Community holds vigil for slain youth, calls to end gun violence in metro Atlanta
Community holds candlelight vigil, calling for a stop to gun violence
A plea to end the gun violence plaguing metro Atlanta. Local leaders and community organizers held a service to memorialize the victims of gun violence in Atlanta and around the state. Among the speakers were the father of Ahmaud Arbery and the mother of Cameron Jackson.
ATLANTA - Activists, religious leaders, community organizers, and victims gathered together on Friday to renew a call to end gun violence.
The group held a memorial service for young people shot and killed in metro Atlanta and north Georgia in the past year at First Iconium Baptist Church in southeast Atlanta.
The group called it the SAYMYNAME Candlelight Memorial and was held in response to Gun Violence Awareness Day. The group read the names of each young victim out loud, lit candles and released balloons to honor them.
The father of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black man who was killed by a group of white men while jogging through a Brunswick neighborhood, spoke to the crowd.
"It’s difficult everyday of my life," said Marcus Arbery, Ahmaud Arbery’s father.
Arbery’s murder helped to spark a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement and a racial reckoning across the country.
"I’m in a fight I didn’t ask for, so I’m in this fight for the end," Arbery’s father said.
The mother of 15-year-old Cameron Jackson also spoke. Jackson, along with 12-year-old Zyion Charles, were gunned down last month near Atlantic Station during a fight among a half dozen people.
"I really don’t have words for it. I was looking at the name on paper, Cameron and he’s not here," said Carmeron’s mother Tiffany Smith.
"We just want to decrease the amount of people impacted by gun violence," said Shaun Smith with the community group BlackPush Inc. "We’re trying to send a message that this is a community issue and the community has to be more involved."
Smith along with the church is opening a community center, an outreach, to give young people options outside a life of violence.
"We hope to give them something different to think about, to give them opportunities to do art programs, to give them opportunities for mental health, conflict resolution, and we want to give them a voice in this society," Smith said.
Both parents that spoke lamented how they spent Christmas without their child and will ring in another year without them. They expressed how it is something no parent should ever go through.