Paul Bass Photos
McBath (above), Nance-Holt (below) at Clinton event.
Thanks to a competitive race for president, Annette Nance-Holt was on Kimberly Avenue Monday telling the story of how a gang member’s stray bullet killed her 16-year-old son Blair on a Chicago city bus. Lucia McBath was there, too, recalling how a 47-year-old man shot dead her unarmed 17-year-old son Jordan after starting an argument about Jordan’s loud music.
They told their stories inside Betsy Ross School’s century-old restored former St. Peter’s parish hall. They appealed for stricter gun control laws. They called for a “moms” movement to make urban streets safer.
They told the same stories, made the same call, the other day in New York. Holt has told her story recently in Milwaukee and Chicago, McBath, in South Carolina, Ohio, and Nevada. She’ll tell it soon in Virginia.
The women also used the occasions to urge Democrats to vote for Hillary Clinton in presidential primaries, including next week’s Connecticut primary.
Nance-Holt and McBath are on tour, a campaign tour, arranged by the Clinton for President operation. So are other African-American mothers who have lost sons to random bullets or police brutality.
“I liken the work we do to being ‘hope dealers,’” McBath said on Kimberly Avenue Monday. “We’re changing the culture,” one person at a time.
Clinton secretly met with ten of these women last November inside Chicago’s Sweet Maple Cafe. She listened for hours, promised to take up their cause in the campaign. And the moms — many of whom, like Nance-Holt and McBath have responded to their family tragedies by speaking out for change — agreed to campaign for Clinton.
It was a sweet deal for Clinton, who is locked into an unexpected drawn-out primary fight against Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders. The women have become compelling surrogates in targeting a key part of Clinton’s base, black female voters. They highllight the issue on which Clinton has gained the most traction recently against Sanders: gun control.
It’s an even better deal for the cause taken up by moms like Nance-Holt and McBath, who determined to respond to their family tragedies not through hate or private sorrow, but by public activism to make the country’s streets safer, especially for young African-Americans at risk of being shot to death.
The Democratic primary campaign has elevated their often ignored urban pleas to prominence, in both camps. Sanders, for instance, released a viral four-minute video endorsement by Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, the man choked to death by cops while selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street. It’s been called “the most powerful ad” of the campaign.
Garner’s mother, meanwhile, along with nine others brought together at the Sweet Maple have emerged as a powerful late-primary-season team of surrogates for Clinton. “Mothers of the Movement,” the campaign calls them.
McBath compared their quest to earlier campaigns to stop drunk driving, fight the tobacco industry, win acceptance for LGBT rights.
“All the major cultural shifts in the country, mothers have spearheaded them,” she said. “We’re going to make you listen to us. You will listen to your mother.”
“We were birthing the babies dying in the streets,” she said.
Nance-Holt and McBath with deputy Clinton campaign African-American outreach director Neisha Blandin.
Monday’s event was technically a Clinton campaign “roundtable discussion” (held, as roundtables often are, around a horizontal table) on gun violence, one of several stops McBath and Nance-Holt made in Connecticut.
Nance-Holt, a Chicago firefighter, spoke of how her son was riding a Chicago bus to help his grandparents out at their store that fatal day in 2007 when gunfire broke out and he tried to shield a friend.
“He wasn’t in a gang,” she said in a conversation before the roundtable began. “He wasn’t into drugs. He was an honors student.”
The day after his murder, Nance-Holt sat at her kitchen table with a reporter, forcing herself to tell the story and appeal for more gun control laws. She hasn’t stopped since.
“I wasn’t going to let his voice die. His voice would go on and on and on until they stop the killing.”
“My son would be alive today if someone had not sold that teenage” gang member a Glock, Nance-Holt noted.
McBath focused on laws like Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” rule that she said have “emboldened people to shoot first and ask questions later.” She also called for gun manufacturers to be held liable for murders committed with their weapons, one of Clinton’s campaign rallying cries.
Tong, Bartlett, and Kimberly Washington of Greater New Haven Mothers Demand Action.
“For urban America,” said Mayor Toni Harp, who convened the discussion in conjunction with the Clinton campaign (it was her third Clinton campaign event in four days), “gun violence is the most important issue.”
“Yes it is,” the visiting moms responded.
Harp called for gun manufacturers to install technology to prevent guns from firing if not in the hands of their rightful owners. “You can have smarter weapons if you have to have weapons,” she argued.
State Rep. William Tong, co-chair of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, promoted a bill, currently stalled, that would take guns away from people under restraining orders in a domestic-violence cases.
Nance-Holt with Harp after the roundtable.
Jason Bartlett — who as Harp’s youth services director organized citywide mentoring canvasses and school-based programs to deal with troubled teens in response to a string of murders — called Clinton’s convening of the “Moms of the Movement” “the single most important thing she has done in their campaigns.” McBath and Nance-Holt said the group has grown close; Bartlett urged them to keep telling their stories.
“Everyone respects the moms. Whether you’re from a good home or a bad home,” he said. “Your voice — they can hear. … People will galvanize behind your stories so we get the right policies.”
As they departed for their next campaign stops — some for Clinton’s campaign, others for independent anti-violence groups — the two visiting moms vowed to do just that.
Earlier in the day, Harp discussed the emergency of urban gun violence as a leading campaign issue this year, on her “Monday Morning” edition of WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the program, which also touched on bike lanes, her inaugural gown, and her upcoming trip to the White House
Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the nation. There are more dead bodies in Chicago in the last year by many times over, than all murders in the entire state of Connecticut. So talk about the effectiveness of tougher laws.
As for smart weapons - this is a silly issue. It can't be applied to every gun and it's not practical. It will accomplish nothing on urban violence. Does Mayor Harp really think that those buying illegal guns will be thwarted by that technology or for that matter buying guns with that technology?
This is a cynical campaign ploy by Clinton because she has no compelling reason to vote for her. So she hires the moms of the dead to tour the country. Where is the stand on the underlying causes of urban violence? The breakdown of the family, the lack of opportunity and hope; poor education, food and housing insecurity. This is a manufactured issue.