New Haven Independent

Hill neighborhood kids, from tiny drum-bangers to full-grown high-school poets, concluded the Universal Arts Movement camp with a performance at the Vincent Mauro School Thursday. The camp, with 40 participants in its first year, gave kids a way to cope with issues they wanted to talk about — drugs, guns, gangs — in their own words, through role play and hip-hop.

For many young performers, gun violence hit home two weeks ago when a boy who they knew from the Hill, 13 year-old Justus Suggs, was shot to death while riding his bike home from a carnival. He was caught in the fray of the same turf wars that killed 13 year-old Jajuana Cole in June.

Kids wrote and performed a play that tackles the pressures they face. “Should I be a Gangsta or a Wanksta [wanna-be gangster]?” ponders Shauniqua (pictured at left) in the play. Pressured into a gang, she regrets the choice when she sees a kid get shot.

In other acts, kids danced hip-hop and, following rousing spoken word performances from their adult mentors, read their own poetry. “I got the power to be who I wanna be,” rapped one young woman to a beat the kids helped create with a local hip-hop record producer. The group joined in a mantra: “We got the power.”

Ras Mo Moses, who directed the arts portion of the camp, followed the philosophy of his Pink and Blue Arts For Violence Prevention Project, which aims to empower kids through self-expression, and steer kids away from gender models that promote violence. In contrast to traditional school settings, he reckoned kids express themselves more comfortably through hip hop. “Make a beat!” they tell him when asked to write something. “I need my beat to write.”

Judging from teen feedback, the method did the trick.

“It made me feel like I’m not the only person that cares about what’s going on,” said 15 year-old Shauniqua Davis (pictured second from left). Like many, she sees too many drug busts and not enough done to stop the flow of guns into kids’ hands. “Drugs are always gonna be around. Let’s worry about the guns.”

Why do kids like her character get mixed up in gang violence? “People do what they do because they not getting the love shown in the right way,” said Shauniqua.

“We need to go to where the love’s at,” chimed in 13 year-old Lakendra McCargo (pictured above at left). Does she see a solution to violence on the streets? “We don’t need to stay in the house, because that’s not good,” she said, though she knew some neighborhood kids’ parents have put them in “lockdown.” Kids should still go outside, but “You see something that’s funny looking, someone with a gun, you run and tell someone.”

“Tell ‘em to stop the violence and just talk it out,” said Brandyn Wright, 15 (pictured).

One bigger problem remained to be tackled: A local activist asked the crowd for a show of hands. “If someone got killed, how many of you would tell someone, if you know who it was who shot the person?”

Few, if any, hands popped up.

“Someone gonna come kill us if we snitch,” said a young girl.

Thanks in part to Alderwoman Jackie James, who saw a dearth of jobs for her Hill teens, the summer camp got funding through the city’s Youth @ Work program to pay 19 teens to be counselors. The rest of the program was strung together on a meager budget, run by adult volunteers with psychology, hip hop and behavioral therapy backgrounds. David Kendrick, the program’s director and co-founder, said low funds “made it tough.” But he hopes to continue the camp next year.