St. Louis CofCC Blog

At an alternative technology/entrepreneurship high school in the inner city. The suspect, a 14-year old suspended student from the school, killed himself.

From the pictures and words in the article, this seems to be a mostly black school. However, look at this picture:

This is a victim giving the thumbs-up to onlookers. That looks to be a white thumb, and his bald head is light-skinned as well. So either he’s white, or very high yellow. If he is white, and the shooter is black, I’m suspecting racial hate as a motive.

Otherwise, from the article:

“It’s a shining beacon for the Cleveland Metropolitan School System,” said John Zitzner, founder and president of E City Cleveland, a nonprofit group aimed at teaching business skills to inner-city teens. “It’s orderly, it’s disciplined, it’s calm, it’s focused.”

Maybe it was, but it wasn’t three of those four things today.

The school, opened five years ago, ranks in the middle of the state’s ratings for student performance. Its graduation rate is 94 percent, well above the district’s rate of 55 percent.

This means that a high school in inner city Cleveland, that is essentially a magnet school, and can probably be selective in student admission (if not, then it still has the advantage of a self-selecting aristocracy), can only get to Ohio statewide average on student achievement.

UPDATE 11 PM:  Scratch all that.  The 14-year old gunman, ironically named Asa H. Coon, was white.

“I wholeheartedly agree with the Council of Conservative Citizens in their quest to speak out for this great and wonderful country. It is about time we spoke out!” — Dapper O’Neil, in 1999.

The Boston Herald profiles former Boston City Council member Albert “Dapper” O’Neil in the years following his retirement from politics.

You can send Mr. O’Neil a get-well card to:

Dapper O’Neil
Care Of Deutsches Altenehim Rest Home
2222 Centre Street, Room 204
West Roxbury, MA 02132

Today:  30,726
Yesterday:  30,699

Boston Herald:

Clergy and Hub leaders are demanding action after a 13-year-old church-going Dorchester boy became an innocent victim of reckless city gunplay, warning that the community faces an “urban nightmare” if it doesn’t fight back now.

“It takes a tragedy like this for the community to wake up to what’s been happening,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, director of the Ten Point Coalition and a friend of the victim’s family. “This has got to be a moment of mobilization. If we don’t mobilize now, then we are going to plunge into an urban nightmare the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

Mayor Thomas M. Menino echoed that sentiment yesterday at a press conference with Police Commissioner Edward Davis.

“We need to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” Menino said. “We can take back the streets and start a new era of hope.”

Really?  If I’ve heard this canard once, I’ve heard it more than a hundred times.

It’s not that anything they ever do to “stand up” and “fight back” ever works, but I would like to know where all this indignation is after black-on-white crimes.