Where was daddy?
 
Chapter One
 
Anne Dozier’s youngest son was shot dead on Baltimore’s streets in early June. News reports said she kissed Kevin “KK” Dozier on the cheek as he lay dying on a block just off the Pimlico Race Track.
 
“Tell Mousey and Kim that I love them,” Dozier reportedly whispered just before KK died.
 
Mousey was Michael Dowdy. He was only 18 when someone shot and killed him as he rode a bicycle in June of 2003.

Kim was Kim Nichols. Four days past his 19th birthday in May of 2002, Nichols was fatally shot too.
 
Mousey and Kim were KK’s older brothers. All were Anne Dozier’s sons. Not one lived to see 20. KK, like Kim, was only 19 when he was killed.

For about a week this month, Anne Dozier and the murders of her three sons in three years were the talk of Baltimore. As is usual for black folks when black men kill black men, we shook our heads, lamented our plight and talked about what a crying shame it all was.

But some folks questioned Anne Dozier’s lifestyle and suggested she should have borne much of the blame. A quick glance at the circumstances of her life suggests this may have been a valid point.
 
Dozier had four children by four different men. She recently gave birth to a fifth child by yet a fifth man.

For 11 years, Dozier was separated from her children while she served a prison term for murdering one of her boyfriends. Her daughter, who was then her youngest child, went to live with relatives. Mousey and KK went to foster homes, while Kim went to live with his maternal grandmother.

Yes, when I read these facts and then learned Dozier had just given birth to another baby girl, part of me wanted to scream, “TIE THE TUBES, LADY! TIE THE TUBES!”
 
Yes, I wanted to excoriate Anne Dozier as the poster woman for what happens when a people hold “baby mama-ism” up as not only a cultural icon, but a darn near cultural imperative.
 
But read closely what happened to Dozier’s children. Anybody read about any daddies stepping up and taking responsibility?
 
You surely didn’t. Which is why I’m giving Dozier a pass on this one. Maybe it’s because, having lost three siblings in a 17-month time span — including my youngest brother to homicide — I can really feel her pain.
 
Whatever the reason, I can see that at least three daddies — the fathers of Mousey, KK and Kim — didn’t step up when they were needed. Assuming the boyfriend Dozier killed wasn’t the father of any of these boys, we should all be asking: Damn, where were you “brothers?”
 
Kim was killed first. We might assume there was nothing his father could do about that. But the news stories about Dozier and her sons suggested that once Kim died, Mousey and KK were at risk from guys in their Pimlico neighborhood out to get both of them.
 
It is at this point that the fathers of Mousey and KK were supposed to step up. They were supposed to look out for their sons. Get them the hell out of “Bodymore, Murderland.” That’s what some of Baltimore’s criminals, with piercing perspicacity few figured they could ever muster, called this town in the infamous “Stop Snitching” DVD.
 
Once Mousey took a bullet, you figure KK’s dad would have seen the handwriting on the wall and moved the boy out of the neighborhood or, even better, out of town. Send him to that uncle who lives in South Carolina. Let him live with that aunt up in New York. That extended black family network we used to cherish should have kicked in.
 
Many of us don’t have that anymore. But isn’t that worth “conserving?” Black liberals ask black conservatives, in all seriousness, what we want to conserve.
 
That black extended family is one thing. Black dads in the home — which was the rule, not the exception, in black America until at least 1960 — is another. A time when teen pregnancy and black criminals carried a certain stigma in black America is yet another.
 
The question isn’t why black conservatives want to conserve these things. The question is why black liberals don’t.