New Haven Independent

The street corner in question was Davenport and Stevens, in the Hill, one of the most afflicted by violence, not far from where Tracey Suggs (pictured below), who was also in attendance, lost her son Justus last summer.

Monday’s event was the sixth stop on the “Men’s We Care Street Tour,” a program of the Brotherhood Leadership Summit of the Christian Community Commission.

The fifth out of seven stops on the tour, which began in May and runs throughout the summer, each location chosen corresponds to a high-crime intersection. The tour is an expression of a coordinated effort on the part of grassroots African-American ministers and lay preachers, both Christian and Muslim, along with faith-oriented rappers and other organizers to replace models of violence with expressions of love, caring, positive role models for young African-American males.

“We’re out in the community every Monday,” said Morris, “and people know we love them, know there’s someone to care about them. We’ve been doing this for two years now, more sustained and consistent now, and I’m convinced that the way we are talking to whole families is working. Without this, violence would be a lot worse.”

The program mixes good old- fashioned impassioned call-and-response street corner preaching with Christian rap and hot dogs. There is no mistaking the profound sense of urgency at the heart of this effort. “Too many of us are standing stagnant,” declared Blest (pictured), master of the streetcorner ceremonies, who is also co-chair of the Third Ward. “And it’s not all your fault. The fault is with us too, your elders. We must do better, and we are. These men here, these positive role models.

“We want you to come close to us. We want to look you in the eye not to go to war with you, but to look in to your soul, to help you see what is happening to us. Our community is broken, our grief is often so normal, we don’t even know we’re grieving. Our machine is broken. We need not to complain and blame the white man or the city for this or that, but to take control ourselves and we’re doing it, and our men must lead … to participate in the apprenticeship job programs, to have our say in how the Route 34 redevelopment will take place, so this community can benefit from it. Let’s stop going to funerals and wearing pins and rebuild the sense of community we once had.”

As in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the potentially transformative power of faith was everywhere in evidence on this tour’s presentations, which, it was often repeated, were not about entertainment but a path to redemption. Every other man in the gathering, it seemed, had a piece of a bullet still lodged in him, or had had a son or sibling wounded or killed by gunfire, or had done time in jail for drug dealing. All, victim and former perpetrator alike, were on the corner now to declare their transformation and offer themselves in words and song as a model.

Take this Christian rap group, Crossbreed, with (left to right) Eric Morton, Melvin Epps, and Thomas Dubose. Their nicknames, indicating their transformations, are Eternal Lyfe, Deacon D, and Big T. “Between the three of us,” said Morton, “we’ve committed felonies, we’re ex-drug dealers, we’ve womanized, we’ve dabbled in all the bad stuff.

“But I tell you we all reached a point where we just couldn’t go on on our own. I mean we became so beat up, so heavily downtrodden, there was no one to talk to. So who do you talk to when there’s no one else? We’ve gone from serious transgressions to deep transformations. It didn’t happen to us in jail, but out in our lives afterwards. Now we want to reach out to these kids.”

As the crowd gathered for the hot dogs, there was a sense of family, or of family getting to know each other in perhaps a different way. Listeners included a young man shot three weeks ago and now out of the hospital. He listened, it was clear to a reporter, but from across the street. Up next (pictured below) speaking to the neighborhood was the self-described “conscious hip hop group” Soldiers of Good Fortune, featuring, on the left, Scholar and Remidy.

Remidy’s a Muslim. This ecumenical coming together of Christian and Muslim ministers and their cohorts, all focused on the single goal of reclaiming young black men from violence, and their community, before it’s too late, is another salient feature of the Mens We Care Street Tour.

“The media play up the difference between Christian and Muslim,” said Remidy, a New Havener all his life, who was born into a Muslim family but did not take his faith seriously until a moment of personal crisis. “Yet we are all on the same path of righteousness. We’ve talked this over, and that is our common ground.”

How did he turn to a more serious embrace of Islam? “When I was on the streets,” he said, “I realized that what was keeping me going was this faith that my mother gave me. After you get beat up enough, you turn to what works for you. After I came back seriously to God I got married, I took a job, I support my family, and I do this.”

He took a long sigh. Then he added, in a revelatory moment that reminded a reporter of a streetcorner Muslim version of St. Augustine confessing: “It happened like this. I was tired of living. I was tired of not living. When you’re out on the streets, maybe you breathe, maybe you eat, but that’s not living. That’s being the walking dead. But to do things that help god and our people here, that’s what makes you alive. To turn them from seeing only guns and naked women and violence to these other things and to provide job resources, because that’s what goes on here too, not just preaching and singing, that is going to make a difference.”

Police Officer Shafiq Abdussabur (on the right, with Willie Ellis of Street Team, and Christopher Holland, on the left, co-chair of the Brotherhood Leadership Summit) put some organizational perspective on the Men’s We Care Street Tour. “In the aftermath of that terrible summer, we sat down and had our ‘urban think tank,’” he said. “Donald Morris, after that, established the Brotherhood Leadership Summit, and these street gatherings have grown out of that and gained momentum. And I have no doubt they’re working.

“In other words, what you see here is not a spontaneous reaction to homicides, but an effort from the grassroots up that we’ve planned and that has evolved over time. And there’s a lot going on here that falls beneath the radar of the general community.”

Take Willie Ellis, aka Chill Will, who ran the streets in the 1980s, he said in his remarks to the crowd. In 1987 Ellis lost a son. “Shot,” Eillis said, as he looked away, “shot in the head. I just got tired, terribly tired of the violence.”

His response? Not to apply for grants or help from the city, but to establish what he calls Street Team. He’s in the community everyday, with the specific purpose of bringing kids together from the different neighborhood to do things that kids should be doing. He recently gathered 500 kids and took them by the busload to go roller skating in Wallingford. “I specifically got kids from all the gangs in New Haven, and, believe me, I know who they are. And I brought them together to show them they can have fun and not hurt each other. To do the normal things.”

Ellis was doing this, Abdussabur said, for years, and the various churches were also doing their activities. But now they’re pulling together under an umbrella with a sense emergency and urgency around what Abdussabur calls the most critical urgent need: the social development of the young males of the community, of which the Men’s We Care Street Tour is the tip of the activist iceberg.

“And in many ways,” said Abdussabur, “the most hopeful thing about this is that we are laying infrastructure, leadership to make this all last.”

What’s next? On June 18, the tour moves to the corner of Kensington and Edgewood avenues, where, Abdussabur said, there will be remarkable joining forces of the local Muslim community with the Christian ministers. Oh, and Willie Ellis is planning to take 140 kid, 20 kids each from different groups and gangs who don’t think they can live with each other, together to the Apollo Theater in New York. Ellis does this, as do almost all of the activities described, almost entirely out of his own pocket.

For more information on the tour and activities of the Christian Community Commission, call Reverend Donald Morris at 624-9228. Or to reach Willie Ellis, the contact is 675-4630 or this email address.

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