Emancipation is hard to celebrate when kids are still slaves to city’s violence
washingtonpost.com | Apr 17, 2011
Whatever the Promised Land was that Martin Luther King Jr. saw before his assassination 43 years ago this month, those parts of the city where Jackson and hundreds of his contemporaries lived and died were definitely not it.
Ra-Heem was one of eight black people slain in the District and neighboring Prince George’s County in a recent 10-day stretch. Funerals for four of them were held in the city last week. Now comes the Passover Seder, on Monday, marking the start of the Jews’ ancient journey out of bondage. The story, as chronicled in the Book of Exodus, has made for a unique bond between Jews and African Americans.But after this latest surge of killings, I can’t help but wonder if the deadly spirit that “passed over” the children of Israel and took the first-born of their oppressors has somehow reappeared and descended on the sons of black folks with a vengeance.
