My youngest one, she was 13 when I started
Kids Off the Block. I was hanging with her, trying to keep up with
her because all my other kids were gone off to college and married
and she was the only one at home. She had about nine friends, and
they were running up and down the street all the time. They didn’t
have anything to do. They were just tearing up people’s grass and
fences and stuff. Not intentionally, just playing in it, you know?
I started to take them skating and fishing and swimming, all that
kind of stuff. And my mother saw it, and she said, “Why don’t you
do something with those kids? They like you.” And I was like, “No,
no, no, no, no.” I thought my youngest daughter would go off to
college, and I’d be free.
But then I prayed about it for three days. I
prayed hard, and I said, “Lord, is this it?” And yeah, it was. When
I finally made up my mind to go out there on July 15, 2003, they
were all in the front. Hottest day of the year. They were all
standing out there, hollering at each other and playing, and I
walked out and said, “Excuse me.”
And my daughter said, “Oh, Ma. What’s the
matter, now?”
“Nothing. I just need to ask you guys a
question.”
“What, what?” they said.
“If I started something in the house, would
you guys participate?” Because I didn’t know what—I had no idea
what a nonprofit was and all that.
And they were like, “Yeah!”
I asked them, “So, what do you guys wanna be?
What do you want
to do?”
And they all started jumping up and down: “I
wanna be a doctor!” “I wanna be a singer!” “I wanna be a rapper!”
“I wanna be a lawyer!”
And I was like, “Oh, so ya’ll do want to
do
something?” And that’s what inspired me. That’s what
excited me. The next day I invited them into my living room, and
that’s where it started.
I had a six-room apartment. My husband said
we’re not going past the living room, the dining room and one
bedroom, which we made into a little studio for music. So we cut it
off there. I gotta have my own bedroom. I looked up one day, and
there were 75 young people coming to my house every day. We could
barely move. I realized how big the need was, because these kids
didn’t even know me.
In the beginning of KOB, as I began to talk
to the other kids, I realized all the problems they had. Oh my
goodness, I was like, “Whoa, I couldn’t be a teenager these days.”
They had so many issues. They had mothers who were on drugs. They
had fathers who were on drugs. They had mothers who were locked up.
They had fathers who were locked up. They had grandmothers who were
taking care of them. They had sisters who were taking care of them.
They had older brothers who were selling drugs to take care of the
little kids. And then to do something with them and see them smile
and play, because they missed all that, you know? The innocence.
The playing. The laughing, the talking, the bonding. They missed
all that.
The key to young people, by the way, is their
interests. If they love something, they’ll get involved in
everything else. Last year, there was stuff all summer at KOB. It
was so awesome. We had a three-day workshop on HIV/AIDS. We went to
a workshop at O’Hare Airport learning about aviation. That was so
cool because some of them had never been on a plane. We went to the
Black Women’s Expo. We did an event for the alderman, a barbecue.
We’ve been to 20 cities, because the young people don’t go
anywhere, they stay on the block. Their whole life is on the block.
They don’t know what downtown Chicago looks like.
I had 53 young people working out of my house
through the Put Illinois to Work program.62 We walked Roseland and
cleaned up vacant lots and alleys and seniors’ yards. We had little
groups go and see what the seniors wanted, because we have a senior
citizens’ building right on the corner. Like, if they needed stuff
from the grocery store, cleaners, things like that. The young
people had some great stories about the seniors, but I was just
thankful that they even listened to what the seniors were saying to
them. I keep telling the older people like myself that the young
people don’t know about the civil rights movement. They have no
clue; they don’t understand it because nobody has explained it to
them. How many people died, how many people were injured, how many
people were jailed, just so these young people can do what they’re
doing.
I found out my biggest thing with young
people was that I listened. No judgment. I give advice if I’m
asked, and sometimes when I’m not asked. If I know that they are
getting ready to make the wrong decision, I will step up to them.
But 90 percent of the time, I just listen. It has to be a
relationship, you know?
