No Holiday From Tragedy

Mother's Day and Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist and educator who died last Sunday at age 90, are two subjects not usually mentioned in the same sentence. But tomorrow's celebration is a reminder that for some mothers, the day will not be filled with gifts and kisses. For women captured in a social prison that Clark presciently warned us about 40 years ago, it will be yet another bittersweet event.

Kenneth Clark, holder of bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University, and the first African American awarded a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, was best known for his landmark research into the corrosive effects of segregation on black children -- work that had an impact on the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision. But Clark's legacy, at least for me, is contained in his book "Dark Ghetto," which documented the painful and disturbing social truths, as opposed to statistics, about life in urban America.

Published in 1965, "Dark Ghetto" spoke courageously about the tragic, cruel and destructive forces at work in the black community. Through Clark's study of Harlem, which he considered to be a "symbol of Negro ghettos everywhere," the book exposed the reality of the torment, anguish and unpleasant facts of life in a world seen by the comfortable and powerful only through the safe media of newspapers, TV and the movies. Few heard or heeded Clark's voice at the time. Symptoms that Clark identified as afflicting America's dark ghettos in 1965 -- "low aspiration, poor education, family instability, illegitimacy, unemployment, crime, drug addiction and alcoholism, frequent illness and early death" -- remain with us in the nation's capital on Mother's Day 2005. In my line of work, every day seems to bring a reminder.

A few weeks ago, a Post building guard sought my help in finding a back issue of News Dimensions, a local weekly newspaper that she said contained her son's photograph. At first I thought she was looking for a story about his scholastic or athletic accomplishments. She wasn't. Her son's picture, she said, was among dozens of other published photos of victims of unsolved murders in the city. A couple of days later, the guard told me she had received a copy of the publication from the newspaper's editor, Valencia Mohammed. Mohammed and I first met when she served on the D.C. school board several years ago. She has lost two sons to D.C. street violence.

On April 25 a 16-year-old Ballou High School student riding in a car at 2 a.m. was shot to death. Another shooting victim, a 9-year-old boy, was buried this week. Each year, the number of murdered youths in the city rises, the victims get younger; many of the shooters are only kids themselves. The mothers of those victims don't get pampered on Mothers Day; they get to mourn.

Tomorrow Valencia Mohammed is hosting a mothers-only luncheon at the Frank Reeves Center in Northwest Washington to discuss the thousands of unsolved murders in the nation's capital and what is to be done about them. No fathers, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, grandparents or children are invited to the afternoon event. The mothers have been asked to wear or bring something belonging to their deceased child or children.

In a recent issue of News Dimensions newspaper, Mohammed wrote: "The Black community has become a self-cleaning oven. It rids itself of good people and bad people. It's kill or be killed or kill because you think that someone might get away with killing you."

Kenneth Clark saw it all coming. Decades before we reached our present-day debasement, Clark recorded how lives were becoming corroded, marginalized and stigmatized. He told us about what can happen to boys without a strong father figure on which to model their behavior; how boys without stable family relationships go on to have unstable relationships with many girls, showing no responsibility toward any; how those boys identify their masculinity with the number of girls they can get; and how boys confuse masculinity with sexual prowess.

Clark told us back then about the chronic, self-perpetuating institutional pathology in the dark ghetto, with its family and social instability and illegitimacy. He alerted us to the "pernicious drug and 'hustler' subcultures" that were beginning to flower in our community. He told us that crime will never be fully controlled by police vigilance alone; that if suicide is conceived of as aggression turned inward, homicide is the ultimate aggression turned outward.

He described in excruciating detail how the contagious sickness of a community with its neglect, abuse and abandonment of children can produce today's youthful deviants with guns in their hands. He warned against the unstated acceptance of crime and violence as normal for a black inner-city community. He said that if we really want to curb inner-city crime, we should get on with the work of "changing the conditions which tend to breed widespread violence" rather than focusing all attention on reforming the individual lawbreaker.

Forty years ago Clark put the spotlight on damaging behavior, behavior that shows up in teen pregnancies with, as he put it, "especially poignant and tragic clarity." He explained how the desperate yearning of young people for acceptance and identity and the need to be meaningful to someone, even for a moment, can lead to sex; how that yearning can lead a girl into a relationship in which she doesn't expect to hold the boy she's with; and can cause her to bear a child as a symbol of her womanhood and for the gain of having something of her own. We learned from Clark that for the girl in the ghetto, a child out of wedlock was no disgrace; that for her, given her status, it made little difference if she married the father, because in her eyes, his life wasn't leading him anywhere -- except toward the defiant, aggressive and self-destructive behavior we see today.

Clark examined the inner city's power structure -- politicians, churches, black press -- and found them sources of both clout and weakness in the community. Clark did not, however, write a "blame the victim" book. America's ghettos, he noted, were the handiwork of people beyond the black communities who had "learned the words and ideals of democracy" but had also learned the language and behavior of prejudice. His prescriptions, sprinkled through the book, have gone largely ignored.

The harsh consequences of what Kenneth Clark laid before us are now being realized. Which is why some women of Washington are gathering on Mother's Day under the slogan "Don't Let Your Child's Blood and Death Be for Nothing."

kingc@washpost.com