The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  A decade had passed since McDuffie, and nothing had changed. If anything, it was worse. Like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown today, Clement Lloyd’s shooting was just the one black death that caught the media’s attention. Miami’s inner city had become a war zone. Crack cocaine brought gangs to Liberty City and Overtown in a major way. They were some of the most notorious in the nation: the John Does, the Boobie Boys, Cloud Nine. The violence quickly spread beyond Liberty City and Overtown. Opa-locka, North Miami Beach, Little River, Allapattah, Model City, West Perrine, Carol City, Coconut Grove, Florida City—they all had their own gangs and their own problems. The violence of the crack era brought the War on Drugs to Miami’s streets, but militarizing the police only made the problem worse. The Reagan and Bush administrations were hell-bent on fighting a war against the cocaine cowboys with no regard for the victims who were the most in need of help; SWAT teams were storming into people’s homes with tear gas and body armor, arresting innocent bystanders and low-level players in a futile attempt to root out the drug trade.

  By the early 1990s, Miami had the fourth-highest percentage of residents in poverty out of all major US cities. In parts of Liberty City, 68 percent of families were living in poverty. The child poverty rate was higher than it had been thirty years before, under Jim Crow. To make matters worse, Miami also started seeing a massive surge in immigration from Haiti, just like we did with the Cubans after Mariel. Thousands of Haitians descended on Florida trying to escape the torture and killings of the Duvalier regime back home. New Haitian gangs like the Zombie Boys, E-Unit, Zoe Pound, and several others exacerbated the problems. Unemployment, homelessness, crime—all the bad indicators went up, and they’d been way too high to begin with.

  For the drug gangs, it was all business, and business was good. When young black men went looking for jobs, the gangs were the only ones hiring. Fourteen-, fifteen-year-old kids were dropping out of school to work the corners while the gangsters sat inside, counted their paper, and carried out the hits. The murder rate soared. It was the same bullshit that killed my man Handsome Harry: drive-bys, revenge killings, executions. If you weren’t killed in a gangland beef, then it was probably the cops that got you. Or, like Trayvon Martin, you were killed for the crime of being black and walking down the street near some idiot with a gun—and the whole state of Florida is nothing but idiots with guns.

  At the time, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, setting off the first Gulf War. For a young black man from south Florida, statistically it was safer to be an enlisted soldier in Iraq than to be on the streets of Miami. Every month brought a new funeral with some kid’s sophomore yearbook picture next to an open casket. Whenever the murders grabbed too many headlines, the police would start on the “weed and seed” arrests, make a big show of going after “the bad element.” They mainly targeted loitering, public drinking, and graffiti. Judges were handing out prison sentences like door prizes. Nonviolent offenders and petty crooks were filling the jails and getting criminal records while the real problems went unaddressed.

  The response from the city of Miami to all this was basically nothing more than a big PR campaign. The important thing was not to save the children of Liberty City, but to keep the tourists and their dollars from being scared away. The art deco renaissance of South Beach got splashed all over the national media: fashion models in bikinis, boutique hotels, celebrities on Ocean Drive. It’s what the rest of the nation saw while the problems of black Miami were swept under the rug. Miami needed police reform and better schools. Instead, Liberty City got SWAT teams and private prisons while Miami Beach got glossy brochures and tax breaks for tourist hotels.

  Part of the problem was with the black community itself: we didn’t have a community. Our institutions had been broken up by the destruction of Overtown, and had slowly eroded in the decades since. We didn’t have leadership. The black politicians who represented us at the county and state level, some of them were good men and women, but too many of them were crooks, garden-variety hustlers. They’d come out to Liberty City, tell black voters what we wanted to hear, then go back to City Hall and do nothing but line their own pockets.

