No Good Dads’ Day: Bradley Lockhart Appearance at “Shaniya Speaks” Event, June 11

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I was getting tired earlier this week. It was a long day for me, and as usual, I was not at home and working on someone else’s laptop, a Mac. That meant I’ve spent sometime that day trying to get a clue about Mac-king after several years without doing it. And then I thought I had lost this story through a keyboarding mistake.

No doubt, there’s a lot I’d still like to talk about–no blacks on the Oscar Grant III jury, the attempted rape-frameup of seven Green Bay Packers, the disappearance and recovery of a Wisconsin housewife and mother, and of course, about the oil spill–but I need to eat and get ready for the weekend. But before I do, I thought I would revisit the Shaniya Davis case. Unfortunately, there are still people who support her negligent white daddy.

“For the past 10 years, I have traveled back and forth to Iraq, traveled throughout this country, entrusting my kids with their grandparents, with my sister, with my ex-girlfriend, who is a wonderful person who we love very much and raised Shaniya to be a very, very special person,” he said.

“I got on that plane every time they told me to, thinking that making hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy that big, nice home was making up for me not being there,” he added. “The sad part is, I had to go through this to realize what I was really missing. Don’t make that same mistake.”

During his speech, Lockhart said he would not stand for negativity or placing blame. He said healing starts by being part of the solution and that the community needs to take responsibility.

“If you are not going to join this team, get out of my way because I’m going to run right through you,” he said.

The crowd gave Lockhart a standing ovation. Several people walked up, hugged him and whispered in his ear.

My mouth flew open reading about this display.

He says he doesn’t want to engage in negativity or blame gaming? Uhuh. Fine words to say when his own complicity in this sad tale goes on without his taking full responsibility for his trifling ways. It wasn’t all Antoinette’s doing that the child was murdered. Who initially placed his daughter in harm’s way without checking with the authorities about the state of Antoinette’s home? Screw the community taking responsibility. The community took care of his black children. Several in the community asked to take care of Shaniya rather than her own mother. Responsibility begins at home, with individuals creating a home and a family unit, and then spreads by example throughout the community. It’s the community’s fault when really he didn’t care about his kids enough to raise them at home, or to adequately provide for them? What fcking nerve.

This was from a teaser article written a couple of days before the event:

Lockhart, who has since moved to Alabama, was in Fayetteville for Shaniya Speaks Day, which is designed to bring awareness to sex crimes and violence against children. The event is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at the John D. Fuller Recreational Complex on Old Bunce Road.

“(We want to) try to unite the community into making a difference to where this horrific crime doesn’t happen to another child,” Lockhart said.

The event comes two days before what would have been Shaniya’s sixth birthday.

“There won’t be that birthday party or that next birthday picture. It’s tough,” said Lockhart, who wears a yellow band on his wrist that bears his daughter’s name. “Just like Amber Alert, when they hear Shaniya’s name, it’s a household name.”

Lockhart, who was never married to Shaniya’s mother, said he regrets that he couldn’t take Shaniya to live with him in Alabama.

“I (could) actually go to work and go home every night and be with Shaniya and my other kids and really create a good family that I’ve been missing for so many years because traveling has taken me away,” he said. “Every day is filled with some sort of thought or feeling of Shaniya.”

I’ll bet.

I’ll bet too, that he didn’t want to take Shaniya to Bama in the first place. I also heard that his new lover didn’t want her there, either.

I see that his other children weren’t there at the event. Or the grandparents who tried in vain to get child support for them while they were growing up and he was running around. Don’t tell me that caring about his new girlfriend and child are giving him a new lease on fulfillment and fatherhood. Especially since I hear that they are both white like him. Or am I wrong?

But the place was packed with people who probably wanted their 15 minutes with him. People who don’t even know how to count one plus one. People who don’t know that he may be involved in the adult entertainment/sex industry.

Cumberland County–the cops and the social services department–seems to be deliberately dragging its feet about bringing up criminal charges against Lockhart. Or perhaps, they are exonerating him by default. Seems like a lot of people think that he’s a good guy, but he certainly isn’t. People, he isn’t. Again, he is using his own child to feather his own nest and to make himself out as some kind of hero. To a much lesser extent, he reminds me of Jim Jones–another white man with a black following–in the midst of the devastated Fillmore black community in San Francisco. The facts are out there proving a lot of things to the contrary, but seemingly no one wants to listen and give true justice to this little girl. Instead, all the justification is for Bradley Lockhart’s contemptible actions before and after her death.

~ by blksista on June 18, 2010.