There is a Providence, Rhode Island, that most people never see.
It isn’t the downtown that has been opened up by moving the paths of two rivers—an immense project that transformed a flood-prone aging infrastructure into a destination—where thousands pour into the city on soft summer nights to eat in fancy restaurants and watch gondola rides and see the rivers lit up in a ceremony called “WaterFire.” It isn’t Brown University, sitting up there on the top of College Hill, only a couple of blocks away from the statue of Roger Williams, the state’s founder, overlooking the city like a benevolent father. It isn’t the chic restaurants of Federal Hill, the spiritual home of the state’s large Italian-American population.
This is inner-city Providence, at the intersection of South Providence and the West End neighborhood, a place commuters pass by as they hustle down I-95 to Cranston and Warwick and the rest of the southern suburbs. This is the Providence of sirens and gunshots in the night, of kids who live in fear, of gritty streets where there are too many drugs, too many gangs, too many guns, and too little hope that it’s going to change anytime soon. This is the Providence that got left behind in the so-called Providence Renaissance in the ’90s. A place you could spend your entire life in Rhode Island ignoring, a place where the American Dream has been under siege for a long time now.
I was there one cold December morning in 2011 to do a column for the Providence Journal on the death of former Hope High School basketball star Laurence Young, who had died unexpectedly while playing professional basketball in Brazil, the result of an infection after dental surgery. Basketball had taken Young far from the South Providence of his roots, a place where too many kids like him never make it out of the neighborhood. It had rescued him from a difficult home life, living with his aunt and helping her care for his grandfather, who was a double amputee. And it had given him a life that must have seemed unimaginable in 1999 when he graduated from Hope High School, just another inner-city kid with a future that seemingly stopped at next week.
The small storefront church on a narrow side street was jammed, and people kept coming up to the altar to talk about Young. Each one put a living face on the body that lay in the front of the church in an open casket, a gold basketball on his chest.
One of the speakers was Dave Nyblom, a burly white man in a dark suit who had coached Young at Hope High School about a decade earlier. He had always been more than just a coach to Young. He had been his advocate, believing that one day Young would be a college player when no one else saw that potential, bringing Young to summer camps and AAU tryouts, always touting him to college coaches. Young had never been a childhood phenom, someone anointed early by the basketball gods. He had been a skinny tenth-grader, and spent that season on the junior varsity team. And even after he had gone on to become a great player at Hope, making second-team All State in 1999, the high school cheers quickly faded into echoes. Young had nowhere to go, until finally Rider, a college in New Jersey, saw him at an AAU tournament in Providence and offered him a scholarship.
Nyblom had become a sort of surrogate father to Young, forever giving him rides home, past the drug dealers and the street people, past all the hangers-on who in their own ways were trying to steal Young’s dream. When he heard on the phone that Young had died he started crying.
When it was his turn to speak Nyblom described what a good person Young had been, the emotion growing stronger in his voice with each passing sentence. In the back of the church was Nyblom’s wife, his mother, and his two children. When he came to the end of his eulogy for Young, the tears were right there with the words.
“If there were two people I could see in Heaven it would be my father and Laurence,” he said, his father having died twenty years earlier falling off a ladder while fixing a broken basketball hoop in Nyblom’s hometown of South Kingstown, Rhode Island.
In many ways Young had not only been the prodigal son, he had also been the role model for many of the Hope players who had come after him. He was the one who had listened. He was the one who had bought in to Nyblom’s vision for his players, the simple idea that if they did the right thing and worked hard they could escape the grim neighborhoods in which they were coming of age. He was the one who had said no to all the drug dealers. He was the one who had made it out, had overcome so many odds.
“He was like a son to me,” Nyblom once said. “He always knew what to do.”
Left unsaid was that there were so many others who hadn’t known what to do.
And maybe now, there were more of those kids than ever.
If life in inner cities long has seemed to exact its own little pound of flesh, it’s even harder now, as disparities in wealth divide neighborhoods. The crumbling economy has created a mélange of dysfunction, and communities are under siege. Providence is no exception. Gang violence. Shootings. Never-ending street crime. These are the almost daily news stories of horrors big and small, stories that amplify the sense that inner-city Providence is much more dangerous than it used to be, and that the kids who live in it are growing up in a cruel, dystopian landscape. Their world and its realities are rarely discussed in all the “race to the top” conversations, the national dialogue attempting to reform education, especially in the inner cities.
It’s a world I have drifted in and out of through the decades, writing sports columns for the Providence Journal. One column was about Cedric Huntley, who had grown up on the streets of South Providence, one of the first black basketball players at a longtime Catholic school in Providence, and who worked for the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence.
“I wouldn’t want to be a young person in this city,” he had said. “It’s so much worse than when I was a kid, and it wasn’t good then.”
He first got involved in working to reduce violence because he was going to too many funerals. Huntley had come to know how fragile it all is, how a kid’s life can change in an instant. Joining a gang. Selling some drugs because everyone else is doing it. Engaging in foolish retribution for some perceived slight. Lives hinge on that one bad decision, all played out against a backdrop of poverty and broken families, the daily minefield so many of these kids walk through.
“If we don’t help these kids, who is going to?” Huntley had asked.
Another piece had been about Roosevelt Benton, who on an afternoon in 1995 was running the South Providence Boys & Girls Club and was superintendent of programs at the state training school. He was one of the unsung heroes in Providence at the time, a large black man with soft eyes that conveyed a certain sadness.
“The biggest thing I’ve seen is the attitude of the kids,” he said then. “The level of respect has changed dramatically. In many cases, there’s no respect. None whatsoever. The other change is the lack of values and the desire for material things at an earlier age.
“TV exerts a great influence on these kids,” Benton continued. “It increases their desires. You’ve got to have the right sneakers. The right sweatshirt. And, basically, we adults are responsible for this. This is the society we’ve created, the society these kids have grown up in. They see people respected for their material things. Not for their value system. Not for their ethics. Not for who they are as people. For their material things.”
He paused then, and when he spoke again his voice was softer, more resigned.
“It’s much more difficult now for these kids than it was when I grew up. We weren’t exposed to crack. We weren’t exposed to guns. We weren’t exposed to being able to make a hundred dollars when you’re twelve years old just by selling a couple of vials on the corner. We weren’t exposed to the advertising that says if you don’t wear two-hundred-dollar sneakers you’re nobody.”
That was thirteen years ago. It’s even tougher now to be young in this place.
In my columns, I usually focused on the kids who had gotten to college, the ones who had overcome so many of the odds, whether it was through talent, good fortune, mentors in their lives, or some other factor. Yes, their back stories were part of their stories. But these were the kids who had made it, despite the odds. They were the Laurence Youngs of the world. But what about the ones who probably were not going to make it in sports? What about the others?
This is Dave Nyblom’s world. He’s been coaching at Hope for twenty-four years, nineteen as the varsity basketball coach, driving up from southern Rhode Island every morning in a truck whose bed is often full of food because he long ago realized that some of his players don’t get enough to eat. He’s had a handful of ex-players die. He’s had others end up in jail. He’s heard for over two decades that inner-city kids are undisciplined, can’t be disciplined. These are the stereotypes he’s spent his entire adult life trying to refute.
And on this gray day in late November 2012, here in this old gym on the second floor of Hope High School, this massive red-brick building that first opened in 1936, he’s about to try to refute these stereotypes once again.