When even having a father is not enough

They laid Newark Special Police Officer Dwayne Reeves,35, to rest yesterday, amid the skirl of bagpipes and the tears and salutes of family, neighbors and more than 1,000 fellow officers from as far away as Puerto Rico. A thousand neighbors lined the streets outside New Hope Baptist Church in the 97-degree weather as Red Cross workers handed out water bottles and treated people for heat exhaustion. Dignitaries sang his praises, fellow mourners held up his young widow as she looked at her husband's face one last time, and one of his young daughters twirled in the aisles in a pretty pink dress.


Reeves was shot to death outside of a city high school July 18, as he tried to break up a fight involving two female summer school students. His partner, Akia Scott, 26, was wounded. Khalil Tutt, 26, of Newark, New Jersey, who is referred to by the police as Omar Tindell, has been charged with murder, along with Hassan Reeds, 32. Tutt had been called to the scene by his sister, one of the girls in the fight. Both Tutt and Reeds are reputed members of the Bloods gang according to news reports. Both men have been arraigned on first-degree murder and weapons charges. Convictions could lead to 30-year jail terms.

At Reeves' funeral, Rev. Leslie Jones said the slain officer's blood cries out from the ground, "No more violence, no more pain." The cruelest irony in the death of Dwayne Reeves is that by all accounts, he became an officer and went to work in the schools because he wanted to help and protect young people. He and his partner were attacked by men who were close enough to their ages to have gone to school with them, who had rushed to the scene in a stolen ride, ostensibly to protect a young person. But like CJ, the amoral protagonist from the popular videogame, Grand Theft Auto, Khalil Tutt's idea of protecting his family involved gratuitous violence.

Tutt has an arrest record going back seven years, for as many as 10 different offenses ranging from drug dealing to racketeering and attempted murder, using eight different aliases, according to a story in the Newark Star-Ledger. In fact, Tutt is not even being charged under his real name, but under the name Omar Tindell, which really belongs to his cousin, according to the Star-Ledger, or to someone else.

Law enforcement officials wonder why someone with such an extensive arrest record was on the streets, and Acting New Jersey Governor Richard Codey has ordered an investigation. According to news reports Tutt beat the most recent charges against him -- attempted murder -- when a key witness against him changed her story, citing fears of gang retaliation. He was expected to stand trial on racketeering charges later this year.

But that is only the beginning of the questions surrounding the actions of the one-time conscientious student and basketball prospect. The most common explanation when a young black man goes wrong is "father absence." As columnist William Rasberry put it:

"Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing its children (boys especially, but increasingly girls as well) to school failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship — and to an intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle."

While there is no denying the importance of fathers, it does not explain Khalil Tutt's descent into a life of crime. The Star-Ledger article profiling him (why libel the real Tindell?) notes that he came from a stable, hardworking two-parent family, and had, from an early age, displayed the talent and drive to earn a basketball scholarship to college. Despite the encouragement he received, something turned him toward the streets in high school, friends, former teachers and family report, although his relatives don't believe that he is guilty in this instance.

Of course, any generalization has its exceptions, and Tutt's behavior may have nothing to do with any of the troubling sociological trends that plague our communities.

But as I read Jeffrey Tutt's description of his family, I found myself reminded of the adolescent disdain that writer Nathan Mc Call expressed toward his hardworking stepfather in his 1995 memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America. Mc Call said he didn't respect or understand the compromises that his father made in order to earn the money to buy his family a home and a middle class life in Portsmouth, Va.


Mc Call was in the first wave of black students to attend integrated Southern schools, and he grew to resent white people with a passion. He particularly hated watching his father be solicitous toward the wealthier whites who patronized his landscaping business. Instead of seeing his father as a role model, Mc Call adopted a father figure from the movies: Ron O'Neal's "Superfly" a drug dealer who decides to settle some scores before getting out of the game. Watching O'Neal play out the 70s version of prototypical bad black man, Stagolee fueled McCall's revenge fantasies and helped him and his peers fashion themselves as bad boys. Never mind that the makers of Superfly, and most assuredly the composer of its soundtrack, Curtis Mayfield, intended to convey an anti-drug message. Mayfield said of his work:

Our purpose is to educate as well as to entertain. Painless preaching is as good a term as any for what we do. If you're going to come away from a party singing the lyrics of a song, it is better that you sing of self-pride like 'We're a Winner' instead of 'Do the Boo-ga-loo!'"

When scholar Cecil Brown traced the origins of the Stagolee legend, he not only found the 1895 murder case on which the song is most likely based, but also stunning paralells between the lives of the real black folk at the turn of the century and today's urban dwellers. Then, as now, black people were unsure of their future as a changing economy and a resurgent conservatism laid waste to the hope of Reconstruction. The black middle class was politically divided and corrupt machine politics further poisoned efforts to uplift the community. In fact, the real Stagolee, Lee Shelton, was a pimp and gang leader with connections to the Democratic Party, born in Texas in the year of emancipation, and doing business in St. Louis.

The man he killed in a barroom argument, Billy Lyons, was the son of a prominent saloon order with strong connections to the dominant Republican Party. Their argument started over politics, but just as some young black men kill each other over a pair of sneakers today, Preston killed Lyons because Lyons took his Stetson hat. Preston would use his political connections to help him stay out of prison, although he eventually died there in 1912, and passed into pop culture immortality.

One of the many differences between 1895 and 2005, however, is that Lee Shelton and his values did not represent most black folks' understanding of the path to success. Today, the picture is more confused. It's instructive for me to think about the two breakthrough roles played by this year's hottest black actor, Terrence Dashon Howard. In "Crash," Howard, a pillar of the black bourgeoisie, is forced to watch a white cop molest his wife, played by Thandie Newton. In "Hustle and Flow," he plays a pimp trying make it as a rapper.

Howard said that his own tough upbringing and sometimes-thwarted ambitions helped him identify with "Hustle's" character, DJay -- so much so that it ruined his marriage for a time. But Howard told an interviewer that playing the scene in Crash which Thandie Newton is violated made him question himself:

I was trying my hardest not to cry standing there. Instead of me literally trying to cry - another actor might be trying to cry - I was trying not to cry. I was trying not to be afraid. And I caught myself at a moment trembling that wow, does this person really live inside of me? Would I allow anything like that to happen?

Indeed, it seems the predominant media image of a black man who becomes successful through education and hard work is of an emasculated Babbitt in black face -- unsure of himself, and of limited use to anyone. Against that media landscape, black parents who are trying to raise their children to resist the fools' gold of the Stagolee myth face staggering odds. The hook in DJay's composition in "Hustle" is, "You know it's hard out here for a pimp," but I would argue that it's even harder for black men who are trying to do the right thing in the face of a culture -- from the boardroom to the streets -- that makes heroes of modern-day Stagolees.

Khalil Tutt seems to have chosen to be a bad man despite the best efforts of his family, his coaches and even Dwayne Reeves. The real lesson of his life may be that while a strong family is a start, it's not enough. Just as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 caused many young people to join the armed forces, to protect the United States, we need a new volunteer army to take our communities back from the Khalil Tutts and Hassan Reeds. And that war can't just be fought on the streets -- it has to be waged in the media as well.