by Miles Harvey
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 diffe
rent. 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.
I’m not trying to say it’s a curse, but it feels weird knowing that five of your friends got killed within the same year. So it’s kind of hard, even though most of them were gangbanging. I’m not saying they deserved it, but most of them don’t want no help. I kind of like separated myself from them, because I didn’t want to be a part of that crowd. I’m not trying to live like that, ‘cause I’m not that type of person.
I grew up with my mother and my father, and both of them were on drugs. When I was growing up, my mother was beaten. Like beaten, you know? When it started, I think I was like 3 or 4. My father used to beat her in front of my face.
The biggest incident happened when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I was just not doing what I was supposed to be doing when I was in first grade. I mean, I wasn’t a bad student. I just didn’t do the work. So the teacher had called the house, and my mother had come up there, and the teacher was like, “Well, Hyinth is a good student, and I know he can try harder. I just know he can do better.” My mother was like, “Okay.” But my father, you know, I guess my mother told my father. He took it overboard.
He brought out the belt and he just started hitting me. So my mom, she tried to stop him. She was like, “No, no, don’t hit him. You have to talk to him.” But he got mad. My mother, she was blocking my way, so he hit her. And then it got to the point where he broke her leg and her arm. She was on crutches. She was on crutches. She had a cast on her leg and a cast on her arm, and she couldn’t walk. She was on crutches.
It was kind of sad living in the house, but I really couldn’t do nothing about it because I was young. I remember me running to the store at 57th and Sangamon, getting on the pay phone and calling 911. And I didn’t know my home address. I didn’t know the street or anything. I couldn’t tell the police that my mother was getting beaten. I was panicking, crying. I was scared. I used to have nightmares every night.
My mother, dead. I thought in half my nightmares that he killed her. It was all bloody, and I used to see her just lying there in a casket. All I could do was cry. My mother, she’s a loving person and everyone likes her. I don’t think that she deserves what he’s done to her. My family’s been much better since she left him. My mom seems like she’s happy, and she claims she’s not taking drugs no more. She’s really trying to get herself together, but it’s kind of hard ‘cause she’s still living in that environment where people are slowly bringing her down. It’s hard for her to just walk away, you know.
I could forgive my dad, but I won’t forget. I don’t have a relationship with him anymore, even though he’s still around. He just recently got out of jail. That’s always been an off-and-on thing for him—going back and forth to jail. When I was born, he was locked up. I don’t know how long he was locked up, but he wasn’t at the hospital to sign the birth certificate.
Me and my two sisters, 13 and 26 years old, we’re close. My two little brothers, ages 8 and 10, they’re in foster care. When my mother had them at the hospital, I guess, the foster people took them away. They got custody of them. It’s kind of hard, because I don’t speak to my two little brothers at all. I only saw them one time. They don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who they are. I would love to be in their lives, to guide them, do things that brothers should do. It gets to me. It really hurts.
The happiest moment that I had with my family, we took a vacation. We went to Florida. We went away for, like, a week. That was the hap
piest
moment because there wasn’t no type of negativity drama surrounding us. You know, we actually enjoyed ourselves and didn’t have to worry about what’s going to happen today, what’s going to happen the next day. Happiest memory from my neighborhood? There’s not much I can say, you know, about Roseland, because there was a lot of shooting. There’s still a lot of killing. I think someone just got killed on 111th. I think it was yesterday. I’m not sure.
I got robbed three times. One time I was coming home from school—this was my sophomore year. I had these red-and-white shoes on. I was the only one in school that had them. So my friend and me was just walking and my friend had my phone, listening to my music. The next thing you know, the boys who robbed me, they was like, “That’s my song. Play it again.”
I’m like, “Don’t play it again.”
So they put a gun up to my head and was like, “You have ten seconds to take off your shoes.” I had to hurry up and take them off. They was actually counting. Then they took my driver’s license. They was like, “Just in case you trick, we know where you live.”
It was snowing, and next thing you know, I was barefoot walking home. Then I had to go and get the locks changed on the house.
The most recent time I got robbed was my senior year. It was around prom time. I remember that I had $100 in my pocket, and I ended up getting jumped on by my friends—guys who I thought were my friends.
I’m mainly by myself now. I feel as though groups cause problems, so I’d rather be by myself because I don’t want a target on me or anything. Always be by myself. Can’t trust anyone. You know, people always tell me how you got to trust some people, but it’s easy for them to say because they haven’t been through what I’ve been through.