Alex Kotlowitz

On a snowy Thursday, March 2, Craig Davis was on his way to a friend’s house to pick up two turntables and speakers for a dance the following evening at which he was going to DJ.

On the way he was spotted with some friends and pursued by a policeman and an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The Treasury Dept. official, Richard Marianos, caught up to Davis and held his revolver close to Davis skull when Davis struggled to escape.

The revolver fired into the back of Davis’s skull. The bullet fragmented through both hemispheres of the brain. Davis died shortly after receiving emergency care at Mount Sinai Hospital, where Davis had been born.

Now so far in this story I have left out four key facts as recounted in Alex Kotlowitz’ remarkable story “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys growing Up in the Other America.”

Davis was black. This took place in the mean streets of Chicago. It happened in 1989. And to this day, I believe, nobody has taken responsibility for Davis’ death, an event we would barely have heard about. It merited one paragraph in the back pages of a Chicago newspaper.

The reason Kotlowitz chose to highlight the death in his story was for the psychological impact it had on one of the two boys in his story, Lefeyette Rivers.

The conditions under which these children lived in a Chicago public housing project were quite plainly, horrifying. It was as evil and gross as any description of poverty including the New York classic, “How the other Half Lives,” by journalist Jacob Riis back in the 19th century.

It was also before the notorious Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1991, and long before the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the demonstrations we experience today in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.

There is no better time to memorialize the fallen, and no better time than the present to excoriate society for so heinously forgetting that Black Lives Matter.… (mere)