Violence roils black funeral parlors
Clarence Glover has a surveillance camera in the chapel of his http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3936 home. Joseph Garr sometimes carries a revolver in his hearse. Carl Swann Jr. is contemplating leaving the business.
The three directors of black funeral parlors here have been assaulted at services and each has had gunshots fired during burials. Concealed weapons, pre-funeral intelligence briefings, cameras, panic buttons and armed security guards are becoming as much a part of services as the eulogy.
“I’ve been in this business 42 years and I’m jittery now,” Mr. Glover says.
Across the country, black morticians are changing the way they operate. The reason: a spike in African American murders — and the violence that sometimes follows victims to the grave. In an echo of more volatile parts of the world, such as http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1654, African-American morticians report seeing an increase in violent behavior, and occasional killings, at funerals.The violation of the once-sacrosanct funeral is one byproduct of a little-noticed upswing in the murder rate of African-Americans. The number of blacks killed in America, mostly by other blacks, has been edging up at a time when the rate for other groups has been flat or falling.
As a result, the black murder-victim toll exceeds that of the far larger white population. According to the most recent statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the number of whites murdered dropped slightly, to 6,956 from 7,005 between 2004 and 2006. The number of blacks killed rose 11%, to 7,421 from 6,680.
African-Americans, who make up 13% of the population, have long had a higher homicide rate than other groups. And the total number of black murders is still significantly lower than in the early 1990s, when the U.S. was hit by a wave of drug-related killings. At that time, though, “funeral homes used to be the most respected places you could walk into beside the church,” says Jeff Gardner, a co-owner of A.D. Porter & Sons in Louisville, Ky., and a third-generation undertaker. “Nobody respects life and the young folks nowadays don’t mind dying.”
What worries law enforcement, criminologists and sociologists is that there’s no unifying theme to explain today’s increase. Some killings are drug related. Researchers trace others to a glut of ex-felons re-entering society. Others correlate the rise in murders to the lack of a proper education.
Black funeral homes, long a fixture of African-American communities, offer a stark perspective from which to view the trend. There are no comprehensive statistics on assaults or other crimes at funerals. And the violence has not touched all black communities. Still, the topic has become a hot one in the industry.
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