The Parkland generation was raised on lockdown drills—responding to tragedy by learning to hide better. Tragedy: a word we’ve grown so sick of, but we employ it selectively. Year after year brings a fresh crop of devastated kids—most of them affluent, telegenic, and white. It’s horrifying, yet safer than enrolling in an inner-city school. In February, seventeen died at Douglas High, along with 1,044 others in America. In the first six months of 2018, over 1,700 kids were killed or injured by guns, heavily concentrated in the inner cities. Where were the tears for them?
The disparity is partially an adult affliction: shrugging our shoulders at the urban violence, wishing we could help, but flummoxed how. We don’t understand the nuances of their neighborhoods or experience their pain. But paralysis is a learned response, and kids are often still appalled. The MFOL kids were.
“We know that the reason that we’re getting this attention is because we’re privileged white kids,” Delaney Tarr said. “If you look at Chicago, there’s such a high level of gun violence. But that’s not getting the attention that this is getting because we’re in such a nice area.”
They were determined to change that. They made their first move right out of the gate: Don’t frame the problem as school shootings. They were fighting gun violence, for all kids, not just them. But they didn’t know much about urban violence, either. Time to start talking to city kids.
Arne Duncan had served eight years as Chicago’s schools superintendent and seven more as Obama’s secretary of education. He lives in Chicago, ground zero in the urban gun wars. Duncan saw a chance for a powerful connection. He reached the Parkland kids through their school superintendent, and then got in touch with Father Michael Pfleger on the embattled South Side. Father Pfleger is the pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church, Chicago’s largest African American Catholic congregation. It has become a beacon of hope in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood ravaged by gun violence. He runs the BRAVE (Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere) youth group there, organizes the annual Peace Marches, and mentors young activists of color across some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods. The pastor recruited a few kids from BRAVE, and more from the Peace Warriors group on the embattled West Side.
The Parkland kids were all over it. It came together on a Friday night and Emma agreed to host a meeting at her house the next day. They didn’t want another weekend to go by.
D’Angelo McDade was the executive director of the Peace Warriors, a professional position intended for an experienced full-time adult. D’Angelo was a high school senior, struggling to avoid violence and get to college. Months later, asked if he recalled how he got the invite, he answered without hesitation. “I was called at 11:26 on March 2. At 11:26 p.m., I called and texted Alex. I called him at 12; I texted him at 1.”
Alex King is a fellow Peace Warrior—a big, stocky guy with a generous crown of cornrows and a close-cropped beard. He’s a really smart kid with a sly sense of humor, constantly taking people by surprise. Alex has spent his life around guns, and has a lot to say. “I’ve been shot at, I’ve had guns pulled on me—really, I’ve had it all,” Alex said. His first time getting shot at was at age fourteen—he thinks; they run together. The first time he encountered a gun was at age eight; he just stumbled on it in a closet.
Duncan bought the plane tickets, and early Saturday half a dozen kids, plus two parents, were drinking in the Florida sunshine. It was freezing when they woke up in Chicago, snow still on the ground from a brutal storm two weeks earlier. Felt good to take their coats off—they would be swimming in a few hours. How crazy to be cranking the AC! All these palm trees waving along the highway. They really had those, even at the airport; they were everywhere. How cool to finally see them in real life.
They pulled up at Emma’s. “It was a gated community, and I thought it was a hotel resort or something,” Alex said. “I was like man, she lives here! And then when we pulled up to her house, my first reaction: Should I step on the grass? Should I go straight to the sidewalk?” Emma’s mom rushed out to greet them, and she walked straight up the lawn. “So I just followed her,” he said. “And then I saw the house—it was like this big glass window that was also a door and I was like, ‘Wow, OK.’ And I also thought, ‘Should I take my shoes off before I step in?’ But when I actually got in there, Emma came around the corner running, hugging everyone—it was just like happy faces all around the room.”
That’s the thing about Emma. I’ve asked hundreds of people to describe the Parkland kids, and with the others I get a description, but with Emma they tend to describe the feeling after she enters. They describe tranquility. Sometimes they portray it radiating from her, settling over her surroundings, other times it’s her little body absorbing the tension, drawing anxiety out of the air. Her smile is often mentioned, but more often the smiles in the room.
About a dozen MFOL kids were bouncing around Emma’s spacious living room. Big relief, ice broken, now what? “Honestly neither side knew why we were there,” Alex said. “It was like, put Parkland and Chicago together and hey, let’s just see what happens. And we got to connect right off the bat.”
They ate pizza on the lanai, and chicken wings. The food just kept coming. They played a lot of icebreaker games, splashed around in the pool, and spent time just being kids together. “We became friends before we went into the deeper conversation of what we have to do to change this,” Alex said.
They went back inside, piled onto the puffy off-white couches, pulled in dining chairs, and shared their terrible stories. Alex described his nephew DeShawn Moore getting gunned down the previous spring. May 28, 2017.
