The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X spent the best years of their young lives offering solutions to the most vexing problems of racism, poverty and violence in the United States. For both men, the well-being of Black people mattered more than their own lives.
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In the District, one of the ways they are remembered for their commitment is by having streets named for them. But too often, those streets have failed to honor the civil rights icons. Instead, they have been a backdrop for the disinvestment in the poorest communities that has fueled a sense of hopelessness.
Last week, 6-year-old Nyiah Courtney was killed and four adults, including her mother, were wounded in a drive-by shooting at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X avenues in Southeast Washington. In a wrenching incongruity, a curbside memorial has been erected on a utility pole, with stuffed toys surrounded by wilting tethered balloons reaching toward a street sign that bears King’s name.
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The same night Nyiah was killed, a man was shot and critically wounded a block away.
A few weeks earlier, a man was fatally shot on the same block while sitting in his parked vehicle.
As one elderly woman told me when I visited the intersection recently, “I would never go to that corner at night, seeing how much shooting goes on during the day.”
It’s not as if King and Malcolm X didn’t tell us, decades ago, what the despair in poor neighborhoods had brought, or what was needed to make positive change.
“There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer,” King wrote in his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
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“There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum — and livable — income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
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But in Ward 8, where so many of the District’s killings have taken place, a livable income in the fast-changing city is not in the cards. According to DC Health Matters, a collaborative made up of area hospitals and health centers, the median income in Ward 8 is about $39,000. It’s about $91,000 for the District as a whole. It’s easy to see how chaos overtakes community.
Malcolm X told us in his 1964 speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” that Black people would have to “make our own society beautiful.”
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“We’ve got to change our own minds about each other,” he said. “We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to see each other as brothers and sisters. We have to come together with warmth so we can develop unity and harmony that’s necessary to get this problem solved ourselves.”
But that has proved harder and harder to do.
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When I visited the corner, a rail-thin woman was begging for money at a nearby gas station; another malnourished woman was roaming the park asking for a cigarette; a disheveled man paced back and forth, talking to himself. Others were clustered on benches, staring out into space, the haze of marijuana smoke pungent in the air.
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“I agree we need to come together as a people,” one man said, “but how can you have unity with drug-addicted adults and a bunch of trigger-happy kids?”
King accurately diagnosed the conditions that fuel violence in poor communities. Poverty, poor education, unemployment being among the main culprits. All of those can be fixed. There is also racism, which unfortunately probably can’t be fixed but whose impact can be tempered.
The DC Health Matters produced the Community Health Improvement Plan 2019-2022, which draws on a framework for health equity promoted by King and later by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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“Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthier,” the report said. “This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and healthcare.”
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Residents in neighborhoods where schools are good, employment rates are high, grocery stores are plentiful and supplied with healthful foods — where medical services are readily available, including counseling for troubled teenagers — do not tend to have drive-by shootings. Six-year-olds are almost never caught in crossfire.
Creating a sense of community is much easier when everyone in the neighborhood is not cowering in fear or operating in desperate survival mode.
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We know what has to be done: Get guns off the streets, hold accountable those who are responsible for the violence, and build up those who have known only what it’s like to be down.
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When the street that is Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue was constructed in the 1850s, it was called Asylum Road because it led to a government hospital for the treatment of those suffering from mental illnesses. That hospital is now known as St. Elizabeths.
If we don’t get serious about stopping gun violence, and repairing our most distressed communities and our most distressed people, we’re going to need more hospitals like St. Elizabeths. It will be clear that we’ve chosen chaos over community.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.
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