I let Lazarus go outside. He had a key. I
figured since he was 13, he was getting big. Israel can never go
outside. I will not allow it.
I want to have a safe haven for the children.
I was a parent that was working and I really thought it was okay to
let Lazarus go outside. But it’s not okay. They need to be
somewhere where there is an adult.
Because of my hours at the hospital I
couldn’t just say, “Okay, doctor. I have to take off these scrubs
and I’m going to leave you in surgery by yourself.” I didn’t have
someone to look after Lazarus. So I left Lazarus to be an adult at
the age of 13.
We need programs; we need safe havens.
There’s not really a safe haven in the North Side. The streets of
Chicago are not safe, and parents need to be more aware. It’s up to
us parents to stand together and take charge of our children. We
need to stand together and let the gangs know that we’re not afraid
of them. I think each area of Chicago should really do that. Even
if the crime is not bad here, where I live, it could get bad.
The night after Lazarus died, I had a vision.
I was sleeping in my bed. Lazarus’ room was right across the hall
from mine. I could see the inside of his room from my bed.
I saw him. He came past and he threw his
shirt over the door and grabbed his book bag. Then he smiled and
walked out.
Sometimes, I don’t think I was asleep.
—
Interviewed by Jacob Sabolo
Endnotes
16 A 1958 article in The Crisis, the official
magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), estimated that Marshall’s “student body is about 50
percent Negro now.” See “De Facto Segregation in Chicago Public
Schools: A Report from the Chicago Branch of the NAACP,”
The Crisis, February 1958, 87-93, 126-127.
17 Budlong Elementary School is at 2701 W.
Foster Ave.
WHAT THE WATCHMAN SAW
COREY BROOKS
On Nov. 22, 2011, Pastor Corey Brooks
climbed onto a rented construction lift and took it to the roof of
a vacant two-story motel across the street from his New Beginnings
Church in the 6600 block of South Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Then he set up a tent, climbed inside, and began a vigil against
gun violence.
No one paid much attention to Brooks at
first, but as he continued to camp out during a Chicago winter, his
rooftop vigil became national news. By the time he came down 94
days later—on Feb. 24, 2012—he had raised $450,000 to purchase and
demolish the dilapidated motel, a longtime haven for drugs and
prostitution. The last $100,000 of that money came from movie mogul
Tyler Perry, who heard about Brooks on a radio program and wrote a
check the very same day.
We visited Brooks twice in his tent, a
cozy space into which he had packed an impressive array of
furniture, space heaters, computer equipment and books. A steady
stream of advisors and well-wishers kept stopping by to see the
42-
year-old pastor, who greeted them in a track suit and work boots,
his hair
and beard growing a little nappy but his energy and spirits
undiminished by the long odyssey.
We spoke with him a final time after he had
left the roof and begun work on his next project: finding funds to
build a community center where the motel once stood.
This started with a shooting. Actually, it
started with ten shootings.
In 2011, I did ten funerals of young black
men between the ages of 13 and 25 and none of those young men were
covered in the press or anything like that. And then the 11th
funeral was a young man by the name of Carlton Archer, 17 years
old. And right before the service began, some of the children
coming into our neighborhood for the funeral, they started being
shot at by another group of kids.
I was upstairs, getting prepared, so I just
ran downstairs and I saw all these kids running into the church. I
saw kids underneath cars. I saw adults under cars. Everybody was
trying to hide. And it was just, it was chaotic—it was, it was
really scary. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my
life.
Something drastic needed to be done.
Something radical.
I used to be pastor of the West Point
Missionary Baptist Church18 in Bronzeville,19 on 35th and Cottage
Grove. It was real traditional, real conservative, with an upwardly
mobile-type congregation. So it wasn’t a good fit, because I was
young and progressive and wanted to do radical stuff. And so the
more radical stuff I would do, the angrier the leadership would
get—even though a lot of the church members loved it, because their
sons and daughters were coming back to the church. But a lot of
ex-cons, a lot of gangbangers, a lot of people who hadn’t been in
church before started coming, too.
