Clementine Barfield declared war on violence the day it claimed two of her sons as victims, killing one of them.
The day was a hot, sunny one in July 1986. Every year is a violent one for children in Detroit, so much so that the city’s daily newspapers run tallies of the hundreds of juvenile gunfire victims. But that year Detroit led the country in youth killings, with its children dying at more than triple the average rate for the nation’s 10 largest cities. A record 365 youngsters were shot, 43 of them fatalities.
Barfield never expected her children to be among them. Even though her 16-year-old son, Derick, had attended three funerals of friends so far that year, she didn’t think the violence permeating the city ever could seep into her snug northwest Detroit home in the Mumford High School area. “I had no idea that the violence was as pervasive as it was,” she says. “I certainly had no concept that anything like that would happen to any of us. I mean, things like that don’t happen to the good guys. They happen to bad people. I used to think there was a dividing line. I know there isn’t now.”
Barfield crossed a line of awareness when she stepped into the hospital room where Derick lay on a gurney with two gunshot wounds in his head and chest. “He didn’t look dead,” she says. “He just looked like he was asleep. I didn’t know the machines they had on him were making him breathe and everything. But he looked the same. Six feet, five inches tall, and strong. He was an athlete, a basketball player. He was going to make the pros, buy a big car and big house for his momma. That was always his dream. . . . “Yeah, he looked the same-except for this great big bullet hole in his head.”
Though still attached to life-support machines, Derick had been killed instantly. His 15-year-old brother, Roger, recovered from his wound, although a bullet remained lodged near his spine. The boys had been shot by a teenager who fired four rounds into their car.
“I look at it like there’s nothing I can do to change (Derick’s dying),” she said, “but there is something I can do to change what we have left for my own children and the rest of the children. If I do something to save another child, then it’s like I haven’t lost my own child in vain. His life meant something. If, because of him, we can save another child, another hundred children, another thousand children, another million children, then it all means something.”
What Barfield did, in early 1987, was organize hundreds of bereaved parents, community leaders and concerned citizens into the now nationally renowned antiviolence group Save Our Sons and Daughters. The group not only counsels bereaved families and child survivors of shootings, but also attempts to channel their grief into action with vigils, marches, rallies and lobbying for gun control. Its focus is on education, with its staffers and volunteer members going into public schools to teach children peacekeeping and violence-prevention tactics.
The group has a staff of eight but claims to have hundreds of dues-paying members and volunteers. The organization has counseled 500 families so far, but its greatest accomplishment probably has been to arouse public awareness of the epidemic of youth violence in Detroit. Its annual memorial vigils for slain youths attract thousands of people. More than 5,000 people turned out in 1989 when the group organized a six-mile human chain around Belle Isle, a city park on an island in the Detroit River.
Save Our Sons and Daughters has become a major force for change in the city, and, according to youth violence expert Deborah Prothrow-Stith assistent dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, a model of community-based organizing for the rest of the country.
To Barfield, the group’s greatest impact is inspiring people throughout the country to mobilize against urban violence. Save Our Sons and Daughters has chapters in Washington, D.C., and Fresno, Calif., but its emphasis has been on helping people to create their own organizations, “to start their own movements,” as Barfield says, “and do what is needed in their own communities. To me, changes need to come from the bottom up anyway.”
Barfield, 43, is a force in her own right. She has been honored by former Presidents Bush and Reagan, lionized in the national press, interviewed on CNN and the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” To Detroiters, she is almost as familiar a figure as Mayor Coleman A. Young and a symbol of empowerment to some. Perhaps her greatest accolade was to have been compared to civil rights hero Rosa Parks as a catalyst in the anti-violence movement.
All rather heady stuff for a woman born in a four-room, tin-roof shanty on a Mississippi Delta farm, the 13th of Tolbert and Malinda Chism’s 15 children. When their house burned down, her father quit the land and moved his family to Detroit, where he went to work as a janitor. Malinda Chism, a licensed foster-care mother, took in yet more children. “She was always the neighborhood mother,” Barfield says. “No matter where we lived, she always drew people to her, you know? The winos, the helpless, the hopeless. She was the person who gave people hope. Some people are just imbued with that gift, that strong spiritual self, where they have enough to give and never stop giving. She was everybody’s mother.”