When they believe in themselves, it’s
contagious. They pull along their peers and friends and everybody.
But the hard part is getting them to realize their power. They’ve
been told otherwise, and they believe it, because they’ve been told
so long. Some of them since childhood, since birth. So that’s what
you fight against, too.
You see the young man—that poster over there?
He was just killed. His real name is David Rodgers, but we call him
Red. He was just killed on 115th, right here on this corner. And it
hurt me to my heart. I still reel.
Red loved basketball. He ate, slept, drank
basketball. And Red was really talented. I believe Red could have
gone to the NBA. I really do. I used to tell him that. I used to
tell him, “You’re a superstar, Red.” And he would be like, “I know,
I know.”
But he had a cousin. And when this cousin
came, I knew that everything would change for Red. Red’s grades in
school had started coming up. We had got him a job. He was working
with us. He was coming to play basketball. He was doing so good and
then, all of a sudden, he got involved with drugs and gangs and
robbing people. I would still see him. I would try to talk to him.
But in the last couple months, I couldn’t get to him. I just
couldn’t get to him. He was surrounded by negativity. So I did what
I knew best, and that was to pray for him.
He had gone to a barbershop right up here on
this corner. He got to arguing with another guy in the barbershop,
and he told the guy, “Let’s go outside.” It seemed like a setup to
me. When he got outside, three or four guys starting shooting at
him, and he was trying to shoot back, and they caught him on that
corner over there.
I was coming from downtown, at another event
about youth violence. I had about 10 young people with me. And we
see all these police cars on the corner, and we were like, “What’s
going on?” So we get out of our cars, and people are screaming and
hollering. All of a sudden, I look right there at the sidewalk, and
there’s Red. He had been shot in the jaw, shot in the chest. I
said, “That’s Red.” And I, oh, my daughter and I, we just grabbed
each other.
I think, when Red first came to KOB, the way
I was talking to him, he believed it for a minute because he got
involved and started to do real well. But reality set in when he
would go home. He’d be right back in his environment, and I could
only go so far. Funding doesn’t allow us to do a whole lot. We are
good at what we do with what we have. Red loved basketball, so we
could keep him going with the basketball, but you had to go beyond
basketball. He needed other services, which we tried to get him,
but it was a battle. It was a battle for his life.
And he chose. He chose to do what he was
doing. His whole family was involved in gangs. I mean, that’s all
they knew. If you ride around this community, you will see what I’m
talking about. There’s nothing here for young people. There’s
nothing here. Where in this community does it say we care, we want
to help you to thrive, we want to give you recreational activities?
We want to give you the arts so you can express yourself? Nothing
here.
Youth violence hurts me. I don’t know how
many times I’ve cried. I had to stop being so emotional about it. A
lot of my friends were telling me, “You can’t save everybody.” And
I used to say, “Why not?” I was being naive, I guess. You see, it’s
not that violence has escalated so much. It’s the brutality of the
violence now. And it’s the ages. When you see an 8-year-old gunned
down, and she’d been jumping rope? How cruel is that in the young
person’s mind who is getting ready to shoot? Does he think, “Maybe
I’m not going to shoot now because that little girl is there?” No,
he still shoots. What’s missing here?
What’s missing is that the young man who is
doing the shooting has no guidance, and if he does, it’s negative.
He has nobody to say, “Look, man, you don’t do that.” That’s the
young man I like to get to. I like to get the ones who are the
shooters, the ones who want to do the bad things to our community.
Because I believe that’s all they need, somebody to get to
them.
We’re losing a generation, right before our
eyes. What’s really ticking me off at this moment, the same thing
that was ticking me off when I started: no outrage. If this were
happening in a different culture, a different race, I guarantee you
it would be different. And I’m faulting my own, because they’re
ours mostly. It’s Hispanics, and it’s black kids. And nobody is
saying a word.
