Content area
Full Text
Joan Andersson is a former member of the Guild Practitioner editorial board.
Elaine Brown, former head of the Black Panther Party, has written a book that seethes with rage over the terrible conditions to which many African-Americans have been relegated. She describes in great detail how each of the factors which should be in place to guide and protect a young child's development were utterly missing in the case of a thirteen-year-old African-American boy currently sentenced as an adult to life imprisonment. Brown argues that Little B is not alone--the United States has created a permanent underclass of black people who share the degradation in which Little B lives. She places the blame for these conditions on a wide variety of people and institutions, including black people who have attained great success as individuals, but have failed to fight for the majority of their people left behind in the ghettos of the inner cities.
The story of Little B takes place in "Black Mecca," as some blacks have called Atlanta. That it is the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement adds poignancy to an already tragic story. Michael Lewis, or Little B as he is known, was born to a crack addicted mother and father. At the time the murder was committed, Little B, thirteen years old, lived nowhere. He had no one looking after him, and in fact he was the only person his younger half sister could rely on. His mother had been declared unfit a few years ago and after being taken in by a friend of his mother, he was soon declared a ward of the state. Nevertheless his two-year truancy from school was ignored, and he was left to fend for himself in the crime- ridden, drug-drenched neighborhood he called home. Prior to his arrest for the murder of an adult black man, Little B had a record of petty brushes with the law but had never been charged with a violent crime. Brown suggests that had an adult committed the murder, it would have been ignored by the public and the press as just another black on black crime, which was old news in the ghetto. It was Little B's age that inspired the mountains of press, which...