Last week, Twitter user BlackMarvelGirl tweeted about eight missing Black girls from Washington, DC. It quickly went viral.
An op-ed writer at theGrio states:
Several media outlets, including Essence and TeenVogue, began to write about the topic, discovering that in January, there were as many as 15 open cases of missing black and latinx girls in DC, getting little more than local media coverage and some tweets from the police department. Although this number is alarming, it speaks to a much larger issue going on in our country that is failing to make top stories on evening news programs.
Black women and girls are missing, and no one is doing anything about it.
Thanks to the increased conversation, the Congressional Black Caucus is now calling on the FBI to help find these missing girls. AP reports:
The District of Columbia logged 501 cases of missing juveniles, many of them black or Latino, in the first three months of this year, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, the city's police force. Twenty-two were unsolved as of March 22, police said.
The letter, dated Tuesday and obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, was sent by Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond, D-La., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District in Congress. They called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey to "devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed."
An email sent to the Justice Department seeking comment was not immediately answered Thursday. Richmond said he hopes to meet with Sessions and bring up the issue. No meeting is currently scheduled. But President Donald Trump assured caucus members on Wednesday that he would make his Cabinet secretaries available to them.
I have a feeling that Sessions doesn’t really care about missing young people of color, but hopefully these measures will help bring resources for these types of oft-neglected cases.