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- Community leaders have come together to address gun violence in Knoxville.
- Alleviating Black poverty is critical to ending violence, they say.
- Black Knoxvillians face significantly higher economic inequality, including household income and unemployment.
- Community leaders called on public officials to be more visible in neighborhoods grappling with violence and economic inequality.
As long as poverty burdens the Black community in Knoxville, the gun violence taking lives will continue to plague the city, says a group of leaders who have banded together to address systemic problems they think has been ignored for too long.
“I can’t tell a young man to stop doing certain things if I don’t have anything to offer him. You’d be surprised at what just a meal can do,” said Lawrence Williams, founder of the Safe Haven House in East Knoxville.
Over the past few years, Knoxville has seen record-breaking increases in gun violence. In 2020, 37 people died by homicide in the city, and that figure soared by more than 10% in 2021 to 41 deaths by homicide. Thirty-three of the 2020 deaths and 40 of the 2021 deaths were by gunfire.
About a dozen community leaders convened last week at The Bottom, a hub and community space in East Knoxville, to discuss ways they could mitigate the violence. They share frustration over a lack of progress in improving quality of life for the Black community.
Kalil White, executive director of The Bottom, told Knox News that as a Black woman whose family has been impacted by gun violence, she felt called to organize and get The Bottom involved.
“We wanted to reach out to people in the community and just begin having these real conversations around how we can address the issue of gun violence in our neighborhood,” White said.
While numerous concerns were expressed during the meeting among Black and white community members, one key issue was driven home: Black poverty.
“I get so frustrated. We have leaders out here sitting around tables, and it’s like they don’t know what to do about the problem, and in my mind, we can’t do anything about these shootings without addressing poverty. So much money is invested into more policing, but what about putting that into fixing poverty? We can talk all day, but we need to put the money where it’s needed,” Rosette Jones said.
Longtime educator and a former Knox County Schools Principal Blenza Davis said economic inequality in East Knoxville has continued for decades, even as far back as the Jim Crow era when she was being bused to segregated schools in the county.
“Many of these people haven’t lived in our shoes. And even when we as Black people here did have money and resources, they tore it all down and pulled our boots out from under all of us,” she said.
Brandi Augustus, a community activist who works at The Highlander Center and co-founder of Black Mamas Bailout, discussed ways that the criminalization of Black men and women also contributes to the poverty level.
Oftentimes, injustice and lack of financial mobility cause Black parents to be thrust into the cycle of poverty.
“My mom was a single mom and worked three full-time jobs for 17 years. She didn’t have time for school board meetings or neighborhood roundtables because she was busy trying to make a living,” Augustus said.
“We know that Black women and caregivers are the backbones of our community. When one of the shootings happened last year, we had a mother of one of the victims we had to bail out of jail because she couldn’t pay child support. She couldn’t afford her $250 child support bill. With the way Black folks are criminalized, we are taking away primary caregivers, and they don’t have direction or protection. Then young people are raised by their peers and on the streets.”
Williams said that many smaller organizations on the ground that have already been engaged in addressing gun violence lack the support they need.
Gun violence traumatizing in Knoxville’s Black neighborhoods
In a matter of months in 2021, nine teenagers died by gunfire, including six teenagers who attended the same high school.
So far, in 2022, there have been 24 confirmed homicides. Of those, 22 have been gun homicides. At the same point in 2021, there were 32 homicides, all of which were gun homicides.
Of the 24 confirmed homicides in 2022, 12 remain unsolved, according to Knoxville police data.
KPD spokesperson Scott Erland acknowledged the reduced gun homicide numbers this year in comparison to last years, but said community concern hasn’t dwindled.
Greg Jackson, a gun violence intervention expert and executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund in Washington, D.C., told Knox News that gun violence in Black communities is also more than just a youth problem.
“Community leaders have to look at the root causes of this violence. Violence in the Black community is not simply just a crime problem. It’s a cycle of poverty and trauma,” he said. “We have to look at these issues beyond crime control and decrease the risk factors. Invest in addressing what leads to these violent incidents.”
Knoxville’s Black poverty rate is among highest in the Southeast
“We have to stop pretending that the system doesn’t know. They have the data. They know the disparities and inequity here among Black people. They aren’t blissfully unaware. There are no more conversations to be had. There’s nothing else they need to know,” Daesya Parker said.
Seventy-five percent of gun homicide victims in 2021 in Knoxville were Black though Black residents make up 17% of Knoxville’s population. Of those people killed, 22.5% were between the ages of 15-19.
Nearly half of Knoxville’s Black communities live below the poverty line, according to the latest census data.
In 2020 Black poverty was 32.4%, more than three times the percentage of white poverty at 10.9%
Knoxville’s Black poverty rate is more than three times the national poverty rate and higher than the city’s overall poverty rate of 22.5%. The U.S. poverty rate was reported at 11.4% in 2020 by the U.S. Census.
Data from the Knox Planning Commission also unearths staggering disparities across Knox County in all facets of economic mobility.
The median income in Knoxville for Black Knoxvillians in 2020 was $30,427, compared to $63,623 for white households.
Black unemployment in 2020 was 7.3% compared to 3.9% for whites.
Only 21.3% of Black men and women in Knoxville held a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 39.8% for whites.
What are leaders doing about it?
City leaders, spurred by the shootings of teenagers in 2021, took to addressing the problem with violence interruption strategies, but it has been a rocky process.
With concern about how local gun violence was being addressed, Councilwoman Amelia Parker asked the council to back the Recognizing Gun Violence as a Public Health Act, a bill filed by state Rep. London Lamar, D-Memphis, that would treat Tennessee’s epidemic of gun violence as a public health emergency.
A $1 million pledge was made by the city last year to help reduce gun deaths. Knoxville scaled back a contract with Cities United and developed a pilot program with Turn Up Knox, a local group of a dozen staff members provided with a $450,000 grant to make the program a reality. The Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development, commonly called SEEED, will receive $90,000 in administrative fees to function as an “incubator” for Turn Up Knox.
“I come from the streets. I have been there,” Williams said. “We have a lot of programs out here that deal with the issues, but a lot of them don’t deal with the young men that are actually in this cycle of gun violence. It has to reach them. We bring these guys in and deal with them. We open our house for these young men from the streets, and we offer life skills. My motto is if these guys can start to fellowship with one another, they won’t want to kill each other.”
Longtime civil rights leader and former Knoxville NAACP President Dewey Roberts told Knox News and the group that money is the main barrier for groups like Williams’ Safe Haven program, which often lose out on help to groups that have more resources.
“We will get an idea, and what happens is you’ll have more people come in and see us working and say we can do it better. But what really has to happen is at some point we have to come together and do the work together,” Roberts said.
It’s critical for public officials to be seen in neighborhoods grappling with economic and public safety problems, said group members, who pointed out that meeting people where they are is vital to gaining trust among Black Knoxvillians.
“When Austin-East was in the news, and over the years, we have all these shootings, and momentum was up. Leaders threw around money, but what happens is three months later, it all dies down, and we are still going to be dealing with this. You have to go to the people. Leaders have to go into the community,” Williams said.
Katherine Bike, newly elected school board member, says Knox County is economically imbalanced and more elected officials and city leaders must treat problems as if they were their own.
“District 1 is just as important as District 4,” Bike said. “We can’t have leaders who are only dedicated to their own community. We are all Knox County.”
Angela Dennis is the Knox News social justice, race and equity reporter. You can reach her by email at angela.dennis@knoxnews.com or by phone at 865-407-9712. Follow her on Twitter @AngeladWrites; Instagram @angeladenniswrites; and Facebook at Angela Dennis Journalist.
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