Pubdate: Thu, 20 Jul 2006
Source: Peoria Journal Star (IL)
Copyright: 2006sPeoria Journal Star
Contact:  http://pjstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/338
Note: Does not publish letters from outside our circulation area.
Author: Pam Adams

T-SHIRTS TELL OF LIFE, DEATH

What runs through your mind when a young black man with a shady 
background gets shot?

Do you think "live by the sword, die by the sword"? Do your thoughts 
turn to cloaked variations on the "those-people" chant, as in "I 
would stay in Peoria, but it's not safe"? Or do you pause long enough 
to think about it at all?

James Fairley sighs when he hears the question. He owns The Tee-Shirt 
King, a custom-printing business along Western Avenue. Fairley 
understands exactly where the question leads.

"I think, 'Here we go again.' "

He sighs.

"The next thing I know, someone will come through the door saying, 
'My boy just got killed. What will it cost to get T-shirts made with 
his picture?' "

He sighs.

"Of course, I give them the spiel. The more they buy, the less it costs . . ."

He sighs.

The more they die, the more money Fairley and others make copying 
photos of the newly deceased onto cotton T-shirts. Fairley's sighs 
capture both a personal mourn and a business dilemma.

"I didn't want to do this at first," he says. But the T-shirts became 
such a touchstone of grief in the 'hood, he couldn't avoid it. "It's 
like second nature now. The minute someone passes, the next thing 
people want is T-shirts. It's like set the funeral day, pick out the 
casket, get the T-shirt."

As far as anybody knows, the T-shirts don't have an official name. 
Call them memorial T-shirts, dead-man shirts or R.I.P. Tees. They've 
been around for more than a decade locally, longer in big cities 
where a mish-mash of gangs, gangsta rap, drive-by shootings and 
obscenely high homicide rates among young black men are thought to be 
the impulse behind immortalizing dead youth on T-shirts.

Wearing the memory on a T-shirt is no longer a memorial solely for 
victims of street violence and its collateral damage. People order 
them when Sister dies of cancer, when Brother dies from the burdens 
of diabetes, when Grandma dies of natural causes. They wear them to 
the funeral, they re-order new ones on birthdays and anniversaries of 
the death, they frame them and hang them on the wall.

"A lot of white people are starting to do it now," says Randy 
Scronce, owner of A Cheep Tee. That's because a lot of white kids die 
too young, too soon, also. Whether it's vehicle accidents in Tazewell 
County or shootings in the Harrison Homes, the emotional aftermath is the same.

We are counting teenage traffic fatalities in Tazewell the same way 
we have been tracking young-black-male homicides in Peoria. Perhaps 
because the wounds of traffic fatalities are still raw, the public 
focus is on holistic approaches, curbing deaths, saving lives. The 
deaths are the current front-page, top-of-the broadcast news.

Meanwhile, Harrison Homes and other high-crime areas of Peoria are 
little Lebanons where residents, public housing maintenance workers 
and young black men are often endangered by conflicts not of their 
own making. But their deaths have long since been relegated to 
second-class news. Unless, of course, it happens in a middle-class 
neighborhood. The public, political focus has shifted from saving 
lives to cutting crime rates.

There is a difference between the two. Cutting crime rates is 
impersonal, a measure of statistics and law-enforcement strategies. 
Saving lives, as exemplified in the old stop-the-violence movements 
and the best crime prevention initiatives, sends a valuable message, 
a message of value. A life is worth something.

Some people hate the memorial T-shirts and all they represent. To 
others, they are a prescription for the anonymity that accompanies 
the loss of young lives.

Lest anyone hold on to the myth that poor black neighborhoods are 
apathetic, that poor black men are somehow immune to the violence, 
the T-shirts are a cry about a life that was worth something.

Ironically, family reunions and church contracts make up the bulk of 
Fairley's business. But the T-shirts represent the most grief. Literally.

"If they want to do me a favor, they can stop killing each other," he 
says. "I'd rather get business some other way."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman