Looking out: 3919 South Federal

June 15, 1994
Issue 

By Brandon Astor Jones

[African-Americans] ... must not make the mistake of the German Jews, who assumed that if the German nation received some of them as intellectual and social equals, the whole group would be safe. It took only a psychopathic criminal like Hitler to show them their tragic mistake. [African-Americans] ... may yet face a similar tragedy. [We] ... should prepare for such an eventuality. — William Edward Burghart Dubois

The address at the head of this column belongs to a building that is 19 stories high, one block wide and two blocks long. The elevator rarely works; and, no matter how young or old you are, walking up its two stairwells is both physically and emotionally hazardous.

In those two stairwells an unsuspecting visitor is very likely to find a potpourri of feuding drug pedlars and their lookouts, along with a few local crap shooters and an assortment of other equally well-armed young men and women more than willing to accost strangers who venture therein. It is not uncommon to find people dead or dying in those stairwells.

I can remember walking up and down those putrid corridors of ascending and descending tangles of concrete and steel several times a day without encountering anyone. However, nowadays, I'm told, the stairwells have become violent no man's lands. Especially when the elevator is not working, this renders the residents at 3919 South Federal virtual prisoners in their own homes. Such is life, if you want to call it that, for the residents of Robert Taylor Homes (RTH), one of many of the Chicago Housing Authority's low-income housing projects.

On April 21, 1994, President Bill Clinton sent a group of high-ranking White House officials to RTH. Their mission was and is to find a way to "sweep" through RTH's individual apartments in a Gestapo-like search and seizure fashion aimed at uncovering and confiscating illegal caches of drugs and weapons. The idea, it seems, is to do that without denying RTH residents their constitutional rights, not the least of which, clearly stated under Amendment IV, is: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause ..." There is no way for such searches and seizures to legally take place without proper individual warrants, or the individual resident's permission being given.

Isn't it interesting and unfortunate that a large portion of America's most brilliant legal minds are now marshalled into a kind of ad hoc presidential think-tank to find a way to break the constitutional laws of the land?

Sadly, but equally worthy of note is that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if those young men and women living in and around RTH had access to decent jobs that paid them enough money to feed, house and clothe their families, the vast majority of them would be at work instead of living and dying in and around the stairwells of RTH.

I'm four square for the removal of the drugs and weapons trafficking that reduces the likes of RTH to free world prisons, but Gestapo tactics will not remove them. Such tactics will only entrench them more. Meanwhile, my greatest fear is that one day the words of the late great W.E.B. Dubois may turn out to be prophecy instead of past social commentary.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]

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