Huckleberries in the Hood |
Culture > Black-on-Black Crime
Huckleberries in the Hood
Why are so many young black men so quick to anger, to lash out and kill?
Sloan Oliver | March 6, 2026
In the movie Tombstone, after the famous shootout at the OK Corral, bad-guy Johnny Ringo went looking for Wyatt Earp. Ringo was going to kill him. Instead, Val Kilmer, playing the part of Doc Holliday and friend of Wyatt, met Ringo and delivered the movie’s most famous line: “I’m your huckleberry.” The phrase “I’m you huckleberry” was 19th-century slang for “I’m the guy you’re looking for,” “I’m your man,” or “Bring it on.” It was a macho, braggadocious expression used when confronting an adversary.
Macon, Georgia has lots of huckleberries. That’s unfortunate, because when two huckleberries meet, bad things usually happen. That’s exactly what occurred last week in the hoods of Macon. Over several days’ time, there were eight, maybe nine, shootings that left five dead and another nine injured.
The shootouts in and around Macon’s OK Corral (the Unionville neighborhood) began Saturday, Feb 21, at 12:30 A.M. (one man shot). Then Shaviz Adams was shot and killed at 6:58 P.M., and at 7:24 P.M., another man was shot. The day ended with three people shot at 11:59 P.M.; one victim was only seven years old.
Sunday picked up where Saturday left off. At 1:29 A.M., a seventeen-year-old male was shot and injured. Then the serious huckleberries came out at 3:35 A.M., on Moseley Ave, and three men were blasted into eternity. That was followed by a 6:30 A.M. shooting that left two more wounded. The weekend’s final shooting victim was a 55-year-old woman, shot at 2:37 P.M.
However, the huckleberries weren’t finished. On Wednesday, in south Macon, a 45-year-old man was shot and killed. If you’re counting, that’s five dead and nine wounded in nine separate shootings, all in a city of 155,000.
Fortunately, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) does good work apprehending the perps. Within days, arrests had been made, to include Jeremi Hill, 31, and Malik Jenkins, 29, arrested for killing Shaviz Adams. Julius Milner was arrested for Sunday’s triple-homicides.
As best I can tell, all the shooting victims were blacks. On the BCSO’s Facebook page, residents widely thanked the police for the good work they did apprehending those responsible.
In response to the shootings, the community had the usual reactions — neighborhood peace marches, calls for unity, balloon release to end the violence, demands to impose youth curfews, comments about the victims being good people and “they didn’t deserve this,” comments to end the gun violence, and pastors preaching. Several community leaders want to bring back midnight basketball for teens and to initiate other youth activities. All of those things are feel-good, do-nothing moves that only makes the participants think they’re doing something to solve the problem while avoiding the real issue.
Some people blame the mayor, community leaders, and guns for the violence. First off, there’s nothing any mayor or community leader can do that parents shouldn’t already be doing. And the violence does not come from guns. It comes from the evil in the heart of the person doing the shooting, who just as easily could have used a knife, a hammer, or anything else to inflict harm.
We must ask the tougher question: Why are so many young black men so quick to anger, to lash out and kill?
What — because I’m a white guy, I’m not supposed to ask that question? With that logic, nobody but athletes could ask tough questions about sports, only military people could criticize the military, and only former cops could discuss police issues.
It certainly isn’t police in the neighborhoods. If nothing else, blacks want more police presence in the hood. And it certainly isn’t white “racism.” If anything, black murder and crime were much lower before the Civil Rights movement, when white racism against blacks really did exist.
No doubt there are many reasons for the violence. However, far and away, the single largest contributing factor is lack of fathers in the home. Every research study clearly shows a direct link between fathers not in the home and negative outcomes of the children. Children raised in fatherless homes are likely to be less educated (the kids drop out of school), multiple times more likely to go to prison (without an education, the kids resort to crime), four times more likely to be raised in poverty (two incomes are better than one), and much more likely to have behavioral issues — low self-esteem, delinquent behavior, mood disorders, get in with the wrong crowd, unable to resolve conflicts, and the like.
The behavior issues should surprise no one. Without a responsible male role model, young males never learn how to resolve simple disagreements. Also, a young child often blames himself if his father abandons the family with thoughts such as “Daddy left because he doesn’t like me.” Imagine the guilt a child bears when abandoned by a parent. He simply doesn’t understand adult dynamics and internalizes that abandonment. With low self-esteem, young girls become sexually promiscuous, leading to babies being born to very young girls and boys joining gangs to find a sense of belonging. And the cycle repeats — gang-bangers (some as young as fourteen) get women pregnant, end up in prison, and their children are raised fatherless. Sadly, about 75% of black children are born to unmarried women, and about 66% of black children are raised in single-parent households, the vast majority of those by single women.
To understand the dynamics of both parents, all one has to do is observe the differences between how most women interact with children versus men. The mother asks the child, “Johnny, do you want to eat your carrots?” Of course, he says, “No!,” and the father firmly says, “You’re sitting here until you eat those carrots.” When disciplining, the woman tells the child, three or four times, to do something. The man sternly says, “Look at me when I’m talking. Do you want a whooping? Then do what you’re told.” Mothers and fathers both contribute to the whole child.
The adverse effects on children of being raised in fatherless homes is only half the discussion. The other important question is, why are so many children, especially black children, born out of wedlock and raised in fatherless households in the first place?
The political elites want blacks, and minorities, to be raised in fatherless households. They want minorities dependent on them, and on government, for their survival and existence. They have implemented policies that have replaced black fathers with Uncle Sam. The results of those policies are manifested in the actions of the huckleberries in every hood across America.
As long as we have such irresponsible government policies in place that reward fatherless households, as Colonel Trautman warned about Rambo, and as Macon discovered last week, one thing we’ll need is “a good supply of body bags.”
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