Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools

Brothers in Grief

Brothers in Grief

The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools

NORA GROSS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82087-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83620-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226836201.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gross, Nora, author.

Title: Brothers in grief : the hidden toll of gun violence on black boys and their schools / Nora Gross.

Other titles: Hidden toll of gun violence on black boys and their schools

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024009782 | ISBN 9780226820873 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226836201 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African American high school boys—Social conditions. | African American high school boys—Education—Social aspects. | School environment—United States. | Education, Secondary—Social aspects—United States. | Youth and violence—United States. | Grief—Social aspects—United States. | Psychic trauma—United States. | Educational sociology—United States.

Classification: LCC LC2779 .G76 2024 | DDC 373.18211089/96073—dc23/eng/20240403

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024009782

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To all the boys who grieve, and who are grieved for.

And to my sweet boy, who brings me so much joy.

I don’t know if I’m the same without you

It ain’t no gang without you

Birthdays ain’t the same without you

Christmas ain’t the same without you

I’ma represent your name when it’s ’bout you

QUAVO, WITHOUT YOU (2023)

I’m 18.

I play pick-up basketball games with ghosts.

Is there a reason, I’m making it out of a community that has martyred young men

I might be mistaken for?

I.

Don’t.

Know.

Will they ever call your death beautiful,

Your life a sacrifice,

A love story to be jealous of?

How many deaths will it take

Before this is considered genocide?

DEMETRIUS AMPARAN (AGE 17), NATE MARSHALL (AGE 18), AND DIANNA HARRIS (AGE 18), LOST COUNT: A LOVE STORY (2008)

Poem performed at the Brave New Voices youth poetry slam

Contents

Preface

One  I’ll Never Know My Last Time . . .  INTRODUCTION

Two  Silent Hallways, Shared Sorrow

Three  A School Prepared—And Not  THE EASY HARD

Four  Policing Grief  THE HARD HARD

Five  Disenfranchised Grief  THE HIDDEN HARD

Six  Long-Term Social Injury?  THE REPEATED HARD

Seven  From Grief to Grievance

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Appendix A | Glossary of Social Media Abbreviations, Slang, and Emojis

Appendix B | Participant Details

Notes

References

Index

Preface

In some sense, this book began in 2008 when, fresh out of college, I was a high school writing teacher on the West Side of Chicago. Two months into my first year, our community was rocked by the drowning deaths of three beloved students, AJ, Jimmy, and Melvin, on an overnight leadership retreat. The local headlines—Three Chicago teens die in Fox River boating tragedy—could never convey the impact of their deaths on the tightknit school community. Students, teachers, administrators all mourned together, held each other, and cried at three funerals. For the rest of the school year, most of us wore yellow rubber bracelets bearing the school’s mascot, the Phoenix, which symbolized our shared desire to rise from the ashes of what felt at times like unrelenting grief.

Although new to the school, I was already connected to all three boys; many of their friends were peer coaches at my Writing Center. The Monday after the three students’ funerals, the principal told me with a sympathetic smile that I had gone through baptism by fire, as if acknowledging that losing students was an unavoidable rite of passage for an urban teacher; it just didn’t usually happen this early in a career, or three at a time.

At twenty-two, I was the youngest teacher at the school. Though I had by no means led a sheltered life, I had experienced extreme privilege—growing up an only child with two professional parents, attending a private elementary school, an elite magnet public high school, an Ivy League college, and being white. I had been raised with an attentiveness to the challenges of poverty, homelessness, and racial injustice in my unequal city (New York) and beyond, and with a sense of responsibility toward bettering my communities. But I had not experienced these hardships myself and had mostly been shielded from the violence and untimely death that were already so familiar to my Black students. For several of these Chicago teens, these were by no means their first lost friends.

Even so, I was at the time grappling with my own first consequential experience of peer loss: the death of a close high school friend in a hiking accident. Perhaps sensitized by the chaos of my own still raw feelings of shock and grief, I became acutely conscious during the course of that year of the enduring, sometimes destructive, aftermath of premature peer deaths on my teenage students, layered on top of the many other injustices that had already shaped their young lives.

