For Tayshanna Murphy

The MANY weeps for Tayshanna “Chicken” Murphy.

May she forever rest in peace.

Young Ms. Murphy was in the 12^th grade at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers and was a nationally ranked guard on the girls basketball team. She was yet another rising star in Harlem who's brilliance and talent were needlessly extinguished.

If you haven't heard the sad news, this past Saturday night/Sunday morning at about 4 a.m. Tayshanna was murdered in the stairway of her home in the Grant Projects by trio of young thugs from the rival and nearby Manhattanville Houses.

What a horrible story of wasted potential and senselessly destroyed lives for our community.

This young woman's athletic talent and hard work would have given her options for a whole other life, and I feel terrible for her heart broken family, friends, classmates, coaches and teachers.

I have sadness, too for the families who loved the three 21-24 year old knuckle-heads who pointed their guns at Tayshanna Murphy and shot her dead.

At that time of night, all of these young people should have been safely home. The young men should have been exhausted from working meaningful jobs (that give them the respect they crave), or else they should have been studying and enjoying themselves safely on a college campus. Instead, they were being gangsta-thugs-- chasing and gunning down a girl (who may or may not have dissed them).

I always tell my kids that nothing good comes from them being out at all hours of night in the city that never sleeps, and then I hold my breath and PRAY they listen.

The powerlessness to protect our children feels overwhelming. While guns in the hands of so many of our young seems common (and shoutings happen everyday at ANY time of day)-- as a Black/Latino community, we cannot ever get used to losing our children to violence.

And it's also overwhelming for our youth to see too few options for escaping the worst our neighborhoods so readily offer them.

Problem is. . . No one is coming to save them from themseves unless we PARENTS step up and do a whole lot more teaching, loving, positive parenting and role modeling in our own homes. And that means each and every one of US who claim to love our Black & Brown children!

The government surely won't tell, nor teach our kids they can be more than thugs, rappers, fast-food clerks and maybe, if they are very lucky-- althletes. They don't love them and they care about them because of the Anglo-centric, capitalistic need to keep the underclass in place to fuel the highly profitable prison industrial complex, and maintain a low wage workforce who serve the needs of corporations and the elite.

Truth be told, our youth would have no access to guns if the government didn't want them to. We don't manufacture them, and we sure as hell don't pour our Black money into the pro-gun lobby.

By and large the NYC public schools have failed our youth, as have our religious institutions, and the cultural and community based programs that might have once shown them how to develope their potential in terms of the arts, sports, music, theater, and work-skill building, are either gone or hindered due to lack of funding.

As parents, we have to let our children know from when they are babies, all the way through adulthood, that they are loved and valued, and that we expect-- and demand nothing short of greatness and honor from them.

We alone have to teach them that every human being on earth, every single lifeform is God's (or Allah's or Jehovah's) meaningul work-- whether we like someone's looks, speech, actions, dress or personality-- or not. Taking a life or making it worthless only brings the wrath of hell and unhappiness down upon them for destroying what God created.

So here's another call to all the mothers, aunties, sisters and grandmas in NYC: ORGANIZE. It is up to us to do something. We must stop this violence with the power of our love. And through our vast numbers, we must begin to all practice the same thing in our homes. . . .that human life is VALUABLE.

We have to stop our children from dying. As a community, we all suffer their loss.

I see no better way to honor to this gifted child, and try to remedy this feeling of overwhelming powerlessness and grief, then to use our Safe Perimenter Project to raise funds in support of a "Tayshanna Murphy Memorial Scholarship" for students at Tayshanna's high school. I will contact Murray Bergtraum's Principal, PTA President, Parent Coordinator and the Murphy family to see if this would be acceptable.

(Check back for an update).

Meanwhile, please support the work of The Mothers' Agenda NY (aka The MANY).

As a grassroots group of NYC mothers, community women and Black/Latino and White female school teachers, we are fighting like hell to educate, promote human rights and do our best to save our kids from more of this senselessness.

www.wearethemany.com