The Chicago Tsuami Crime Wave/ Dreams Deferred Exploding

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

So last weekend, again I was ensconced in Chicago’s  well fortified Hyde Park. But it wasn’t far enough to hide from the weekend crime tsunami.  Forty Blacks and Browns shot and six killed in a two day period, including 16 year old Joseph Briggs.  During the first wave of the tsunami two weeks ago, Briggs escaped one attempt on his life with a bullet to the shoulder. Well, last Saturday as I enjoyed a bomb fire at a University of Chicago graduation ceremony, blocks away the killers tracked Briggs to his grandmother’s doorstep and finished the job. 

We all know “Black on Black” violence is older than a pair of original Air Jordans and with our transformed American economy, this violence is increasingly and ridiculously lucrative, after all some one has to build and supply all those prisons. But what’s new is that desperately poor Black youths are no longer just wrecking havoc with flash violent episodes of public wilding in the "safe confides of the "hood", similar to what claimed the life of 16 year old honor student Derrion Albert who was stomped and beaten with a railroad plank by other youths outside of his High School,  but are now taking public transportation to white areas where the money is.

Last Saturday gangs of inner city youth attacked people, including tourists, outside of the Chicago Jazz Fest.  And Sunday night a group of youth savagely beat and robbed a man on Chicago’s Gold Coast. The good news is that one eighteen year old was arrested. The bad news is that seventeen of the youths remain on the streets with valid CTA fair cards and the public school aren’t even out for the summer.

A new form of urban math is needed to explain this phenomenon, expressed as Rapidly Expanding Inner City Job Deserts (TIMES)  The Increasing Prison Population( MINUS Educational Opportunities in Prison (EQUALS) Frequent Explosive Violence.

I predict this summer is gonna be the summer of years and years of Black Dreams Deferred finally exploding.  

This summer, 96% of young Black men in Chicago between 16 and 19 years old are unemployed.

Only 46% of Black males graduate with a high school diploma from Chicago public schools.

Only three out of 100 Black boys who start kindergarten in the Chicago Public Schools earn a bachelors degree by age 25.

70% of Black children in America are born into and live in single, female-headed households that are usually impoverished.

Black males are 6% of Illinois’ population but they represent 63% of the state’s prison population.