Certainly, some students, I noticed, seemed to gain strength and motivation from the losses, growing closer to each other, learning not to take their friends for granted, and feeling more determined to work hard for their futures. But others saw their friends’ deaths—especially because they were so unexpected and random—as yet another sign that they ought not to expect to make it out, that is, escape the risks and challenges of their Chicago neighborhood. The veneer of a college preparatory school could not protect them from either expected or unexpected dangers. Hard as they had striven to imagine and work for bright futures for themselves, many seemed now confirmed in the conviction that an early death likely awaited them too.

For years afterward, I reviewed the terrible days and weeks after AJ, Jimmy, and Melvin’s deaths, wondering what more the school, my colleagues, and I could have done to help these beautiful, traumatized children with so much potential, struggling to stabilize themselves after their calamitous loss. I also worried about how much the emotional toll of peer losses was unspoken and unacknowledged each new school year.

In 2013, those gnawing questions traveled with me to graduate school in Philadelphia, where the shooting deaths of young people were becoming a way of life in some parts of the city. Though gun violence was not at the forefront of my mind when I began my studies focused on the social contexts of urban education and adolescent boys’ inner lives, my experiences in Chicago had attuned me to the ideas of grief and loss as underexplored subtexts of school life for young people growing up in contexts of poverty and precarity. As the homicide rate steadily rose in my new home, so did the troubling feeling that surviving youth were suffering silently.

I have the tremendous privilege—which I imagine only some of my readers share—of not having to worry about my own risk of dying too early, whether by gun, by police, or by societal neglect of one sort or another. Only when gun violence, particularly mass shootings, dominates the news cycle do I feel its presence in my own life as an everyday potential danger. Will this place be the next target? Could this conversation be my last with this person? Public interactions feel heightened, goodbyes more loaded. But high-profile mass shooting incidents, while terrifying and tragic, account for a tiny fraction of US gun deaths, and I am among the lucky whose acute fears wane as the news cycles move on.¹

Yet, for so many kids across the country, gun violence has always been an everyday worry. When the headlines dwindle, their worries—and real risks—remain.

The longer I lived in Philadelphia, the more I came to see that reality. One summer day in 2016, I spotted the cover story of the local paper: a shooting that took the life of a fifteen-year-old near a basketball court just a mile or two from my campus. A week later, I heard from a former Chicago student about the gun death of another young man who had been a senior my first year of teaching. On social media, I watched the vigils and memorials, read the anguished posts from his friends, peers, and former classmates (many my former students). I began to ask: How was grief affecting their relationships, their aspirations, their ideas about themselves? My questions grew and expanded: What are peer deaths doing to our young people? What are they doing to their schools, their schooling, and their possibilities for the future?

I began looking for an appropriate site to begin an in-depth study of grief and schooling in the aftermath of neighborhood gun violence. I met with the head of a local Philadelphia nonprofit serving young adult men, who mentioned the basketball court shooting I had seen in the paper and offered to introduce me to a teacher at Boys’ Prep, the all-boys charter high school the victim had attended. Coincidentally, the very same day, a colleague made the same connection. Within a week I had a meeting with the school’s leader. Like me, Dr. Stephens worried about the Black teen boys who populated his school, many of whom he believed were still suffering deeply after the death of their friend. If I could answer my research questions about how grief shaped their experiences of and in school, I might be able to help. He warmly invited me in.

As my research plans took shape and I began to share them publicly, I was not always met with the same sense of importance and urgency that Dr. Stephens and I felt. I was told by at least one senior scholar that attempting to explain school experiences or achievement by looking at gun violence losses was like looking for a specific piece of hay in a large haystack: With so many challenges in urban education, why focus on this one specifically? Others encouraged me to seek out a white comparison group to strengthen my study. While I valued these perspectives, they missed the depth, breadth, and inequality of this problem. Grief for murdered friends was a form of suffering experienced by thousands of children across Philadelphia, and it impacted myriad dimensions of their social, emotional, and school lives. These impacts were concentrated for groups already marginalized by race and class and, up to this point, largely neglected by prior research. We academics are often quick to seek the bigger picture or a comparison, but there is insight to be gained in sitting with the complexity of individual human experience as it is—especially in corners that generally don’t get enough light.

Here I focus on a single school year, 2017–2018, during which one school was shaken to its core by the murders of at least three young people connected to the school, including two active students, one of whom had been a participant in my research. I tell the stories of the teenage boys alongside their teachers and school leaders as they navigated their grief and endeavored to continue pursuing their educational goals. Though this is the story of one year in one school, it represents a set of experiences faced by thousands of other young people and their school communities across the country amid a gun violence crisis that shows no signs of ceasing.

