Qiara Butler, whose cousin of Tyrone West died in police custody in 2013, speaks about police over overzealousness on The Larry Young Morning Show. (Photo Credit: Kamau High)
One of the hardest things to do as you get older, sometimes, is to let a young person talk without interupting to inject your wisdom. That’s what Larry Young, host of The Larry Young Morning Show on WOLB 1010 AM/PRAISE 106.1 FM, discovered on Tuesday, when he hosted a group of about 30 young community activists and just let them talk from the hours of 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.
And while Young gave them five topics to get the conversation started—politics, health and safety, economics, education and faith—the conversation ranged far afield. On hand, and asked to keep mostly silent, were government officials such as Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Kieffer Mitchell, special adviser to Gov. Larry Hogan and Adrienne A. Jones, Speaker Pro Tem, Maryland House of Delegates, among others.
As with any discussion of how to make Baltimore a better place, the subject of what to do about the escalating violence in the city came up. Tariq Touré, a community activist with the Male Enterprise Network, which works with minority entrepreneurs, said, “When we talk about the root causes you have to expect that they will act out this way. It’s like someone who’s been molested. They’re probably going to molest someone else.”
Another volatile topic to come up was mental health, and how often members of the Black community are reluctant to seek treatment. Qiara Butler, whose cousin of Tyrone West died in police custody in 2013, said, “Drugs, which are a mental health issue, should be treated as such. If the police weren’t focusing on petty drug crime, what would the Black community look like?”
When given a brief period of time on the microphone, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake spoke about getting involved in government and trying to change it for the better. “My hope is that you use this as an opportunity to get more engaged. How many City Council meetings have you attended so that you can be heard?,” she said. “Every challenge that we have was not created in the past five or 10 years.”
