Since January our leaders have been growling and spitting over whether or not the Rev. Willie Wilson should be given a seat on the board of the University of the District of Columbia. Their backs were up over the mayor's preferred method of funding pay raises for unionized city workers. And now they're in high dudgeon, nursing revenge, convinced they have accounts to settle with each other, because the mayor doesn't like the council's simple-minded plan for changing the way the school board is selected. You'd think they would be concerned about the criminality claiming young lives in our city. But this is a political leadership consumed with self-image and the picayune.
Teenage slaughter is nothing to think twice about, as far as D.C. officialdom is concerned.
But it's not just the politicians who have been giving short shrift to the slaughter on our streets. Heckscher hit me right between the eyes. Heckscher had written to me about Raynard Davis, a D.C. native and 1985 Oberlin College graduate whom she met in 1987 when they were working with the D.C. Student Coalition Against Apartheid and Racism. Along with other community activists, Heckscher and Davis protested together, got arrested together and took their lumps together in their struggle against racism. Davis worked particularly hard to build collaboration and goodwill between African Americans and Jews, she said.