American Slaughter -- 150,000 young black men have been murdered by other young black men since 1993
The annual slaughter of 5,000+ young black men is a national tragedy more than 30 years old. It's time the major media publicize it and black 'leaders' like Obama and Oprah speak out about it.
1993 was an especially bloody year for the City of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County.
As Post-Gazette crime reporter Mike Fuoco reported in his year-end roundup of local homicides 30 years ago today, 118 men and women were murdered in a city/county population of about 1.3 million. It was the highest number since 1917.
As usual, and as Fuoco pointed out early in his article, those Pittsburghers who were killed in 1993 were disproportionately young, black and male and virtually all of them were killed by young black males who used handguns.
Homicide-wise, not much has changed in Pittsburgh in 30 years, except for the steady shrinking of its population and the names of this year’s list of dead young black men.
In 2023, according to the Post-Gazette’s year-end wrap-up of city and county homicide statistics, there were 97 homicide victims — 49 in the city (pop. 303,000) and 48 in the rest of the county.
Like most cities, the city of Pittsburgh’s homicides fell in 2023. Its total of 49 was lower than the 71 murders the city had in 2022, a year when national violence rates were still spiking as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
In terms of who died and who killed whom, 2023 was a typical year in Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs and rusted steel towns, which are known for having low crime and murder rates.
As usual, about 82 percent of the murder victims in the city and the county were black. Few were women and 32 of the 41 black victims in the city were under age 34. Seven were under age 17.
Since 1993, roughly 50 black males between 14 and 34 have been murdered every year in the city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Over three decades, that adds up to about 1,500 dead young black men and teens.
Pittsburgh’s 30-year death toll is tragic, but it’s puny compared to Chicago’s.
Chicago is the national media’s poster child for deadly weekend shooting sprees and urban drug gang violence. But it doesn’t have the highest murder rate per 100,000 people in the country. St. Louis (69) Baltimore (51) and New Orleans (40) are the top three.
Chicago is a distant No. 10 with 24 murders per 100,000 people. In 2023 there were 632 homicides in Chicago, down 15% from 2022. Yet since 1993 the city has been a permanent killing field for young black men.
Every year in Chicago at least 300 young black men have been shot, stabbed and beaten to death by other young black men.
That 300 murder figure is a conservative estimate, given that Chicago’s annual death toll has averaged over 500 homicides for 30 years. But it still adds up to nearly 10,000 young black men killed by their peers since 1993.
That’s a shocking number. But Chicago’s murders make up only a fraction of the country’s annual slaughter of young black men.
In 2022, according to Statista, there were 19,196 homicides in the U.S. The total number of black victims was 10,470. Though whites outnumber blacks in the population by about 5-1, the number of white homicides that year was 7,704.
The glaring black-white homicide gap in the U.S. is decades old and it happens every year. July 4th shooting sprees and multiple gangland murders on weekends get mentioned in the news all the time — like sports scores.
But no one important or influential in the media or elsewhere has seemed very interested in digging into or publicizing the specific details of annual black homicides.
If they did, they’d find that the homicide statistics for the whole country are macro versions of Pittsburgh’s and Chicago’s.
They’d also learn that each year since 1993 roughly 5,000 black men under 34 have been killed in America by other young black men, usually with handguns. That means the running toll of murdered young black men since Bill Clinton was elected is a staggering 150,000.
It’s a figure so shocking — and never pointed out in the media — that it’s hardly believable. It’s 50,000 more Americans than were killed in Vietnam and Korea combined.
So where are the Million Man marches for those 150,000 slain young black men? Where are the cries and outrage of national black -- and white -- leaders?
Where are Obama and Oprah and Lebron and Kamala and all the famous politicians and pundits and moral preachers of every color and political party who supposedly care about important racial issues?
What could possibly be more important to the country than trying to end a bloody 30 years war on black men by other black men?
The country’s annual murder toll goes up and down for all kinds of social and economic reasons. So does the murder rate per 100,000 people — an abstract crime statistic used by the media that means nothing to the average American.
But let’s make things clear and simple, skip the murder-rate stats and just count all the dead people.
Let’s say there are 20,000 murders in the USA in an average year. That comes to roughly 54 murders per day. About 60 percent of those homicide victims — roughly 32 a day — are black Americans. Mostly they are males under age 34.
In 2023 the country’s final homicide toll, though down compared to the covid years, will include roughly 10,000 blacks of all ages. Again, based on the numbers, at least 6,000 of the victims will be a black male under 34 who was killed by a black male under 34.
Reducing this perpetual urban killing field should have been the chief concern of black leaders and the legacy news media for decades. It’s hardly a secret to the black community.
A group called the Gifford Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence knows what’s going on. It says that “For decades, gun violence has taken a disproportionate and grueling toll on Black communities—leading to tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun injuries.”
The report says, “Homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century” and that “for young Black men: gun homicides are the leading cause of death and more than outstrip the next leading causes of death combined.”
Yet black leaders apparently do not realize the scope of the national slaughter of young black men or don’t want to discuss it. And the major news media is AWOL.
Journalists have been too clueless to have noticed the deaths of 150,000 young black men or been too chicken to ask national and local black leaders why the black culture is so violent and what they are doing to fix it.
As in previous years, no black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures will jump in front of the cameras and declare a national crisis or call for a national crusade to slow the killing of America’s young black men.
They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts for the murders of thousands of young black men.
Meanwhile, the slaughter will continue to be what it has been for more than 30 years — the bloody elephant in the American newsroom that people can’t see or are afraid to say anything about.
***
Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.
2022 homicide stats
Here, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are the 2022 homicide numbers for Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the entire USA:
2022 national homicide stats
Published by Statista Research Department, Oct 20, 2023:
Homicide victim demographics
There was a total of 21,156 reported homicide cases in the U.S. in 2022. When looking at murder victims by gender and ethnicity, the vast majority were male, while just over half of victims were African American.
In addition, homicide victims in the United States were found most likely to be between the ages of 20 and 34 years old, with the majority of victims aged between 17 to 54 years old.
Are murders up?
In short, no – since the 1990s the number of murders in the U.S. has decreased significantly.
In 1990, the murder rate per 100,000 people stood at 9.4; it stood at 6.3 in 2022.
It should be noted though that number of homicides increased slightly from 2014 to 2017, although figures declined again in 2018 and 2019, before ticking up again in 2020 and 2021.
Despite this decline, when viewed in international comparison the U.S. murder rate is still notably high. For example, the Canadian homicide rate stood at 2.06 in 2021, while the homicide rate in England and Wales was even lower.
I think there's a "thug chic" at play in the culture that normalizes, then elevates the drugs, sex, violence, looting, narcissism, and misogyny that surround inner city life. I'm also guessing there are far more white kids consuming this garbage than black kids.
Yet a part of this appeal in the broader culture isn't racial at all; Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger all had popular support from people happy that at least someone had succeeded in "sticking it to the man."
Seniors like me love to blame the excesses of the 1960s. The same probably happened in the 260s, what with those young people abandoning Roman virtue and adopting barbarian dress and customs.
All that said, I do believe that when societal restrictions were blown up in the 1960s, they blew up 100-fold in the black community, having been simmering for years under Jim Crow laws. We are all paying the price now, none more so than the the black victims of black thugs.
Dismal as it is, there are little blazes of hope out there. Please check out freeblackthought.com.
In the Middle Ages, Western Europe executed about 1% of its too-aggressive males every year. Got the aggression out of the gene pool. That’s why it’s so peaceful today - or was, until a million Africans and S Asians showed up. This number is a problem only because it was extrajudicial.