‘Our boys are dying’: Overland Park mom on the anxiety of raising black boys

At 5:52 a.m. on July 7, Bukeka Blakemore’s soul broke down, and she livestreamed the crash on Facebook.

In the space of a week, the 54-year-old jazz singer had sung at the funeral of a 4-year-old killed in a gunbattle in Kansas City; sung at a church service in Orlando, Fla., honoring victims of the Pulse nightclub shootings; then, back in Kansas City, watched a disturbing video of Alton Sterling being killed by police in Louisiana.

It was too much. That predawn Thursday morning, alone in bed, her husband working an early shift, Blakemore was apprehensive about turning on the TV. The images of Sterling being shot while lying on a sidewalk were still too fresh.

She flipped the set on anyway, hoping to catch the weather, and instead horrifying images of Philando Castile bleeding to death — his fiancee used Facebook Live to film the shooting’s aftermath — flashed onto the screen.

Looking back, Blakemore says the trigger was hearing the voice of the fiancee’s 4-year-old daughter consoling her wailing mother: “It’s OK, Mommy, I’m here with you.”

Blakemore, sitting on the edge of the bed wearing an orange nightshirt, picked up her phone and tapped the record button.

About a minute into the video, after politely greeting her audience and recounting the details she has just learned of the Castile shooting, Blakemore begins to cry.

“I just can’t take it anymore. I have a son. I have all boys.” She repeats “all boys” over and over. Nine times. “Our boys are dying.”

Her five-minute testimony ends with a whimper: “I’m just so tired of it. And I’m scared. So …” She clutches at her throat but no more words will come, and she blows a soft kiss and shuts down her phone.

The video has had more than 5,000 views.

The boys she is scared for are sons Delbert Shoals, 26; stepsons Lewis Blakemore, 26, and Delasalle (Dee) Blakemore, 14; and grandson Greisyn Shoals, 16 months.

Blakemore remembers the first time she felt the fear pierce her maternal heart. Delbert was 5 or 6, sitting on the living room floor playing with Legos, when a news report came on saying black males have a higher mortality rate than white males. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” she says softly.

When Delbert was 7 or 8, she had a moment of self-realization. “We were at Gordman’s and he was running through the store, and my first thought was, ‘Stop! Someone will think you are stealing.’ When I had that thought it shocked me, but these things pass down from generation to generation. It’s in the water.”

The worries grow with the child. When Delbert was 20, he wanted to drive his car from Kansas City back to Ithaca College in New York. Stacked on top of the normal parental anxiety about the car’s reliability was this: Delbert was traveling with two good friends, both white females.

“I had to work to be positive, I found myself repeating over and over, ‘They are going to be fine,’ but then I’m picturing them traversing these little towns in Pennsylvania and thinking, ‘Omigod, is it going to be OK?’ I tried to clear those negative thoughts from my mind so I could be comfortable, but when I finally got the call that they had made it, I was like, ‘Oh, thank you, Jesus!’

“That is a horrible way to live your life, to have to think about places you can or cannot go, because some people in some places don’t want you there and don’t like you just because you are black.”

Delbert is out of the house now, with a college degree, good job and nice car. “It’s not enough,” Blakemore says, “I still am concerned about his well-being.”

Next comes Lewis, a successful producer at a major record label in Chicago. “We all know what Chicago is like. All I want to do is find a way to get him here,” Blakemore says, shaking her head.

But she fears the most for Delasalle. He’s 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds — at 14. “He looks like he’s 20, but he’ll do stupid 14-year-old stuff, and I’m just terrified all the time.”

Even though Bukeka and Eugene Blakemore, who own the entertainment company FAVUnite, live in a safe, mostly white neighborhood in Overland Park, they laughed out loud one Friday evening when Dee said he could walk home from a skating rink a couple of miles away if they would drop him off there.

“You can’t walk anywhere at night!” they told him, shocked at his naiveté.

Bukeka and Eugene don’t want to instill fear in their sons in conversations about racism and police. “We treat it like life skills coaching: Here’s how you are going to stay safe.”

Having “the talk” about what to do during a traffic stop (keep your hands on the wheel, give the police officer all the information he needs) doesn’t take the worry away.

“You can comply and still die,” Bukeka says, citing the Castile case, where Castile allegedly told the officer he had a legal weapon and was reaching for the ID the officer asked him for when he was shot.

That incident has her thinking about adding a new part to “the talk.” “Now I want to say, ‘If they ask you for your registration or anything else in the glove box, ask if they will open the glove box for you.’ Because obviously anytime a black man reaches for anything, the police officer can say later they felt threatened.”

Blakemore hasn’t talked to Dee about the Castile shooting, she says, shaking her head and looking down. “I can’t. I can’t.”

Still, Blakemore is optimistic that life might be less dangerous for her grandson, Greisyn. And she believes the change can come in part from the police.

“People of color and women are joining police forces across the country. These people are dedicating their lives, making a huge sacrifice so that we can have a better conversation about how we can live together better in a lawful society. I believe that, I do.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 5:30 AM with the headline "‘Our boys are dying’: Overland Park mom on the anxiety of raising black boys."