Barfield has never seen herself as anything more than a good mother, struggling like millions of others to scratch out a living and a better chance for her children. “There was never a limit to what I’d do for my children, and there still isn’t,” she says. “I just have more children now.”
Married at 17 to a young Baptist minister, John Barfield, she was divorced 10 years later. She returned from Long Island, N.Y., where her husband had been posted, to her home in Detroit with her daughter and three sons. For the next several years she held two or three jobs and tried myriad home marketing schemes to make ends meet. Meanwhile, she studied nights and weekends to earn a college degree.
Barfield eventually got a job as a city finance clerk, which she held for 14 years. Until last year, the city continued to pay her a salary after she left to found Save Our Sons and Daughters. During those hardscrabble years, she says, “I was just concerned with making sure the children had a decent home to live in and opportunities for the future. I did not realize, I really didn’t, that I needed to be concerned with keeping them alive.”
She was out on a city workers’ strike and attending a union rally downtown the day her sons were shot. The atmosphere was festive as thousands convened outside the city-county building in support of the strike. Barfield was walking the picket line, catching up with old acquaintances, when she was summoned over a loudspeaker. She found her brother standing next to a police officer. Both of them struggled to break the news; it came out in bits and pieces.
A crowd of friends pressed in, asking, “What’s wrong? What did he say?” Barfield responded, numbly, “One of my boys was shot.”
“No,” the officer corrected her. “Two of them.”
“I wanted to think that they’d been shot in the hand or leg or foot,” Barfield says. “I didn’t want to think that it might be fatal.” But at some level of consciousness, Barfield knew Derick was dead.
“I wasn’t crying or screaming or any of that, because I had known my son was going to die. Almost a year before he was killed, I had had this vision that he was going to die. It was more than an instinct or feeling; I just knew. He and I had talked about this. We could talk about anything. I told him to be very careful, not to take any chances or get into any arguments because I had this feeling that something bad was going to happen to him. . . . “
Derick was the family’s leader, playful and antic, as Barfield describes him, but also wise beyond his years, an “old soul” to whom everyone turned. That’s what his brother Roger did, telling Derick how he had been accosted the previous day at summer school by a classmate brandishing a gun. Derick, as Barfield later learned, wanted to defend his brother by beating the boy up. So the next day, he, Roger and their elder brother John piled into their car and headed for Northwestern High School looking for the boy.
On their way, the Barfields spotted another teenager whom they believed had supplied the boy they were seeking with his gun. “Let’s ride over there and beat him up,” Derick said, according to the court records. They pulled into a gas station as Jessie Harrison, then 18, was cutting across the lot with a group of friends. Derick called him over to the car. As Harrison came forward, he reached for a pistol tucked beneath the elastic band of his sweatpants.
“Why are you reaching for your heater?” Derick asked, according to the court records.
“Because you all rode up on me to talk,” the boy said. “If you want to talk, talk.”
“Do you know how to use your gun?,” Derick asked.
“Yes,” Harrison replied. And then he opened fire, shooting Derick between his eyes and again in his chest and Roger in the back of his neck.
At his trial for second-degree murder, Harrison’s defense attorney argued that the Barfield boys were the aggressors because they had gone to the gas station looking for a fight. The jury agreed, convicting Harrison of the lesser charges of reckless use of a firearm and use of a firearm during a felony. Harrison got out of prison after 3 1/2 years, but he wasn’t on the streets for long. Another jury sent him back to prison for his part in a drug-war assassination attempt.
Harrison’s light sentence didn’t anger Barfield; the continuing violence does. No matter what her group’s success, kids are still killing kids. Almost 300 children are shot every year in the city.
The statistics are numbing, and many people’s response is to shove them from consciousness. Barfield’s is to never let people forget. “As long as I have the energy and the mind to do it, I’m going to keep doing this work and challenging people to get involved,” she says. “Because there’s a need. Somebody has got to speak for the children. Somebody has got to work at trying to create a safe, nuturing environment for the children.
“This isn’t just about me and mine. See, I have a whole lot of children now; I have a world of children. I’m able to think of every child out there as though it were my very own. And I think that’s what everybody is going to have to do to really change the way things are. You’ve got to look at every child and think of it and treat it as though it were your very own.”
