After the Shootings, Tallahassee Leaders Put a Choice in Front of the City's Young People: Corvettes or Hearses

Tallahassee's answer to a recent string of shootings was staged, deliberately, as a choice. Community leaders gathered Friday, October 30, at the Tallahassee Urban League to speak to the capital city's young people, their parents and the wider community, in an event that combined prayer and community outreach with a procession built around a stark piece of symbolism: a line of Corvettes, led by two hearses.

The gathering brought together the Tallahassee Urban League, the Leon County Sheriff's Office, the Tallahassee Police Department, ACLU FL at FAMU, the League of Women Voters of Florida, and city and county commissioners. After the program at the Urban League, participants traveled in the procession from Old Bainbridge Road to Perry Street, where they gathered in prayer near the site of a recent mass shooting - the ground where, a week earlier, gunfire outside Florida A&M's homecoming football game injured a dozen people.

Two practical messages ran through the morning alongside the symbolism. Leaders asked adults to start direct conversations with young people about who they are and what their plans are, and the Urban League pointed families to its Youth Crime Prevention and Intervention Program, which serves Leon County school-age students and offers a workshop component for young adults and parents. And the law-enforcement partners repeated a prevention point they have made before: firearm owners should stop leaving guns in unlocked vehicles, a practice they described as a preventable contributor to gun violence in the capital city.