Generally, gun violence research and reporting concentrate on the victims—and, increasingly, those who survive their injuries. Another point of focus is the families. Sometimes, in the case of a school shooting, the school community itself receives public consideration or study. Such perspectives may also include the perpetrator, who may also have been the victim of other kinds of harm. But here, my eyes and ears were trained on another disturbingly large band of vulnerable people in the aftermath of a shooting, who are so often left out of the accounting on injury: the friends—the brothers in grief.

This book does not have all the answers, and certainly it does not have a solution for gun violence—one of the most urgent problems of this century. But, attention must be paid, as we know from that classic line in Arthur Miller’s play. And, instructively, attention is the beginning of devotion, as the poet Mary Oliver wrote. Witnessing and listening to the stories of these young people is a necessary step if we are to respond with compassion and urgency. The boys on these pages are your brothers, sons, nephews, friends, students. We cannot let ourselves be lulled into the feeling that their losses are normal or their grief tolerable. These boys deserve our attention, and our active devotion.

Chapter One

I’ll Never Know My Last Time . . .

INTRODUCTION

On Saturday afternoon of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Hazeem was in his room enjoying an unusual period of quiet at home and thinking about the future. Tall and a little lanky with dark brown skin and small rectangular glasses, Hazeem had a brooding quality. He would often sit on the margins of groups of boisterous boys in the school cafeteria, lost in thought or in the world of his phone. Now in his junior year, he seemed to enjoy proximity to several peer groups, but privately identified only a handful of close friends. In classrooms, Hazeem sometimes mumbled to himself or made crude jokes, not particularly endearing himself to his teachers. He found the schoolwork hard, regularly wondering if he could cut it.

Hazeem had been at Boys’ Prep since ninth grade. As its name implies, Boys’ Preparatory Charter High School is a school for boys—more specifically Black boys, mostly from low-income neighborhoods across Philadelphia—with the mission of preparing them for college and the social mobility expected to come from that path.

Hazeem wasn’t sure the school was the best fit for him. That afternoon, he made a post to Instagram with his ponderings: Yoooo I’ll be 18 next year wtf I gotta make my mind up cause I don’t even know what college I wanna go to or what I really wanna do. Perhaps he was hoping for encouraging comments or advice. Although he still talked constantly about his frustrations with the school’s singular focus on college, the uptight uniform and discipline policies, and the lack of girls—and regularly repeated his desire to transfer to cyber school—Hazeem had a new girlfriend who seemed to be a positive influence and he was starting to develop a more optimistic outlook about what could be next.

Less than an hour later, Hazeem picked up his phone to scroll through his feed and check for messages. He saw a post that confused him. He clicked the link, which took him to a news article. No fluff, straight to the point: police were called to an address; when they arrived, they were taken to the body of eighteen-year-old JahSun. According to investigators, [he] died from multiple gunshot wounds. JahSun’s name was misspelled, but the other facts lined up with what Hazeem had heard about his friend’s Thanksgiving plans to visit his sister out of town.

Hazeem didn’t know what to think. He clicked over to JahSun’s own Instagram page, looking for evidence that this was a mistake. He and JahSun had gotten closer that fall since they shared a lunch period and often sat at the same table. Though Hazeem was not a part of JahSun’s close crew of friends (many of them seniors and on the football team), the school was small enough that almost everyone knew each other. Peer hierarchies were limited, so even as a junior who did not play any sports, Hazeem could count on JahSun to give a friendly greeting in the hallway or reply to his online posts with motivating words. JahSun had always seemed happy to play the role of mentor to his younger schoolmates.

On JahSun’s Instagram page, Hazeem found corroboration of the news article. Several friends had already started adding comments on JahSun’s most recent post—uncertain messages like this can’t be real and please text me back, but also rest up and I love you for life. The details were still hazy, but the reality started to set in. JahSun had been shot. Murdered. He was dead.

Hazeem’s lazy holiday afternoon pondering the future was over. This moment would launch him, his teenage classmates, and his entire school community into a year of mourning that, for some, led to long-term wounds neither they nor their school had the tools to fully heal.

