(Four teens have been charged with first-degree murder in the brutal beating death of a Chicago high school student that was caught on videotape. NBC's Robert Stafford reports.)
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(Derrion Albert's mother speaks out about his death.)
Jackson, Farrakhan at beaten teen’s funeral
The funeral of a Chicago teen who was beaten to death on his way home from school drew civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan on Saturday, both calling for an end to youth violence.
Farrakhan said he came to the funeral because he was "deeply pained" by the death of 16-year-old honor roll student Derrion Albert. The boy was walking to a bus stop after school when a group of teens attacked him during a street fight late last month.
"Naturally, we wonder why such a beautiful life? Such a future we thought was waiting for this young man," Farrakhan said. "This was a special young man of righteous bearing who God took from us so young."
Cell phone video footage shows Albert being kicked and hit with splintered railroad ties. Four teens are charged in his death.
Eyes of the world are watching
President Barack Obama is sending U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who once led Chicago Public Schools, to Chicago on Wednesday to meet with school officials, students and residents and talk about school violence.
"The eyes of the world are watching," Pastor E.F. Ledbetter Jr. told mourners at the Greater Mount Hebron Baptist Church on the city's South Side. "This has affected people all over the globe."
Mayor Richard Daley, just off a plane Saturday from an International Olympic Committee meeting in Copenhagen where Chicago lost the 2016 Summer Games, said he would work with police, the community and school officials to break the "code of silence" that happens after street violence.
Police, ministers and community leaders have been asking people to come forward with information about Albert's killing.
"The code of silence is unacceptable in this day and age where we have young children being killed," Daley said at a news conference at O'Hare International Airport.
We will always remember
Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis and Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman also both attended the funeral along with other city and public officials. Huberman called the Christian Fenger Academy High School sophomore a "bright light."
Jackson demanded children and teens to be given safe passage to and from school.
"Derrion didn't have to die," Jackson said. "He was murdered. His pain, his suffering, his death have shook the world."
As mourners filed into the church, video screens scrolled through pictures of Derrion as a baby and with his family, as well as photos of his academic awards. Some mourners wore T-shirts with Derrion's picture that read "We will always remember you."
The program included a poem Derrion's mother, Janette Albert, wrote to her son titled "May I Go Now?"
"I know you're sad and afraid because I see your tears," she wrote. "I'll not be far. I promise that."
Farrakhan also called for communities to support their youth.
"Let's go get our young people," Farrakhan said. "His righteousness was to serve as a redemptive force to command us to get up and get busy and save our children."
Chicago, Obama, the Olympics, and the Murder of Derrion Albert
Chicago does not deserve the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. What the people of Chicago (and other urban American cities) deserve is a domestic Marshall Plan -- an action agenda that will, once and for all, deal with failing schools, terrible housing conditions, limited job, career, and business opportunities, and a culture of violence, mayhem, and hopelessness that led to the very recent beating death of a teen named Derrion Albert, at the hands of other teenagers, no less.
Cellphone footage showing a group of teens viciously kicking and striking Albert with splintered railroad ties has ramped up pressure on Chicago officials to address the violence epidemic that has led to dozens of deaths of city teens each year. The graphic video of the afternoon melee emerged on local news stations and YouTube (before it was summarily removed by the social networking site), showing the fatal beating of Derrion Albert, a sophomore honor roll student at Christian Fenger Academy High School. His death was the latest addition to a rising toll: More than 30 students were killed last school year, and the city could exceed that number this year.
Prosecutors charged four teenagers with fatally beating Albert, who was walking to a bus stop when he got caught up in the mob street fighting, authorities said. The violence stemmed from a shooting earlier that morning involving two groups of students from different neighborhoods, said a spokesperson for the Cook County prosecutor's office. When school ended, members of the groups began fighting near the Agape Community Center.
During the attack, captured in part on a bystander's cellphone video, Albert is struck on the head by one of several young men wielding wooden planks. After he falls to the ground and appears to try to get up, he is struck again and then kicked. Authorities said Albert was a bystander and not part of either group. Prosecutors have charged Silvonus Shannon, 19, Eugene Riley, 18, Eric Carson, 16, and Eugene Bailey, 18, with first-degree murder.
In a terrible case of bad timing, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark to lobby hard for the 2016 Olympics to come to the Windy City. Here was part of Mr. Obama's pitch: "One of the legacies I want to see coming out of the Chicago 2016 hosting of the Games is a reminder that America at its best is open to the world," he said. "We are putting the full force of the White House and the State Department to make sure that not only is this a successful Games, but that visitors from around the world feel welcome and will come away with a sense of the incredible diversity of the American people."
But, to date, the only thing President Obama, who made Chicago his adopted hometown thanks in part to his wife and Chitown native daughter Michelle, has said, has come through White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: "Chilling."
Yes, just one word. Chilling. And that response was only after a reporter asked about the murder of Derrion Albert. So the questions beg to be asked: Why was a sporting event more important than the human lives that are being routinely taken on the streets of Chicago? How could the president, on the one hand, chide fathers over a year ago for not taking more responsibility in the lives of their children and their communities, yet remain virtually silent on this tragic killing of Derrion Albert? Is Mr. Obama going to make a trip to Chicago to talk about the issue of youth violence, or, at the very least, give a speech on it and lay out an agenda to address this social ill plaguing our nation? Will Mr. Obama invite Derrion's mother to the White House, as he did Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley? And who, praytell, is going to make the people of Chicago feel welcome in their own neighborhoods, Olympic Games or not?
I am from inner-city America. I was born and raised there, and but for the grace of God, my mother's uncanny knack for survival and, yes, one incredible educational opportunity after another, I would not be writing this essay this very moment. And I am very clear that it was because of a combination of a movement by the people (the Civil Rights Movement) and the government response to that mass energy in the form of a sweeping legislative agenda, that ghetto children like me were able to attend quality schools, participate in meaningful afterschool programs, and have access to free breakfast and lunch programs that kept our eyes open and firmly on the prize.
But the 1980s crack era and Reagan administration reversals of many of those very minimal gains destroyed the fabric of our communities, ripped apart families, and, all these years later, has left a generation of Black and Latino young people, male and female alike, living their own versions of William Golding's Lord of The Flies. If you think I am exaggerating, then simply Google the video of the Derrion Albert beatdown. Only a people who have lost all hope, who have no sense of spirituality and the preciousness of human life, would resort to this kind of savagery, the pummeling or shooting of each other until death is there, sprawled on the ground, blood gushing from the head, as was the case with young Derrion.
Yes, the protests will come, the candles will be lit, and the eulogies will be sung. But the violence in Chicago, New York City, Oakland, New Orleans, and every other large American city will not end until we decide, individually and collectively, to make it end. And as President Obama pushed for the Olympics to come to Chicago, let us not forget that Los Angeles, after hosting the Games in 1984, saw an explosion of gang violence, and one of the worst riots in American history in 1992 on the heels of the infamous Rodney King verdict. No amount of gloss and fanfare can ever cover up the real work that needs to be done to give every single American, especially younger people, a sense of life, a sense of possibilities, a sense of real hope.
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Sources: Huffington Post, MSNBC, Fox Chicago, Youtube, Google Maps
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