“It was a Sunday afternoon, I believe. He was on the porch with his girlfriend at her house and this car was circling the block and one time when they came around the block again, they started to shoot. He pushed her in a panic into the house, he tried to run home but— He tried to run away from the shots, but it turned out he was running towards them, and when he turned around trying to get away, it turned out he was shot twice . . . once in the back of the head and once in the back.”
Alex learned his nephew was dead on Facebook. Was that common? Yes, pretty common. Alex had lost several family members to gunfire, but losing DeShawn was the one that sent him reeling. He leaned forward on Emma’s cozy couch to recount that story, then confessed his plunge into self-destruction, and his road out.
Self-destruction, the Parkland kids hadn’t seen that coming, but Alex’s buddy D’Angelo McDade had a similar tale. D’Angelo is even taller than Alex, with a similar big frame, a high and tight haircut and chinstrap beard. He’s a bit more serious than Alex, and a natural orator, with a preacher’s cadence when he gets going. He sat back from the circle a bit, on a dining room chair, directly across from Jackie and Emma, who leaned in intently. D’Angelo spiraled downward after he got shot in August 2017. He was hanging out on his porch with his grandfather and a dozen family friends, when a man they’d never seen before came walking down the street and opened fire. “I was shot in my left leg, one from the left side and one from the right side,” he said. “The left side, it went in but did not come out; the right side, a bullet ricocheted off a doorframe and hit my leg. I was on crutches for six weeks.” His grandfather and another relative were also hit. Everyone survived. “And to be clear, we don’t have drug dealers in our houses—gangs, or anything,” he said. “It’s literally just an old-time place with old folks and children.”
The shooter was caught and released multiple times, and D’Angelo believes he will likely get away with attempted murder—three counts. “There is an assumption that if your house is being shot up that you are a drug dealer and/or gangbanger,” he said. So getting shot was another strike against him; he could feel the thud of doors slamming shut in his future. Victimization of the victim.
“I had a really bad attitude,” D’Angelo said. “I had this attitude of, ‘You can’t tell me anything.’” Then he found the Peace Warriors. Violence is woven so deeply into these kids’ lives, and the Peace Warriors seek to unravel it, one strand at a time. But the key step is stopping violence at the source. The Peace Warriors call themselves interrupters. “Interrupters of nonsense,” D’Angelo said. “We associate nonsense with violence, whether verbal or physical. If two students are engaging in horseplay and then begin showing verbal aggression, our Peace Warriors immediately step in. Mediating that situation to make sure that conflict does not rise to a pervasive or worse problem.”
That required a whole lot of bodies to be present when it mattered. Their goal was to amass a quarter of the student body, or 125 Peace Warriors at North Lawndale College Prep High School. They were at 120.
The Peace Warriors taught him humility, D’Angelo said. Alex concurred. A way to redirect anger at the real adversary—which is complicated. Guns are killing his people, but they are the last link in a cycle: “the school-to-prison pipeline.” The first step to combating gang violence is getting honest about why kids join gangs, and then creating realistic alternatives. Gang life is alluring—let’s be straight about that, they said. Lawndale kids who take up arms are driven by economics. Crime pays; drugs pay. Gangbangers are decked out in some hot shit, all the tech gadgets and bling. But there are deeper emotional draws. The gang offers a sense of connection, an extended family, with a name that carries weight. Members feel confident and respected. In the short-run, they feel good. That’s a hell of a draw. It preys on kids feeling hopeless, disconnected, and bleak. Alex and D’Angelo had both felt the lure. When you’re humbled by violence, that’s when you’re most vulnerable to embracing it.
The Peace Warriors have to match what the gangs offer at every level, and come through with it, legit, D’Angelo said. “If you’re looking for employment, we have it. If you’re looking for a sense of family, we have that.” When a kid is tottering on the gang bubble, you have to reach him on his terms, spoken and unspoken, before you inspire him to join the bigger cause. Not every kid’s going to tell you that his home life is a shambles and he feels like shit. But few kids grow up in that environment feeling good. The Peace Warriors’ big agenda—rescuing their neighborhood by rescuing its high school kids, one at a time—appeals to a lot of students. But first they have to survive.
The Parkland kids were amazed. Not surprised, exactly, but enlightened. This was new. But it wasn’t that hard to understand.
It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violence getting there. At the bus stop, on their porch, walking out of church. It could happen anywhere, and it did.
They played more games, took breaks, and chatted in small groups. D’Angelo was talking to Emma about suffering, and the power of converting pain into action. That sounded a lot like principle 4. D’Angelo reached into his pocket and drew out a collection of dog tags, each a different color, translucent and stamped with a different number, one to six. He found the blue one. It said principle #4, with a peace sign—that was it. OK—Emma had no idea what that meant. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached six principles of nonviolence, D’Angelo explained. The Parkland kids were embarking on number 4: “Suffering can educate and transform.” And MLK singled out a particular kind of suffering: “Unearned suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.”
“Oh wow, can we do this all together?” Emma asked.
The full group reconvened. “We taught them the principles, and they taught us about policy,” D’Angelo said.