  Because of the broken education system, you didn’t have many successful blacks making it out of the inner city, and the blacks who were successful, they all left because they didn’t feel there was any opportunity for them here. My older brothers, the successful college graduates, every one of them moved away for jobs they couldn’t find in Miami. You go to the major banks and office buildings downtown, you won’t see many black faces, and the ones you do see, a lot of them moved here from somewhere else. Twenty years out from the end of the civil rights movement, and black Miami was trapped in a cycle of unemployment, poverty, and crime—the invisible chains my uncle Ricky had taught me all about. It was time to break the cycle, time to break out of the chains.

  I was one of the few who made it. In 1990, I had more money and more fame and more influence than any other black man ever born in Liberty City. I was smart and I’d worked hard, but I was also just lucky. A stray bullet or my temper getting the best of me in a bad situation, and my whole life might have been different. I had my chances to leave. At the pinnacle of my success, I had offers to do TV and film and music projects in New York and Los Angeles, and I could have made a lot more money going that route. But I never thought about leaving. It never crossed my mind once. I was born in Liberty City. This is my home, the place that made me who I am.

  I couldn’t go off and live the life of a rock star while the people around me got left behind. I always knew I had a responsibility to help, to reach back and use the money and influence that I’d gained to lift up the next generation, the kids who deserved a chance to follow their dreams and better their lives. I knew the way to do it was through the one thing that got through to these kids, the one thing that spoke to them louder than the gangs or any of the other negative influences in their lives: football.

  When I was with the Optimist program on Miami Beach, I loved my coach, Alex Medina. He was a good man. He always looked out for me, gave me tough love at a time when I needed it. But the way the program itself was set up, I felt the poor black kids were being used. Our talents were being exploited to put points on the board, but we weren’t getting everything we needed outside of football. And then in school, when you’re bused to the other side of town to play, you’re coming home at eleven o’clock at night. Your focus isn’t where it should be: on homework. I got summer jobs and free shoes and boat rides on Miami Beach just because I played football. It was fun, and I felt lucky: “I’m good enough to play where the rich white kids play.” But I didn’t get an education. I was the least educated one in my family. I had a family of five brothers, all of them physics majors and scientists and college graduates, and me, the football player, and I’m the damn dummy. Going into my senior year of high school, I could barely read or write. It was the same for a lot of other black athletes bused over to those schools.

  If you wanted to play, there was no choice. You had to go to neighborhoods like Miami Beach or Suniland, because there were no organized youth teams in our area. After what I had been through, I’d made a vow that if I ever got two cents over my lunch money I’d go back and start an Optimist program in Liberty City. I’d build it based on what I went through. It would be a program in our own neighborhood, right in the heart of Liberty City, so that kids wouldn’t have to ride the bus home at 11:30 at night; the only bus they’d ride would be to away games. It would be a football program, but football wouldn’t be the point: we’d be using football to teach the kids discipline and hard work and commitment. It would be a means to improve their education; we’d have academic requirements, strict ones, and use that as an incentive for kids to keep their grades up. It wouldn’t be about playing ball to make other people look good; it would be about kids getting an education, becoming responsible adults, and having fun.

  As luck would have it, right around that same time, this thirty-six-year-
old Miami-Dade bus driver named Sam Johnson came looking for me at the Luke Records office. He coached a Little League baseball team that played at Charles Hadley Park in Liberty City, and he wanted to talk to me about sponsoring it. I told him, “I’ll help you. I’ll sponsor your baseball team, but I also want to start up football.”

  “I don’t know anything about football,” he said.

  “Well, I do. I know a lot about football. I have a bunch of friends that I played football with at the Optimist program at Miami Beach. They’ll be more than happy to help us out.”

  “All right, let’s do it,” Sam said.

  It was a perfect partnership. I was busy running the record label, but I could provide the money and the ideas and Sam would be the guy to execute the program. We started the program as a 501(c)(3), a nonprofit. In the fall of 1990, I made an initial donation of about $80,000. With that, we were able to charter the Liberty City Optimist Club.

