Something was off from the moment Aisha pushed open the front door. I was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches and gathering up bags of chips and juice bottles, getting ready to head across the street. It was a warm day—May 10, 2007. A perfect day for an evening of basketball. Kids were still in school, and it was one of those rare moments when even the kids who didn’t go to school had left to check in with their parents or meet up with their friends, and the house was completely empty. Aisha usually burst through the door around this time, throwing down her backpack and barging into the kitchen announcing she needed a snack before telling me all about which girl said what to her that day. Aisha always had something to say.
But today, she was quiet. All I could hear was a sniffle here and there.
“Aisha, what’s going on?” I asked, looking up at my daughter.
She plopped down in the one comfy chair we had left in our living room and held her head in her hands. She stared at me, her mouth unable to form the words, before she finally spoke. “Blair was killed.”
I felt my stomach flip-flop with those three words. I’d only met Blair a time or two. Back when Aisha was a freshman, the two of them went to school together, and I got to know Blair’s father, Ron Holt. Ron was a police officer, and I always deeply respected him. I knew his son was a sweet, smart kid with light skin and cornrows who loved to rap and write his own lyrics. He was an honor-roll student on his way up. He wasn’t going to get stuck in the South Side, wasting his life gangbanging for some clique. This kid was going places. For a moment, I thought there had to be some mistake.
“What?” I sputtered. “Blair Blair? That boy?”
“Moooooom!” Aisha wailed. Her voice broke into a scream unlike anything I’d heard since she was a toddler. It was a scream of grief, a scream of fear that she could be next, a scream of anger that somebody like Blair, somebody who did all the right things, could have their life cut off at sixteen.
Watching my baby scream like that made me scream right along with her. My mama instincts kicked in as I scooped her up in the chair and sat with her, holding her and stroking her hair as we cried together.
Kids showed up one by one as we sobbed in the living room. Nobody asked why we were crying. By now, everybody knew. It was all over the news that Blair had been on a city bus, riding to his after-school job at his grandma’s store, when a fourteen-year-old with a grudge and a gun boarded the bus. Bullets flew as this boy pulled the trigger over and over again. Blair, the son of a police officer, whose mother was a firefighter, instantly dove in front of the girl seated next to him and pushed her out of the way. The girl survived. Blair did not.
Shootings aren’t uncommon on the South Side. Kids are murdered so frequently that half the time, it doesn’t even make the news. Blair wasn’t even the first kid close to Aisha to be killed. But Blair’s story was different. Nobody could say, “Oh, if he hadn’t been running around gangbanging, he wouldn’t have got killed.” Nobody could think to themselves, “Well, that would never happen to me. I’d never be in that situation.” Blair was just a good kid who got on the wrong bus at the wrong time. It could happen to anybody, whether they chose the right path in life or not.
Even the kids who didn’t know Blair were uneasy that night. They wanted to know why God would let something like this happen. That was a question I couldn’t answer. Other kids asked why they should do the right thing when their lives could be taken anyway. If I wasn’t talking to a kid, I was busy on the phone listening to somebody ask if I was watching the news or if I saw the story on this or that channel. Some channels even showed a clip from the bus’s videotape of the shooter walking onto the bus, just before he opened fire.
The room spun around me as I fielded questions. It was like I was watching myself sitting in my crowded living room. I was still in shock. I’d been to so many funerals since I’d started KOB. I’d seen too many mamas crying over caskets. I was so tired of accepting as a fact of life that some kids aren’t going to live to see their twenties. Most of these kids didn’t show they were upset when they told me about a friend or cousin who was shot. Even if they were hurting, they stuffed it down. They had to just to survive, to keep living in this neighborhood knowing they took their lives in their hands every time they stepped out the front door. Now here we were, talking about Blair’s funeral. Blair, who should have been studying for finals, writing rap lyrics, picking out colleges. It was wrong. It was all wrong.
