Detroit Parents Campaign to Save City’s Children : Violence: Every year dozens of children are shot down on the mean streets. Parents of some victims have formed a group to fight back.

DETROIT —  Derik Barfield’s life went largely unnoticed by the public. And, at first, so did his death.

Shot with a handgun during an argument in which a brother was critically wounded, his slaying on July 17, 1986, rated three short paragraphs in the next day’s edition of the Detroit Free Press.

It was not a spectacular murder by Detroit standards. After all, 30 other city youths 18 or younger were shot to death that year.

Today, Derik Barfield’s funeral program is one of a dozen tacked to a cork board in a cluttered office in a century-old schoolhouse near the Cass Corridor, Detroit’s Skid Row.

On another wall are two dozen plaques, including one etched with his name and those of the 30 other youths killed by gunfire in 1986.

This is the part-time office of Clementine Barfield, 38, who helped found an organization called Save Our Sons And Daughters several months after the death of the third of her four children. She’s a busy woman this morning.

Plans for a weeklong anti-violence program at Martin Luther King High School and a neighborhood anti-drug march are in the works.

In the afternoon, she will accompany another mother to a state juvenile prison to visit the young killer of the woman’s son. “She wants to talk to him and help him get his life straightened out,” Barfield said.

“We are people who have been through hell ourselves, but we are willing to put it aside, take a stand and say: ‘We have got to do something.’ ”

At the core of SOSAD are Barfield and six other mothers of slain youths who organized the group in early 1987 with about 90 other Detroiters. Citizen volunteers, clergy, and city and school officials have joined in SOSAD’s dual purpose of comforting grieving families and working to prevent violence by and against the city’s children.

“In the black community, bereavement support is not something we normally reach out for,” Barfield said. “The norm is for people to lock themselves in their house and feel like they’re the only one who feels this badly. But we have over 130 families in SOSAD, families that have reached out.”

SOSAD provides weekly support groups, workshops on grief, stress management classes and a 24-hour hot line.

The organization also holds an anti-handgun vigil every Monday at the City-County Building and has sponsored rallies, marches and memorial services.

“Wherever I go, kids are stopping me and saying: ‘You’re that lady about the kids getting killed,’ ” said Barfield, who also works full time in the city Finance Department.

SOSAD is developing chapters in Flint and Pontiac, Mich. It has had requests for organizational help from Milwaukee, St. Louis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Columbus, Ohio, and Omaha, Neb.

“Soon we will be a national organization, or, rather, other people will start their own chapters,” Barfield said. “If they call themselves SOSAD they’ll be looking to us for organization, and I don’t want to take on all that. Right now we don’t have the resources.”

SOSAD is sustained mainly by small donations and grants from the state and city. The group has yet to receive corporate or foundation support.

“Grass-roots organizations usually are started by people who have a lot of love and a lot of commitment, but it doesn’t know how to sustain itself,” Barfield said. “Without money, the group will die out, but our emphasis has never been on money. Our emphasis is on commitment.”

Barfield said her own commitment hasn’t flagged, but she has had to begin picking and choosing her activities. For example, she no longer attends funerals, something she used to do two or three times a week.

“I’ve heard so many crying mothers, seen so many dead children,” she said. “After a while, all the faces started to look alike. The pain is the same, the hurt is the same.

“I don’t want to keep looking at that. I want to look at solutions, look at alternatives.”

Solutions, if any, are hard to assess.

From Jan. 1 through Nov. 12 of 1989 there were 229 shootings of Detroit children 16 or under, 28 of them fatal, according to police statistics. There were 308 such shootings, 55 of them fatal, for all of 1988.

“It’s kind of hard to measure the impact,” Barfield said. “But when you look at the statistics and see homicides among young people are going down, you have to feel encouraged--and it’s not just because of SOSAD.”

SOSAD has worked only indirectly with the Detroit Police Department, said Cmdr. Dorothy Knox, head of the department’s Community Services Division. But the group has been an important influence on other community organizations, she said.

“You have to start somewhere, and if it gets the public up in arms, then it’s meeting its purpose,” Knox said.

Jesse Harrison, who shot Derik Barfield between the eyes with a handgun he bought for $25, spent slightly more than two years in a state prison and was released in December, 1988.

“I can’t heal as long as I’m talking about it every day, so the healing process is not just something I can work through,” Clementine Barfield said. “But I know I’ve been instrumental in helping some children, and it helps to know I haven’t lost my son for nothing.”

SOSAD’s dual purpose of support for bereaved families and anti-violence advocacy may be unique in the United States, said Marjolijn Bijlefeld, associate director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

“I don’t know of anyone like Clem Barfield, who has taken it on and continued long after other parents have quit a support group,” Bijlefeld said.

The coalition itself tried without success to start a support network for grieving families, she said.

“People who are willing to talk about it generally are very willing to talk about it immediately afterward,” she said. “But it’s hard to sustain it. People who have lost a child seven or eight years ago don’t always want to keep going with it. There’s a lot of attrition.”

“I can’t afford to burn out,” Barfield said. “I have to keep the fire burning. But I’m pushing for others to pick up the torch.”