Grim Anniversary Approaches for Missing Local Black Women

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SAFIYA CHARLES | The Montgomery Advertiser via AP Wire Service

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – Aubrina Mack’s dark anniversary passed on Aug. 15 largely unnoticed. Fourteen years gone. She’s been missing since she was 21.

Aug. 28 marks another grim observance. One year since Donna Calloway went missing in Montgomery. She would be 41 by now.

The two Black women seemingly vanished without a trace. Their photos remain logged in the state’s missing persons database attached to scant details about their disappearances.

Calloway was last seen leaving her residence. A little below average height at 5 feet 3 inches, she has black hair and brown eyes. A tattoo on her left leg displays her middle name, Michelle, and on her thigh a picture of a rose with the name Annie.

Mack’s description is similar. 5 feet 3 inches tall with black hair and brown eyes. Last seen leaving her home on Central Street in 2006, she told her sister she was heading over to a neighboring street and never returned. Her family told investigators Mack could not have willingly left her children behind.

Both cases have likely gone cold.

In Alabama, Mack and Calloway are two of 148 adults whose whereabouts are unknown. Nationally, they join a list that numbers in the hundred-thousands. More than 600,000 people go missing each year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. About 60% of them are people of color.

The issue is particularly acute for Black, brown and indigenous women who are disproportionately targeted and abducted. Black women make up less than 7% of the U.S. population but account for between 10 and 12% of all missing persons victims. Across the country, anywhere between 64,000 and 75,000 Black women and girls are currently missing.

Compounding the issue is the fact that Black women and girls are often labeled as runaways rather than victims of abduction.

“There’s always this connotation that they didn’t go missing because of foul play. They went missing on their own accord,” said Jada Moss, a legislative and regulatory attorney at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Moss began to examine how legal measures contribute to the lack of search and recovery of Black women and girls last year.

“These girls are labeled as runaways and so the police don’t give them much attention at all. It’s kind of shooed away as an issue that they don’t have to pay attention to. A case police don’t have to give resources to because well, ‘they ran away, they don’t want to be here. We don’t need to find them,'” she said.

When local woman Lakira Goldsmith went missing days after Thanksgiving 2018, it took authorities more than a year to add her entry to its missing persons database. Requests to ALEA investigators were not answered before press time.

Families of color are often frustrated throughout the process. Feeling at times as if neither police nor media care about finding their loved ones.

Studies have shown that the news phenomenon late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill termed “missing white woman syndrome,” is indeed very real.

In “The Invisible Damsel: Differences in How National Media Framed Coverage of Missing Black and White Women,” the authors found that race, class, attractiveness and youthfulness were often used as criteria to determine the subject’s news value. While stories that centered missing Black women focused on the “victim’s baggage,” an abusive boyfriend or troubled past; media organizations were likely to emphasize the physical appearance or feminine characteristics of white women.

Groups like the Black and Missing Foundation and Peas in their Pods have been working to bring greater attention to cases of missing victims of color. While sites like the Charley Project work to amplify cold cases like Mack’s, whose has been open for more than a decade. After Aug. 28, when Calloway’s investigation passes one year, hers too can be logged on the project’s website.