Victim No. 79: America’s homicide crisis claimed my childhood friend Eric Smith isn’t just another statistic. He and my hometown were caught in this country’s other pandemic.
When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I had a bunch of white friends. They were my neighbors in East Cleveland, Ohio. My family was the third Black household on Brightwood Avenue, a street with 48 well-built residential homes. Then, seemingly all at once, the white folks up and left. At the time, […]
