Watching the last scene of The Great Debaters, which depicts
the discrimination and cruelty Negroes faced in the American South during the
1930s, struck something deep within my being. In the debate against white
Harvard University, the youngest Wiley team member James Farmer, Jr. vehemently
responded to his opponent:
In Texas, they lynch negroes. My
teammates and I saw a man strung up by his neck -- and set on fire. We drove
through a lynch mob, pressed our faces against the floorboard. I looked at my
teammates. I saw the fear in their eyes; and worse -- the shame. What was this
negro's crime that he should be hung, without trial, in a dark forest filled
with fog? Was he a thief? Was he a killer? Or just a negro? Was he a
sharecropper? A preacher? Were his children waiting up for him? And who were we
to just lie there and do nothing? No matter what he did, the mob was the
criminal.
I immediately thought of a young girl Danieal Kelly who, 70
years after the Great Debaters, was left to die in a foul-smelling, airless
room. According to one news report, "she wasted away from malnutrition and
maggot-infested bedsores that ate her flesh. She died alone on a putrid
mattress in her mother's home, the floor covered in feces." At 14 years
old, Danieal weighed a mere 42 pounds. Her last word: water!
Like James Farmer, Jr. asked of the Negro hanging in the
tree, I asked why? What had Danieal done so horribly wrong for her own mother
to deny her the basics of life?
Danieal's crime? Being an embarrassment to her mother!
Danieal had cerebral palsy and her own mother "was
embarrassed by her disabled daughter and didn't want to touch her, take her out
in public, change her diapers or make sure she had enough fluids."
Like the mob that witnessed the hanging of the Negro and yet
did nothing, those responsible to protect Danieal - her parents and the paid employees
of the Department of Human Services (DHS) - did nothing. According to grand
jury's report (warning: report contains very disturbing content):
Employees of DHS and the private
agency it hired were, when they bothered to show up at all, literally on the
other side of the door. But they rarely if ever went inside. The biggest flurry
of activity occurred only after Danieal died - when supervisors and staff
scrambled to manufacture records in an effort to make it look like they had
been doing something.
A doctor examining the case said he had never seen a child
neglected to this extent.
Nine people have been charged in Danieal's death. Time will
tell whether the system that so horrifically failed her in life will do by
right by her in death.
Will Philadelphia taxpayers be outraged enough to demand
life-saving changes at the Department of Human Services? Or, like the debate
team with their faces pressed against the floorboards, will they look away in
shame and do nothing until another innocent child is punished to death for
being different, for being disabled?
Danieal, I did not know you, yet I cry for you. I cry
because you experienced such horrific cruelty; because those responsible to
care for you, to protect you, to love and cherish you, did not; because you
were not given the opportunity to become all that you could be. I am beyond
words that you were punished to death because of your cerebral palsy. Danieal,
having cerebral palsy is not an embarrassment; it is not a crime. Danieal, you
have touched me more than you'll ever know. I write your name on my heart.