The leadership didn’t like that, and so I
decided that instead of trying to fight them for their church, I’d
just start what I felt led to create. And so that’s how New
Beginnings was birthed. We call it New Beginnings because it
was
a new beginning—I wanted to do something fresh and
creative and contemporary. We started the church in November 2000,
and we’ve been in this neighborhood for the last six years.
The church building used to be a nationally
famous nightclub. In the 1950s and early 1960s, jazz entertainers
from all over would come to the city and perform at a place called
the Roberts Show Lounge. All the great entertainers played
there—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan. Muhammad Ali used
to frequent the club. Everybody who was somebody, they came to this
location.
The club was owned by a man named Herman
Roberts, an entrepreneur way before his time. He was one of the
first black hotel owners in the Midwest, and he decided to build
this motel across the street from the Roberts Show Lounge, because,
back in the early 1960s, blacks did not feel comfortable going
downtown to stay. So he built this motel and a few others in
predominately black areas and became a very successful
businessman.
See, back when everything was segregated,
people had no choices but to live in this area, take care of this
area. You had upper income, middle income, lower income living
together, and as a consequence those at lower income had people who
they could look to and say, “That’s Doctor Johnson or that’s
Attorney So-and-So, or that’s Mr. So-And-So who owns the store.”
They had living examples that education works and hard work pays
off and determination goes a long way. But as integration came,20
black people who had middle income and upper income started moving
out and going on with their lives. And so what we’re left with is a
neighborhood where people have been far removed from the American
Dream.
Over time, Mr. Roberts started losing
business, so he sold the motel. And from that point on, it started
going down and down and down. If you wanted a prostitute you could
get one here any time of the night. If you wanted any drugs—heroin,
crack, weed, whatever—you could easily get that at this motel.
That’s the type of people that this motel did business with:
bottom-feeders who prey on people in poverty. And that’s what we
experience all over America in inner cities. There it goes. The
cookie starts to crumble.
And so, as I was coming out the door of that
funeral—the one with all the gunfire—I was thinking I had to do
something. And I looked at the motel, and instantly the thought
came to my mind: “We need to get that motel. We need to get it now.
And we need to turn it into a community development center.”
And then right after that thought was:
“How?”
Then right after that thought was: “I’m gonna
put a tent on the roof of the motel. I’m gonna hold a vigil up
there. I’m gonna raise the money and bring attention to the gun
violence and to the deaths.”
And I laughed, you know, and said, “I’d never
do that.”
And the next day, that thought would not
leave me.
What does it feel like to be called by God?
Wow. I think if I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a prompting, an
urge to do something that does not go away. And you can try to get
rid of that urge, but it just maddens you. It haunts you.
I imagine for some people it may be
different. Maybe they have a Moses-type of encounter where God
speaks in the burning bush and all of a sudden they get this
revelatory thought. But for me it has always been more like an
ongoing, haunting thing that was prompting me to do better, to
excel and not settle for less. It just kept pulling on me.
I was born in Union City, Tennessee, and I
lived in a little town called Kenton, population of about 2,000. I
stayed there until I was 8 with my grandmother and my grandfather.
My mother left me with them so she could go off to pursue a job in
Muncie, Indiana. And later on I found out the real reason she left
was because she had a boyfriend and she was gonna get married and
they wanted to go and get things set up before I came. But I didn’t
find that out for a long time. Being left behind, that hurt. Me and
my mom were really tight; we still are to this day. So being left
with my grandparents—even though they were wonderful—was
traumatic.
And when I moved to Muncie, it was a very
violent household. My stepfather was abusive. He was crazy. He’s
cool now, but he was crazy then. And when I was about 12 or 13, he
got addicted to drugs. And that even made it worse.
I used to get in trouble at school all the
time. It wasn’t that I fought every day, but I had a reputation of:
“Don’t, don’t mess with him.” I’ve always had that attitude: “If
you hit me, I’m gonna hit you. Don’t go to sleep around me, ‘cause
if you hit me, somehow, some way, there will be payback.”