The black community is over here, and we’re
quiet. The white community is over here, and the Latino is over
here, and it’s quiet. I want to break it down. Tear it down! What
purpose does it serve? Why is it so hard for people to come
together?
I would love to walk into the Hispanic
community, which is right around the corner from me, and say, “How
you doing? Come on, let’s sit down. Let’s eat.” I would love for
them to come here. The Latin Kings and the black gangs are fighting
all the time. Some of the Latin King boys can’t come this way
because they might get shot. But I would love for the Latin Kings
to come here and be involved in the program, because they’re
suffering from the same things. They need somebody to talk to.
But you can’t break down that barrier for the
adults in the Hispanic community who say, “We don’t like black
people, ‘cause all blacks are blah, blah, blah.” And we over here
in the black community are going, “Yeah, all Mexicans are blah,
blah, blah.” And we are teaching that to our kids, who then amplify
it. “And all white people are blah, blah, blah, blah blah.” So it
continues, generation after generation.
If I got a 10-year-old, and he’s out here
running up and down the street, robbing old ladies and throwing
bricks in cars, and I’m sitting on my porch going, “That’s a bad
little boy.” Well, guess what? That bad little boy is going to grow
up, and then he’s going to be in your neighborhood. So when I see
that, I say, “Hey! Come here.” And then if they run, I call the
police on them, because they’ve got to know they can’t do that
stuff. I probably saved that little boy’s life, because after I
call the police, then I go talk to his mama. Then, when I see him
again, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m the one. I’m watching you.”
Actually, that’s a true story. Now when he
sees me he goes, “Hey, Miss Diane,” and he goes around the corner.
He knows he can come in that door and say, “Miss Diane, I need
help.” And he got it. Whatever I got, he got.
Lord willing, in five years, I hope to be
serving thousands of young people. Getting them jobs, getting them
back in school, helping them fulfill their dreams. I also hope to
have KOB over this whole city in different communities. I think we
could be a help to others who are already established there. And in
5 to 10 years, I pray that we have touched a whole generation.
I don’t want to offend anybody, but maybe I
should. How in the world can people sit? We’re all silent right
now, but it’s getting ready to get warm again, and when it gets
warm, youth violence heats up. And then when it gets really hot,
youth violence is really hot. We’ll have bodies coming up.
But now, we’re just sitting here twiddling
our thumbs instead of getting ready to intervene into that violence
that is about to happen. We’re not intervening with those young
people who are already standing on a corner because they dropped
out of school, hoping to join a gang and have nothing to do. An
organization like KOB has to fight to get funding to do things, to
stop this from happening.
Help us help these young people! I’m talking
to a city that needs to back up what they’re talking about. They’re
always throwing youth violence out there: We’re gonna do this,
we’re gonna do that. When you find somebody, an organization, that
is really doing that, you should be, “Yeah, let’s help, let’s
help!”
Where are you? That’s my question. Where are
you?
—
Interviewed by Kristin Scheffers
Endnotes
62 Put Illinois to Work was a temporary jobs
program that matched workers with private employers. It lasted only
a few months in 2010 before being shut down by Gov. Pat Quinn. See
Monique Garcia, “Quinn to End Temporary Jobs Program Next Month,”
Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 2010.
HELL BROKE LOOSE
HYINTH DAVIS
Hyinth Davis is a 20-year-old from Roseland.
Growing up, Davis was surrounded by substance abuse, violence and
poverty. Both of his parents were on drugs, and his father was
physically abusive to both Davis and his mother. But unlike many
young people in similar circumstances, he has resisted the
temptation to join a gang. Instead, he spends a lot of his spare
time at Kids Off the Block, a safe haven for young people, run by
community organizer Diane Latiker.
Because of the 2009 beating death of Fenger
High School student Derrion Albert, Davis’ neighborhood has
received a great deal of notoriety. To the countless people
worldwide who watched the viral video of that murder, Derrion
Albert became a symbol of street violence in Chicago. But to Davis,
he was simply another lost friend.