The Context of a School Year

The school year at Boys’ Prep had already been a trying one so far, with a new principal and other administrative changes; ongoing battles with the school board responsible for renewing the school’s charter; and the perennial fall challenge of incorporating a new class of freshmen—arriving with a range of levels of preparation for the academic and behavioral expectations—into the school culture. But by Thanksgiving, there was a sense that the school year at Boys’ Prep had found its rhythm. Both students and staff welcomed the four-day holiday, expecting it to help everyone rebuild their stamina for the final push to the semester’s end. No one expected the break to be interrupted by the shooting death of a student—let alone one like JahSun.

To understand how the school community responded to JahSun’s death, I need to explain the gruesome context: at Boys’ Prep that awful year, the murder of JahSun was bookended by two more student murders. While technically this was the first time in the school’s history that a student was killed during the school year, it was only sixteen months earlier that Tyhir, a rising Boys’ Prep sophomore, was gunned down after a neighborhood summer-league basketball game not far from the school. Tyhir was a popular and charismatic student, a budding musician, and a talented basketball player. He was shot by another teenager (not from the school) allegedly after a previous game had ended in a dispute over the score. The shooter unloaded into a group of boys affiliated with the team he thought had wronged him, injuring two and hitting fifteen-year-old Tyhir in the face. Tyhir would die within a few hours at a nearby hospital, as several of his friends gathered in the hospital parking lot.

Tyhir was mourned by many friends at school, including Hazeem—and JahSun himself. Teachers and staff also mourned the future Tyhir would never have and wondered if they had done enough to support his grieving friends, several of whom had transferred out of Boys’ Prep in the wake of their loss. Some who stayed seemed to have never fully recovered, now over a year later.

And in this new school year, JahSun’s death would not be the only loss students would have to cope with. The school would lose another cherished student, Bill, that spring—and this grief layered on top of grief for other loved ones beyond the school community, victims of gun violence as well as numerous other circumstances and illnesses born of systemic racism and the continued structural neglect of Black communities, families, and children. For the boys you will come to know in this book, the presence of early and unnatural death was a social fact of their lives. The tangible awareness of their own and their loved ones’ mortality was a given. As poet Claudia Rankine has written, The condition of Black life is one of mourning, and for Black boys growing up in cities where centuries of racism have birthed decades of gun violence, this mourning is chronic and acute.¹

At the same time, these boys attended a school that aimed to orient them toward a future of social mobility and mainstream success. Hallways and classrooms were filled with college banners. The staff included two college counselors and an alumni counselor. The school’s professional uniform, the Latin classes, and the assemblies and field trips were all designed to point students toward college and the futures it was believed college would make possible.

So what does a school do when its very premise—helping young people prepare for their futures—is turned on its head by the death of a child? And what if his death is not a singular tragedy, an unlikely accident, but part of a larger epidemic with no end in sight? An epidemic to which the Black teen boys at this school know they are especially susceptible? While I am not aware of any databases documenting youth homicide by the victims’ school, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that many schools experience the particular misfortune of losing multiple students within a single school year.²

This book tells the story of one year at Boys’ Prep, a year punctuated by loss and overwhelmed by grief: the debates among school leaders, the strategies of disciplinary staff, the decisions of teachers in managing their own classrooms, and the experiences of the adolescent boys facing the unthinkable that somehow became normal. I arrived at the school as a researcher not long after Tyhir’s death, with the goal of trying to understand how his friends and classmates were experiencing their loss over the long term, and especially how it might be playing out in their schooling. I never expected to be at the school as a practiced observer, already incorporated into many aspects of the school community, when another gun death happened.

As I narrate the year that followed JahSun’s death, I show how the school, at first, responded well—but then, facing an impossible set of choices, took steps that ultimately exacerbated the harm for its students. The losses these teen boys experienced were shared, but the shaping of their emotions in school forced their grief to be experienced largely alone, and eventually to be hidden, so that over time, the continued grief among students became injuries that transformed their social lives, their aspirations, and their report cards. However, long-term harm was also mitigated through relationships and interactions that took shape primarily beyond the school walls, including online. And there are approaches that the school could have taken to help the students channel their grief into hopeful action and see both their pain and its alleviation as part of a collective experience.

JahSun, Lost Too Soon

Always a reliable student, well respected by peers and teachers alike, JahSun had been hitting his stride that fall, his senior year. He had finally earned a starting position on the school’s football team. He was experimenting with rapping and had recorded a handful of songs. By Thanksgiving weekend, JahSun had already been accepted to two colleges. Though he hoped to play football in college, he envisioned several career possibilities beyond sports.