I was just a real bad kid. But in fifth
grade, I got a new teacher. His name was Joe Stokes. He was white,
by the way. Red hair. Very white. And he just stayed on me. Every
day. I mean
every
day. And if that had not happened, who
knows? I probably would be doing something illegal. But Joe Stokes,
he made me believe in myself.
I stayed in Muncie until I was 18. I played
basketball at Muncie Central High School and ended up getting the
basketball scholarship to Armstrong State, in Savannah, Georgia. I
stayed there for a year, and then I quit playing basketball and
moved back to Muncie to go to Ball State. And in around the time I
moved back, I had a call to ministry—to want to preach.
It was a gut feeling. I’m just now, in my
latter years, understanding it, and learning how to listen to it.
So when I had this idea about doing a vigil on the roof, I kind of
pitched it to God that if I found one person who agreed with me
that it was a good plan, I would do it. But everybody thought it
was stupid. My staff members all laughed and joked and begged me
not to do it. Then I told my wife, and she begged me not to do it.
But there was one last staff member I hadn’t told about it—and he’s
not a “yes” guy. When I mentioned it in the staff meeting the next
day, he said without hesitation: “Pastor, I think that’s the best
idea in the world.”
So that very moment, I stopped the meeting
and said: “I’m going to get a tent.”
The first night it was raining. The second
night the wind was just blowing so hard, and the third night I
think it was raining again. So the first three nights were kinda
like: “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” And for the
first three weeks I was upset, because I felt like: Man, people
ought to get this, you know? Young kids are dying and no one is
doing nothing.
But then I came to recognize that you can’t
get mad at everyone because they don’t see what you see. I take
inspiration from the Book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. The
prophet goes up on the watchtower to hear from God. And God speaks
to him and gives him a vision and tells him to write it, to make it
plain, so the people can run and see it. So I just kind of feel
like that’s my job. For whatever reason, I’m the watchman.
Being on this roof has brought me isolation,
but it’s also given me perception. The number-one thing I hear are
the sirens. Until I came up here, I never realized how many sirens
actually go off on a consistent basis and you pay no attention to
them. But now I can even distinguish the different types of sirens.
Is that an ambulance? A fire truck siren? A police siren? Because
if it’s the ambulance and the fire truck siren you know: “Wow,
somebody probably got shot.”
I hear gunshots all the time. Even the
gunshots that happen ten blocks away sound like they’re next door.
I don’t know why, but it’s like sounds are magnified. And
unfortunately, I have learned to tell the different types of guns
apart from each other. A .25, that sounds more like a large
firecracker. A .45 has a ferocious volume to it. Semi-automatics
are repetitive:
pow-pow-pow-pow-pow.
New Year’s Eve—that was frightening. In this
community, it’s a ritual to shoot off guns on that holiday. So what
happened was around 11 p.m., I began to hear sporadic gunfire, gun
here, gun there. But at 12 o’clock, there was nothing but
guns—small guns, large guns, automatic guns, shotguns. And it can
be horrific if you’re in a close proximity of where these guns are
being shot. Because at any time a stray bullet could come from
anywhere and take you out.
So what I did was, I pulled the futon over
me, ‘cause I figured if a bullet came through it wouldn’t hit me
because the futon is so padded. I just stayed underneath the futon
and slept as best I could. And it really, really sounded like a war
zone. There’s no way that a person could have heard all this
gunfire and not start to think differently about guns.
In January of 2012, I came down to do two
funerals. One was the young man that was killed in Church’s
Chicken21 and another was a young man that was killed at Marquette
Park.22
It was bittersweet to be back on the ground.
I was glad to be down off the roof and to be able to walk around
and socialize with people. But the bitter part was to come down for
funerals and to see so many young people who looked so hopeless. I
think that a lot of kids in this neighborhood feel like they don’t
have anything to live for. They don’t have any education, they
don’t have any jobs, they don’t have any family, so what’s the
point? They’re just like: “whatever.” Whatever happens today, it
happens.
Whatever
. And when you start having that approach
toward your own life, you begin to have it toward other people’s
lives, as well. And I think that’s where a lot of kids are. Life
means nothing. Life has been devalued.