  I did it the same way I built my record company. I just did it. I was going into an enterprise and learning how to build it from the ground up with common sense. I placed a call to a guy named Charlie Brown who ran the football program for the Boys Club. I knew Charlie from my own days of playing ball. I went down to the Boys Club and got some advice from him. He walked me through the whole process of setting up an Optimist program, the proper forms and all that. With the money I’d put in we bought uniforms, helmets, shoulder pads, everything we’d need. I started calling up all my friends who played ball at Miami Beach High with me. I said, “Yo, I’m starting football over here. Would y’all come out and coach?” Everybody was on board. It was a real team effort from day one.

  I even called up my old coach, Alex Medina, to help organize everybody. He helped put the whole coaching program together. Before we knew it we had enough gear and volunteer staff to field eight teams in all the different weight divisions. Coach Medina also helped us get into the Pop Warner league, which is by far the biggest and most popular league for youth football in America: it has 3,000 teams and 350,000 kids. Originally, Sam had wanted me to sponsor his baseball team, and so people wanted to call this new organization the Luther Campbell Optimist Club, with the teams named after me, too. I vetoed that. I wanted it to be the community’s program. I wanted everybody to be a part of it, the local bank, the local stores, the community police—everybody needed to put his hand in this and support it. We ditched my name and picked a mascot: the Liberty City Warriors were born.

  It was exciting. We thought it would be big, but we had no idea how big. When registration opened up, the response was crazy. Hundreds of kids registered. The word was out and people came from everywhere. At that time, I didn’t realize just how much weight I carried in the community. I’d been off doing my albums and my tours, and now I came back and I’m this big-time guy. I’d unknowingly tapped into something really big. We had way too many kids. We eventually had to close registration because we could only have thirty-five kids on each team based on the rules. We took them on a first-come basis and promised the families who didn’t make it that we’d expand the program as soon as we could.

  Our first game was against this team from Richmond. When we started the program, I believed our kids had the most talent, the most drive, the most grit of all the other teams in the area. I was ready to get on the field and show Richmond what we could do. They beat us so bad. They just killed us. I remember sitting in the dugout saying, “God, when is this going to be over with?” That first year we got beat up all over the place. I thought we were ready, but after that Richmond game, I realized how much work we really had to do. Still, I told all the coaches, “We’re going to be the best thing in Pop Warner.” I believed in those kids—we just had to build them up into champions.

  Making them champions wasn’t just about what happened on the field. From day one, I made sure that academics were a core part of the program. One of the things we liked about Pop Warner as a league is that you have to have a 2.0 GPA to play. Before you can sign up, you have to bring your report card from last year. If you’re below a 2.0, you can still register, but you’re going to be put on a progress report throughout the nine-week season. If you had a bad progress report, you were not going to play. If you fell below a 2.0, to stay on the team it was mandatory that you register in a tutoring program. It made kids want to get the grades.

  For the tutoring, I reached out to the teachers at Allapattah Middle School, where I used to DJ dances back in the Ghetto Style days. Allapattah is right next to Charles Hadley Park, where we played. I went over there and spoke to Ms. Jerkins, the same principal who’d let me DJ the school dances there years before. All the teachers at Allapattah knew who I was long before I became vilified as the King of Dirty Rap. I was the guy who played at their dances and owned the Pac Jam, where their students could hang out drinking Coca-Colas instead of hanging out on the corners and getting into trouble. In Liberty City, in my community, I wasn’t the bad guy. I wasn’t the one hurting kids; I was the one looking out for them. Ms. Jerkins knew that. I went over to her and said, “Hey, Ms. Jerkins, how you doing? I’m putting this football program together over here. Can I use a couple of your portable trailers to do some tutoring and get some teachers who want to volunteer some time?” She was thrilled to help. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. We got some wonderful teachers who stayed after school to help out our players, and we were helping the school identify the kids who needed the extra tutoring.

