Dragnet: Small West Georgia Town’s Isolated Neighborhood Is Symptomatic of Many Black Communities Across the Nation

by | May 9, 2017 | Opinion | 0 comments

Twice in a row, in the space of one week, two young Black men have been killed in a local area of Columbus, Georgia, circumstantially known as “The Horseshoe.”

And that’s just here LATELY, it’s an ongoing thing. But before you get your panties twisted in a knot about Black folks and crime, be aware that whites go over there to buy and deal drugs, also. Can you say #fallguys ?

The Horseshoe is a drug-infested compartmentalized den of viperous crime-ridden snakes and drug dealers on 24th Street; and even worse, everyone knows about it.

The neighbors know, the Chief of Police and the cops know, the Mayor knows, the City Council knows, the District and state legislators know, the Sheriff knows, the Marshal knows, the people who live down the street from it know, the people who live IN the cesspool know, and yet, the Valley news lately is that a cop across the pond from us gunned down an unarmed Black man near 11th and 13th in Phenix City, Alabama, but over here, there and everywhere in the nation, they never seem to come anywhere near the places where they need to be bombing and gunning folks down.

Maybe that would just spoil the fun for them; and it’s really not that big of a deal how it endangers innocent folks just trying to garden and sit on their front or back porches to catch a cool breeze, fan flies, walk their dogs, squish mosquitoes, and sip old-school Iced Tea in these hot muggy uncooperative non-compliant Georgia summers.

Hardly nobody around town really sits on their front porches just to chat any more, especially in places where it’s just as dangerous to come outside or be at work or headed TO work or even to go to church as it is to stand in the middle of a hotbed of gang activity and cruelly insult its stakeholders.

Cops won’t touch it from all appearances seen and unseen. Back in the Marshal Dillon days of Wild West TV, it used to be considered an act of outright cowardice to kill an unarmed man, now it’s just target practice to kill other unarmed people, mostly for no reason; while avoiding the hell out of the ones who need to be killed post-haste.

Strange is it not?, the difference in how quickly an unarmed Black man can be legally killed in the midst of doing nothing wrong (even if he did do something non-violent and wrong before), and how far too many like Trayvon Martin, Kenneth Walker, and more recently Jordan Edwards, Black males who never did a wrong thing in their ‘legally sanctioned even without criminal prosecution’ shortened lives can die, for any reason or even no reason at all.

Amazing, is it not?, how similarly and how quickly these localized “crimebusters” run from or avoid REAL criminals, the kind who actually break the law and kill other {mostly Black} people.

In Atlanta not so long ago, an armed killer by the name of Brian Nichols gunned down a deputy, a judge, a court steno inside, and a federal marshal outside, then literally walked out of the courthouse downtown in broad daylight, got on a train – SLOW IT TAKES THEM FOREVER TO GET TO THE STATION MARTA TRAIN- and rode it to Buckhead, knocked on a white woman’s door, held her hostage for DAYS (wasn’t it nearly two weeks?) during a full alert APB, then finally turned himself in only after she talked him into it. Yeah, that’s what WE said … wtf?! And a few of the judges were scared enough to recuse themselves before he finally went to trial three years later.

The criminals, the real ones, have been emboldened by the fact that someone’s going to kill an unarmed Black male, young and old, to make up for NOT going after the ones who are actually doing these criminal things. I get it.

They don’t get paid enough money to actually go after armed criminals and put themselves in harm’s way like that, but we thought the built-in job hazard was meant as a humanitarian act of internalized love of protecting innocent people, not helping to kill them.

In one well-known nationally televised event, these genius “crimebusters” bombed the Black Panthers HQ for trying to exercise their laughably god-given American right to protect and feed their own children and their neighborhoods and protect them FROM the criminals, something the cops would NOT do; but for some STRANGE reason or another, we come full circle around the land and take a dim telescopic view of this latter-day 24th Street hellhole in Columbus, a pin-pointed and very well-known cesspool for crime and criminal activity, and it ain’t even been targeted, let alone touched. By anyone. By no means necessary.

#scaredmuch? or is the message for the LAW-ABIDING PEACE-LOVING BLACK CITIZENS that there are patrolling ‘insiders’ who are part and parcel of these gangs? We know cops don’t make a lot of money, and maybe some of them count on the cash they can get from these backyard downtrodden Blacks, so they don’t care what they do or even if they decide to kill one another and/or some innocent bystander one day?!?

5th Avenue and St John Way fka “Alley”, Columbus GA, At one time, 5th Avenue was a hub of family and community and black-owned business and Black homeowners. It is now just as dead as its people are.

What pussy-grabbed railroading signals are bona fide law-abiders in this small southern town on the edge of Fort Benning, Georgia, supposed to be getting from cops killing unarmed Black folks and running in what looks like fear from the armed ones?

***

We shouldn’t be too impressed by blue and white choppers flying overhead, as if the place is being drag-netted for the one or ones who commit the unending SERIOUS crimes, because it’s probably just to justify having one included in the tax budget.

Chances are that he ~and they~ are likely sitting inside the same apartment complex while everybody else is at work or at school, eating flavored Doritos, drinking cheap beer, watching some dumb reality TV show with their hands down their half-off pants, and thinking “Is that all for me? Hell, they know where I am whenever they get ready.”

If we, Black Americans nationwide, are really ALL IN against crime and in cooperation with the police about it, [sic, #ColumbusAgainstDrugs], then the railroad track switch signals are kinda crossed right now. We even got ghetto-@$$ Black women serving on Jury Duty for known killers who go IN with an agenda to protect gangbangers and we wonder why the cops and the court systems are just burnt plum out from even having to deal with our Black asses.

Sooner or later, those two juxtaposed trains are going to have to collide, especially when you all live with a state governor who may as well be named “Beauregard Trump” who signs off on crime-inspiring bills that mix alcohol with toting guns on Georgia’s college campuses, as if THAT’S not an idiotic state-sanctioned college campus shooting spree waiting to happen.

Black America, Columbus GA, you’ve been baited; big time.

The folks who are bringing the drugs and guns to you to kill yourselves with are, obviously enough, never anywhere around the scene of the crime when you all start going in on each other for no reason except to increase the poverty and the deaths. #selfimplosion #selfexplosion #selfdestruction

“Capt. Saveanigra” has taken off his bullet-ridden cape and retired.

-30-

Keep up to date with everything going on in the Urban Intellectuals Universe.

Black History is World History — and we need you with us! Sign up for empowering stories, exclusive updates, and first access to everything Urban Intellectuals.

Fill in your details below to get started!

Blog post opt-in form 2 (#8) - Bottom of Posts (Active)

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Categories