JahSun, whose name means God is the center of all things, was a believer and a deep thinker. He would regularly attend church with his mother, but he also wondered sometimes whether he connected more with Islam, which he learned about through his father’s children from another relationship. Though his parents separated when he was very young, JahSun had close relationships with both of them and had spent long stretches living with each parent. At school, he seemed equally comfortable being the center of attention or on the sidelines, thoughtfully observing. Jah, as most of his friends and family called him, had several close friends at Boys’ Prep, an extended circle of football teammates, and was friendly with other peers spanning multiple social groups. JahSun’s half brother, Bashir, had also just started at Boys’ Prep that fall as a freshman.

JahSun’s good looks were a regular point of conversation among his friends—he had caramel skin and hazel eyes, and football training was making his 5′9″ frame more muscular. He’d had interest from many girls, and while he projected a certain coyness about his relationships, he told me he was committed to the idea of ultimately marrying one woman for life and having kids only once he had done so.

Though still a teenager, JahSun himself had already lost multiple friends to gun violence. He had mourned the death of Tyhir, and then an even closer friend—one he considered a big brother—killed six months later. This was, in fact, how I came to know JahSun. In the spring of his junior year, soon after his older friend’s death, a classmate introduced us, knowing I was looking to interview students about their experiences of peer loss to gun violence. By the time we sat down for an interview in March 2017, I had already been situated at Boys’ Prep as an ethnographic researcher for half a year. I had mostly been spending time with Tyhir’s close friends—then sophomores—trying to understand the way their continued grief affected their school lives and relationships.

JahSun spoke in long, thoughtful sentences, but did not make much eye contact as he played with the squishy green ball I would bring to interviews to fend off the awkwardness some teen boys felt sharing their emotional lives with a near-stranger. He had recently gotten a memorial tattoo for his honorary big brother across his entire forearm that he was eager to show off. This was one way he had found a sense of healing amid his grief. But he also theorized that grief had manifested in some ongoing physical symptoms.

The deaths of two friends in the past year, layered on memories of the murder of his uncle, gave JahSun an intimate sense of the precarity of life. In a matter-of-fact tone, he told me as we were wrapping up the interview: Death . . . is like, you never know. I know that I just, like, tell my friends to be safe and stuff because . . . I’ll never know my last time talking to them, and it’s a scary thing . . . Like I lost somebody every year so far . . . I feel like death is, it’s like constant right now. JahSun was anxious about what might await him and his friends, but the frequency and proximity of loss in his life had also given him some purpose. Though he had previously considered becoming a dentist (because they made good money and, he thought, always seemed happy) or a firefighter (because the career would give him stability right out of high school), now he was wondering more and more if he should become a therapist (like his father) to help others make sense of the uncertainties he was experiencing. There is a tragic irony that—just as Hazeem soon would—JahSun linked his ponderings of future possibilities with his experience and fears of death.

The following fall, when Thanksgiving weekend approached, fear was far from JahSun’s mind. He was excited by the news he’d just received of a full scholarship to a nearby college. JahSun asked his mother, Maxayn, if he could visit his older half sister a few hours away for the holiday and to celebrate his good news. JahSun’s mother obliged and drove him to the train. His left leg was secured in a large knee-immobilizing cast from a football injury that had sidelined him for the past month. After finally getting real playing time on the football team, he was discouraged to be out for the season and crippled in such a pronounced way in his daily life, but JahSun was trying to stay focused on getting healthy in time to play in college. This trip was meant to be a little escape from what had been a difficult month of doctors’ appointments and uncertainty about his recovery timeline.

His sister’s fiancé had invited his own brother and his girlfriend, all of them quite a bit older than JahSun. The group apparently partied late Friday evening. JahSun kept mostly to himself, stretched out on his sister’s couch, texting and scrolling through Instagram. By early Saturday morning, something had gone terribly wrong. An argument between JahSun and the brother of his sister’s fiancé escalated. Still limited by his leg cast and unarmed, JahSun was shot seven times and died early that morning on top of a pile of clothes in his sister’s bedroom. The substance of the argument remains a mystery, although JahSun’s mother insists it stemmed from jealousy.³

For years, Maxayn would replay the incongruity of dropping her son off at 30th Street Station and then seeing him again when she picked up the casket holding a body that would never age past eighteen. 30th Street, casket. 30th Street, casket, she would repeat. His friends, too, would revisit their totally normal