Requiem For A High School Martyr

Ebony, July, 1999

Brutal slaying of ISAIAH SHOELS at a Colorado high school stuns a nation already chilled by rash of savage attacks against Blacks

MORE than 2,500 cars ringed Denver's Heritage Christian Center, a gleaming, shopping mall-sized religious complex situated on the eastern fringe of the city. Sedans, limousines, sport utility vehicles and trucks carrying hordes of media crews spilled out of the parking lot and onto the surrounding streets, as mourners in the Mile High City queued up in droves to pay their final respects to Isaiah Shoels, the 18-year-old, 4-foot-11-inch football player whose skin color, popularity and athletic prowess brought upon him the scorn of the two classmates who hunted him down and shot him to death in the library of his suburban high school.

Moved by the staggering brutality of the April 20 massacre at Columbine High School, where Shoels, 11 of his classmates and one teacher were killed, nearly 7,000 people ventured out on a damp and dreary Denver Thursday to extend comforting hands and words to the Shoels family and to denounce the culture of violence and hatred that fueled the melee in Littleton, Colo., an affluent bedroom community few imagined would ever be the scene of such a vicious slaughter.

The entire nation recoiled in horror as the details of the Columbine melee were revealed by its survivors. Most staggering was the calculated and cold-blooded manner in which Isaiah Shoels was gunned down. During their rampage, his killers, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, a pair of right-wing, Hitler-loving extremists, had scoured the school looking for Shoels, one of only a handful of Blacks enrolled at Columbine, a school of more than 1,900 students. Finding Shoels crouched under a table in the library, witnesses reported that one of the murderers shouted "there's that little n----r," before shooting Shoels in the face at point-blank range with a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun.

After taking the lives of 12 students and a teacher and wounding 23 others, the two gunmen--who police believe planned their deadly mission for nearly a year--committed suicide.

"Most Americans were saddened by what happened at Columbine," said Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of several nationally known civic and religious leaders invited to speak at the three-and-a-half-hour ceremony celebrating the life of Isaiah Shoels. "But we should not be shocked, for we knew that America had sown the seeds of violence and our children are reaping the fruits of that violence."

Isaiah Shoels' murder sent another tremor down the collective spines of African-Americans still processing the savageness of a spate of recent attacks and the proliferation of right-wing racist groups. High-profile killings such as the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Nigerian emigre who was gunned down in his vestibule by New York police officers, and the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., the Jasper, Texas, man who was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death, have led many to wonder whether the new millennium marks the beginning of open season on Black folks.

More than a week after the Columbine shootings, there was still disbelief that a racially motivated murder had occurred in a region of the country where a Black mayor leads the major city and African-Americans hold the posts of lieutenant governor and secretary of state. The grief registered on the faces of mourners who poured into the church for Isaiah Shoels' funeral. Eyes rimmed with tears, shoulders hunched in anguish, they filed solemnly past the metallic-blue casket where Isaiah Shoels--clad in a black graduation cap and gown, the diploma he would have earned propped beside him--lay in state. The crowd not only filled the 3,500-seat Heritage Christian Center sanctuary and its adjacent gymnasium--outfitted with television monitors to broadcast the proceedings--but the overflow flooded the church corridors, where the grief-stricken hugged and cried and even laughed to ease the pain.

It seemed that everyone in the Denver metropolitan area was there: White and Black, young and old, students, teachers, politicians, ministers, friends of Isaiah Shoels and people who never met the charismatic young man.

"I didn't have the privilege of knowing Isaiah," said Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, "and I don't think there are any words that somebody like me can say that will ease the pain of the family and friends of Isaiah and the other children that have been so brutally murdered. But I do know that we have to resolve today to do everything we can, no matter what our color, no matter what our religion, no matter what school we go to, no matter what we have done in the past, that we do what we can to try to say no more."

And so the people of Colorado came together--under the gaze of a nation watching the proceedings on cable television--to make sense of a senseless act, and to begin the healing process. But most of all, they came together to celebrate the brief but shining life of a young man described by friends and family as a "people magnet."