP head Bennett Johnson among its members.

It maintained that if "Evanston's Human Relations Commission were to
sanction a negative, unflattering, stereotypical portrayal of other
nonminority groups in any context -- it would create an outcry that
would shake the walls of the Civic Center.

"We need an advertising campaign that is balanced -- one that 
promulgates hope, opportunity, optimism; rather than violence,
hopelessness, and despair."

In addition, it pronounced "disturbing that the process did not
include it its conceptual phase, a psychodynamic appraisal by a
learned committee from the black community."

At Monday night's council meeting, Jim Nichols, speaking for the
group, said the overriding reaction to viewing of the video as one
of anger rather than shock.

"Do we need a tape to remind us that our young black males are
killing each other?  Hardly not," asserted Nichols.  "Since we are
the ones bearing the loss, purchasing the coffins, doing the burying
and then doing the mourning.  If we need a TV message to remind us
of our plight we're in sad shape as a people.

"We know the only way to gain the love and respect young black males
is to show them love and respect -- understand where they came from
and what they can become," Nichols said.

Terry Douglas, another speaker, recalled working in the Police
Department's youth department.  During that time, she said her
most haunting memory was that of a mother who had lost her teenage
son to gang violence.

Douglas said she agreed that the commercials are extreme "but I also
believe that these are desperate times.  If the airing of a commercial
can prevent another mother's sorrow and another young man's death,
I'm all for it."

Gwen Rucker, co-chair of the Human Relations Commission, also spoke
in support of the ad campaign, describing it "as powerful ...
hardhitting and it is true."

She noted that 150 members of the community had turned up at the Solutions
Forum when the idea of a publicity campaign was first broached.

Rucker said the ad's intent is not to portray African American males
in a negative light; rather, that the campaign marks the first stage
in an ongoing campaign to deglamaorize gangs.

Copyright 1992 Pioneer Press, reprinted w/o permission.

More installments coming in the Evanston anti-gang ad controversy,
so keep watching s.c.a.a.

-- 
Aaron (Barnhart@netcom.com) -- posting from Evanston, Illinois
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american