On Thursday, The Trace published the first in a series of three stories about the toll of gun violence on Black residents of Philadelphia, reported by Mensah M. Dean. The series starts with a closer look at the roots of gun violence in Philadelphia’s Black community, which was first studied in depth in the late 19th century by renowned sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. The second part, out tomorrow, looks at how gun violence travels through multiple generations, highlighted by the story of Movita Johnson-Harrell, whose harrowing life has been defined by the murders of her father, her brother, and her two sons. The third and final story, out on Friday, delves into the irrefutable link between poverty and gun violence. As the series kicked off on Thursday, Dean wrote a sidebar about why he felt it was necessary. “No matter how bad gun violence spikes or how much it declines in Philadelphia, African Americans lead all other racial groups among those who’ve been shot and those who’ve done the shooting,” Dean writes. “Put another way, homicide was the fifth leading cause of death for Black people in Philadelphia from 2017 through 2023; for white people, it wasn’t even among the 10 leading causes of death during those years, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Heath.”
“I’ve been acutely aware of this reality my entire career as an African American journalist, which began in the fall of 1993 as the night police reporter for a Washington, D.C., newspaper,” writes Dean, who started at The Trace in 2022 but has lived in Philadelphia since 1997, covering education, courts, city government, communities, and criminal justice issues for the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer. “Elected and appointed leaders and their anti-violence programs come and go, but in Philly and many cities like it with large Black populations, Black lives are the most in peril from gun violence — year in and year out,” he writes. “That’s why I wanted to look behind the headlines and soundbites to shed light on why this is so, and to put the steady carnage in a proper historic context. I hope this series will impress upon readers that normalizing higher-than-average gun violence in the Black community is an abnormal response, one that needs to be challenged by each one of us.”
Comments