  We had volunteer teachers helping out with the kids’ academics, and we had volunteer coaches teaching the kids not just about the game but about life. All my guys coached like Coach Medina did back in the day. They were mentors, surrogate fathers, always available to drive a kid home or lend an ear for a kid who had a problem. They understood that’s what these kids really needed. These guys knew how to treat the kids off the field as well as coach them on the field.

  Our coaching was one of our secret weapons. Liberty City coaches watched tapes of the other clubs. We put together college-level playbooks. We weren’t messing around. By our second year we started winning. We started winning big. We were stomping on established teams that had been dominant for years. We were beating the wealthier suburban teams that had budgets for new uniforms and private buses. Pretty soon, the crush of kids registering to play was nothing compared to the crush of fans that came out to watch them play. Youth football in Miami is serious business. You’re talking about a town where even high school football exists on the level of a religion. Regular-season high school games down here can draw anywhere from ten to forty thousand fans a game. We didn’t have quite that many, but the games were always sell-outs, the bleachers packed, two and sometimes three thousand people, parents running up and down the sidelines with their kids, cheering them on.

  Some of the coaches of the suburban teams started referring to Charles Hadley Park as Little Big Horn—it was where you went to get slaughtered. And that was the reputation I wanted to have on the field, but from the start I was concerned about Liberty City’s hardcore reputation. I knew those suburban families were scared to come here because of the riots, because of the crime, because of what they saw about us on the five o’clock news. The first thing they probably expected to see was black people going crazy. I was determined that when white kids and their parents came from other communities that they would have the best time they ever had at any park in the city. Our program was built on respect and sportsmanship. Not one of our kids ever set foot on that field acting like a thug. I wanted those white families to go back to their neighborhoods and say, “We went over there and enjoyed ourselves. We were in the heart of Liberty City and we had a great time! Those kids are great kids, just like ours. They’re no different from us.” It was a big piece of what I wanted to do. We were counteracting all those negative images of us portrayed in the media.

  As those first seasons went by, the teams and the organization kept growing. I did everything I could to use my celebrity and my clout to get people beh
ind the team. I knew the team wouldn’t survive if it was dependent on only me year after year. It had to be self-sustaining if it was going to succeed, so I did everything I could to create the awareness and support that would keep it going through thick and thin. We did celebrity softball games and golf tournaments and raised thousands of dollars. Every year we had a full-fledged training camp with kids running around and learning fundamentals. I called up my friends that I met through the entertainment world and said, “Hey, come out to my camp and have some fun. Come play in my golf tournament and help raise money.” We had everybody out there. We had University of Miami players like Edgerrin James and Bennie Blades and Melvin Bratton and Michael Irvin. We had guys from the Miami Heat like Alonzo Mourning and Dwyane Wade. We had national stars like Dominique Wilkins from the Atlanta Hawks showing up. I would have all those guys participate in raising funds for the Liberty City Warriors.

  My name and my celebrity gave the club the push it needed to get off the ground, but the real heart and soul of that program was Sam Johnson. Sam passed in 2011, far before his time, but when he was alive he fought for those kids like nothing else mattered in the world. He fought for Charles Hadley Park, too, a place that has so much significance both to the club and the community. Like so much of Liberty City, the park had been ignored by the city for so long. Even as we were using it, the municipal government had let it fall into total disrepair. It didn’t have modern facilities. The benches were cracked and splintered. The irrigation system hadn’t been replaced in fifty years. The frustrating thing was that a $6.5 million renovation had been approved for the park, but the funds were tied up in bureaucratic red tape over planning and development. It wasn’t a priority for anyone in City Hall. That languished for years, and Sam haunted the city commission and parks department meetings, fighting for the funds to be released. Back in the 1980s, when Charles Hadley Park had just the one Little League team, Sam had two adult volunteers and twelve kids. Ten years later, he had one hundred adult volunteers and over six hundred kids—and he could tell you the name of every single one of them, because he cared that much.