Monday ceremony offered thoughtful, moving words about senseless violence

There was an unusual funeral motorcade in Columbus Monday morning. There were multiple hearses, but no caskets. The processional ended not at a cemetery or chapel, but at the Columbus Civic Center.

This wasn’t a ceremony mourning the death of one person, but many. Too many, too often, and too young.

As reported by staff writer Alva James-Johnson, members of the predominantly African-American Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and five local funeral homes organized the event to protest and mourn the rash of black-on-black violent crime that has shattered so many lives and families in Columbus.

The makeup of the group was grimly appropriate. Funeral directors and ministers have had to see too many torn bodies of victims, too much wrenching grief of loved ones, in the horrible aftermath of more of these senseless killings than anybody should have to deal with.

Many of these murders are committed against — or by — children: “Age-wise, they’re getting younger and younger,” said Taylor Funeral Home owner Evone Taylor. “It’s males, poor, under-educated families that his is happening to.”

The IMA’s president, the Rev. Ralph Huling, attributed the violence to “vigilante activities” that lead to “anarchy,” and indeed, the stories that emerge after these youth killings are frequently the bleakly familiar pattern of one murder that leads to the next, that leads to the next, that will all too likely lead to another. Huling said the group gathered to urge the community “back to civility, back to the point where we used to love and care about one another and realize that we are our brothers’ keepers.”

What went uncommented on, but almost certainly not unconsidered, is the reality of how much collateral damage — often measurable in still more human lives — such violence can inflict. Not every victim of a violent crime is an intended target, which makes the outcome not one bit less tragic.

To the Rev. Johnny H. Flakes III of Fourth Street Baptist Church, neither the problem of violent crime nor the solution can be just matter of demographic or economic circumstances.

“We have to get the heart transformed,” Flakes said at Monday’s news conference. “We have to get the mind transformed … it’s not just a material poverty problem; there is a morality and a spiritual deficit that’s going on within our community.”

Huling said the rash of homicides in the black community “is our problem … it’s going to be us that have to come up with a solution.”

It was IMA member Edward Dubose, who served multiple terms as Columbus Chapter president and later Georgia State Conference president of the NAACP, who perhaps put the tragedy in the most personal and poignant context: “I envision my children burying me,” DuBose, said, “not me burying my children.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 4:45 PM with the headline "Monday ceremony offered thoughtful, moving words about senseless violence."