Poverty, environment helped set Toledo teens on path to murder

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

A problem that consistently confronts racist law makers in the question of defining who is “Negro” and who is “white.” In general, two schools of “thought” prevail is the United States on this issue. In about nine states a Negro is anyone who had a grandparent who was a Negro. The laws generally define such a person as “having one-eighth or more Negro blood” or as an “octoroon.” The other definition of Negro is used in at least six states: a Negro is any person who has “any trace of Negro blood.” The circularity of these statements does not seem to trouble the opponents of miscegenation.

Virginia provides an interesting example of racist legal gymnastics. Whites in that state can marry neither Negroes nor American Indians. In Virginia, a Negro is a person who has any Negro ancestor, and an American Indian is a person who had at least one Indian grandparent. If someone has one-sixteenth or less “Indian blood” then he is a white. But Virginia still hasn’t decided what you are if you have one-eighth Indian heritage, i.e. one of your great-grandparents was an Indian. Furthermore, if a man is an inhabitant of an Indian tribal reservation and has at least one Indian grandparent and less than one-sixteenth “Negro blood,” then despite the state’s definition of a Negro he may be regarded as an Indian on the reservation. Once he leaves the reservation, however, he undergoes a legal metamorphosis and becomes a Negro. Of course he can then move to Mississippi, where the “octoroon” requirement prevails, and thus become a Caucasian.

Oklahoma courts have decided that American Indians are “white” and therefore may not marry “any person of African descent.” In Alabama, however, Indians are mulattoes, according to the courts, and therefore cannot marry whites. Filipinos in Louisiana must be able to prove that they are “not basically negroid” before they can marry whites. Indiana courts have revealed that “all Mexicans are not white persons and some of them are negroes,” and therefore non-Negro Mexicans can marry either Negroes or whites.

Peter Cumminos, “Race, Marriage, and Law,” The Harvard Crimson, December 17, 1963. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/12/17/race-marriage-and-law-pamerican-racism/

Poverty, environment helped set Toledo teens on path to murder

Poverty, environment helped set Toledo teens on path to murder

The Toledo Blade
Toledo, Ohio
2014-09-21

Roneisha Mullen, Staff Writer

Rose Russell, Staff Writer

First of two parts

By the time Shamus Groom was 11 years old, he was already drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. At 14, he saw a gun for the first time, and at 15, he was occasionally “packing.”

In 2000, Groom, who moved from Adrian to Toledo as a teen, was sentenced to 15 years to life for the 1998 shooting death of a 20-year-old North Toledo man. The victim was gunned down by Groom’s half brother over a drug deal that went bad; Groom was present during the shooting.

Shamus Groom, serving 15 years to life in the Belmont Correctional Institution in St. Clairsville, Ohio, says he and his younger brother were bounced around the homes of family members.
THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGT

Printess Williams, a lifelong Toledoan, pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing four people — two in 1994 when he was 16, and two in 2002 when he was 24. He was sentenced to 151 years in state prison.

Groom and Williams are both black men. While violent crime isn’t limited to the black race, there appears to be something awry when significant numbers of young black males are landing in one of two places: graveyards or prisons.

Looking at their lives, it can be argued the environment Williams and Groom grew up in contributed as much to them becoming killers as their own decisions…

…The chain of events that led to the murder convictions of Groom and Williams began long before shots rang out claiming the lives of almost half a dozen Toledoans.

Born to a teenage mother and absentee father, Shamus Groom never fully knew what it meant to have a stable home. He and his younger brother, both of mixed race, bounced around the homes of family members while his mother worked odd jobs to take care of them. The boys were left with their “foster grandmother” when their mother moved out of the country to be with her new husband, who was in the military.

“They took care of us, but we felt like outcasts, like guests,” Groom said during an hourlong interview at Belmont Correctional Institution, a state prison in St. Clairsville, Ohio, near the Ohio–West Virginia line, where he’s serving his sentence. “We knew we didn’t belong there, and they reminded us all the time.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Ohio, Printess Williams, Roneisha Mullen, Rose Russell, Shamus Groom, The Toledo Blade, Toledo Blade

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2014 at 17:07Z and is filed under Articles, Law, Media Archive, Social Work, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

Poverty, environment helped set Toledo teens on path to murder

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