The deep Detroit roots of
Shahida Mausi
Friday, June 30, 2017 | MotorCity Hotel
POWERED BY REAL TIMES MEDIA
Volume 80 – Number 41
michiganchronicle.com
The Flint crisis:
The struggle is real for Detroit's
homeless
How high does this go?
youth
By Curt Guyette Special to the Michigan Chronicle
When involuntary manslaughter charges were filed last week against five people connected to the Flint water crisis, prosecutors presented a chilling chronology of events they claim led to 75-yearold Robert Skidmore’s death from Legionnaire’s Disease in 2015. In charging state DHHS Director Nick Lyon, the highest ranking public official charged so far in the Flint investigation, prosecutors laid out a stunning and sad tale of neglect and incompetence that they say caused Skidmore’s death. But in sketching the story of the death of Skidmore — one of at least 12 people who fatally contracted the rare, pneumonia-like disease after Flint, under the control of a series of state-appointed emergency managers, switched its water source to the Flint River in April 2014 — the prosecutors’ documents also raise two disturbing (and as yet unanswered) questions:. What would motivate Lyon, an official who had no role in switching Flint’s water system, to potentially participate in a cover-up of the dangers of the water crisis, as alleged? Why hasn’t more been done to compel Gov. Rick Snyder to tell what he knows about the fateful decisions that led to the contamination of the water supply — and the state’s unwillingness to own up to the problem?
June 21-27, 2017
By Roz Edward Managing Editior
E
very day and especially every night, young people in this metropolis in recovery are finding themselves at the mercy of every possible peril of life in the big city and left to fend for themselves in the most desperate and dangerous circumstances imaginable. They are kids who have aged out of foster care, kids who have been neglected and abused by their biological and non-parental caregivers, and kids who are suffer any number and variety of mental health conditions. Life for them is a dismal undertaking of waiting for rescue or death, but they are a tenacious group who fight relentlessly to see another day.
“We find a way to take care of ourselves the best we can,” said a formerly homeless young man, Thomas Randall (not his real name), who says he’s proud of the survival skills he honed living on the streets of Detroit. “I came here from Flint. My mother is an alcoholic, she drinks a couple of fifths of day and I haven’t seen or talked to her since I was 15,” explains the now 23-year-old who successfully completed several homeless shelter programs, including Mariner’s Inn, and secured full-time employment along with a modest apartment and a chance at a future. Gerald Piro, Covenant House executive director, with nearly 30 years of experience in the field of providing services for homeless youth, says as the problem of young people subjugated to life on the streets is growing it becomes increas-
ingly difficult to address the problem. “To get a read on the exact scope of the problem is difficult, because vagrant people have a way of hiding the problem of having a place to live.” On any given day, 5,000 Detroiters are embroiled in a daily struggle to surviving the ravages of poverty and homelessness and approximately 25 percent of that population falls between the ages of 18 to 24. “A lot of homeless youth start out by aging out of foster care, and once they age out of foster care if there is no real plan, they make their own plan,” explained Piro. “Then you have in the city of Detroit a number of people who have lost their homes and the families break apart with the hope that they are going to get back together again, but that become very difficult to do.” These factors coupled with the segment of the youth population who struggle with serious mental health issues and youth who have been the victims of tremendous abuse issues, including abandonment and neglect causes, these young victims learn to distrust authority and form their own forms of family connection and social communes. “In Detroit with the preponderance of abandoned homes, it allows for a lot of cover, and they form these family groups in these properties,” adds Piro.
In considering the first question, one has to remember that Lyon headed the Department of Health and Human Services and, unlike officials with the city and the Department of Environmental Quality, had no authority over how Flint received its water. When Flint, under the authority of a Snyder-appointed emergency manager, decided to move to the Flint River and a city water treatment plant dangerously unprepared for the complex job of making the river water safe for municipal use, Lyon wasn’t involved. And so when the use of the river water resulted in dangerously elevated levels of lead leaching into the water of homeowners from old plumb-
See HOMELESS
YOUTH page A-4
See FLINT page A-4
WHAT’S INSIDE
Farewell to a living, breathing Cass Corridor building It would be impossible to chronicle all the stories that flowed from this newspaper’s longtime headquarters By Danton Wilson
ing’s front door some 36 years ago. Back then, I had no notion that I would eventually work there, much less serve as executive editor. A freshly minted graduate from Grambling State University in Louisiana (I’d graduated and gotten married on the same day), I was then working at the Detroit Free Press as a post-graduate intern.
So long, 479 Ledyard. It’s been an adventure knowin’ ya.
Ideeyah is ‘BRAVE’ Page D-1
It is beyond ironic that the Michigan Chronicle — long on tradition and outsized in its political and cultural footprint — has resided for most of its 81 years inside an Art Deco box of a building located on one of the shortest streets in Detroit. Ledyard Street — all four blocks of it — sits smack in the midst of Cass Corridor, briefly coursing near Cass Tech High School to the south and the Masonic Temple to the north.
$1.00
From the building’s inner sanctum, including a broad newsroom, back production area, and assorted offices, the Michigan Chronicle has pumped out countless stories — inspira-
Danton Wilson tional stories on top of sad stories, entertaining stories soaked into the walls, and milestone stories wafting down a battered yet still majestic main stairway. I will never forget the day I walked wide-eyed into the build-
A Free Press entertainment editor had dispatched me to the Chronicle building to watch and review a movie showing in the Chronicle’s screening room, a small auditorium located on the building’s first floor. Thanks to a rousing speech I heard just before I graduated from Grambling, I was somewhat familiar with the historical importance of the black press. The speech was delivered by a Baptist pastor who owned and operated
an African-American paper in Monroe, Louisana. He explained that most of the legendary leaders in African-American history — Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and more — had significantly contributed to the black press as owners, editors, columnists, investigative reporters, and in other positions. I was therefore primed to bask in the atmosphere of the Chronicle building on the first day I visited it. After leaving the first-floor viewing room, I roamed stealthily around the building, talking to a few young and not-so-young reporters, typesetters, and an icon of a receptionist named Pauline Leatherwood, whose ever-youth-
See CHRONICLE page A-4