Friday, October 23, 2009

Blog Question: McClendon son: 'Thug mentality killed my parents'

McClendon son: 'Thug mentality killed my parents'

A member of the McClendon family is blaming the "thug mentality" in the black community for the slaying of his parents and said black leaders have "to wake up" to change it and "come to grips that our pathologies run deep."

Theodore McClendon early yesterday morning posted a 3-minute videoclip entitled "AddressingThug-Life" on the Facebook social networking site in which he also said that "this kind of intimidation has to stop."

McClendon and his brother Garrard, a CLTV host, are two of three sons of Milton and Ruby McClendon of Hammond, Ind., an African-American couple whose bodies were found in a south suburban Cook County forest preserve Monday afternoon. Their missing green Cadillac was found abandoned on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago early Wednesday morning.
Early yesterday afternoon, a source close to the family said funeral arrangements would be completed yesterday afternoon.

In addition, the source said, 10 FBI agents have joined the investigation.

In the moody and darkly lighted video, Theodore McClendon said "the thug mentality is what killed my parents." He said the people who killed them saw the couple's classic American car, the kind "that thugs want so they can really soup it up." So they just decided to take it, he said.

"My parents happened to be the unfortunate victim of their immaturity and their thugism, and quite frankly to their primitive nature," he said. "We got to change this. Unless we change this we are doomed to have an uncivilized society. We are doomed to live in a quagmire of primordial existence. Unless we change it.

"But we got to admit it. That's where black leaders have to wake up. Black leaders have to come to grips that our pathologies run deep.

"Despite the causes of black pathologies, we must understand they exist. We need to address them rather than to blame external forces, blame economics, blame the white man. Blame something that's not going to solve anything.

"You got to admit our shortcomings... That's what we got to do."

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