Just about everybody I’d ever met in the Chicago nonprofit world called me the next day. “We gotta march,” they said. “Let’s have a rally.” I just wasn’t feeling it. Not this time.
Normally, I was all for a march or rally. I’d throw on my KOB T-shirt, write “Save Our Teens” on a poster board, and head downtown. Hundreds of people would march up and down the sidewalks and offer up our thoughts and prayers. Politicians would take photos with us, and we’d see our pictures in the paper the next day. Then we’d all go home feeling better about ourselves for doing something. I probably marched or went to a rally at least once a week. Somebody was always having one, and I was so new to the nonprofit world that I felt I always needed to show my face at them.
But as my phone rang off the hook that day, I realized all those marches and rallies were nothing but talk. We said the same old things, took the same old photos, and nothing ever changed. These marches weren’t helping our communities. They weren’t keeping our young people alive. I imagined God listening to our prayers and shaking His head. I pictured Him saying, “I appreciate the prayers, but could y’all get out there and do something?” God put us on this earth to do something, to help each other. Marching down a street holding up a sign seemed like a lazy person’s answer. It was all for the media. When I thought about marching for Blair’s death, these marches felt sick and twisted, like in some way they were glorifying the killing of young people.
“Well, what else do you want everybody to do?” James asked me as I ranted to him that night about yet another planned march.
I threw my hands in the air as I paced around the bedroom. “I don’t know. Something bolder.”
“Bolder?” James shook his head. “What else are they supposed to do?”
“Go with me to city hall. Camp out and don’t eat for three days until the mayor comes out and says, ‘What do you all want?’”
“And what do you want?”
I sat down on the bed and rubbed my temples with my fingers. My thoughts were spinning so fast my head hurt. “I want them to invest in our neighborhood. These kids don’t have jobs. They don’t have nothing to do. This place looks like a war zone. And they wonder why they’re all shooting each other.”
James shook his head. “Diane, ain’t nobody gonna open a business here when they can’t even put a clerk behind a desk without bulletproof glass.”
“That’s the catch-22, isn’t it?” I looked at James with despair. “The violence ain’t gonna leave until the businesses come.”
He nodded. Roseland had all but been abandoned. Like our community didn’t matter. Like our young people didn’t matter. It was hard not to feel as though life might be different if our faces were white.
“So what are you gonna do?” he finally asked.
“We gon’ do our own thing.” The words were out of my mouth before I even had a plan. But I went with it. “I’ll call up the reporters and tell them we’ll be over here on Michigan if they want to see how the kids feel about all this violence.”
The day before Blair’s funeral, I pulled out my list of about twenty media outlets and called every single one of them. I didn’t have a big event planned. The kids didn’t even know I’d invited the media, and I had no idea what they would say. I just told the reporters that KOB kids would be talking about Blair’s death and how they felt about living with this violence. Some of them didn’t answer, but a few said they’d try to make it. That was enough for me.
As kids shuffled into my house, I told them to spread the word to their friends about the reporters coming and asked if they could talk about how they felt. I wasn’t surprised when most of them said yes. They were sad. They were serious. And they wanted to talk about it.
By the time the media showed up, we had a little amp and microphone set up in the vacant lot across the street for anybody who wanted to speak. For one day, we wouldn’t unchain the basketball hoop from my porch and roll it across the street. The only sound was the kids’ solemn voices.
Reporters listened as the kids talked about being terrified to walk to school, about the gangs that ruled their streets, about wondering if they would live long enough to graduate from high school. A few of them read poems from notebook paper, their voices shaking. Some rapped their emotions. My daughter even sang “C’mon, Young People.” Tears poured down my cheeks as Aisha’s soaring voice sang the words I’d written years before, words that seemed truer today than they had four years earlier. She gripped the microphone and closed her eyes, swaying as she crooned the chorus.
Let’s get it together
This is our situation
We’re killing each other
From the first day I invited Aisha’s friends into my living room, KOB was my calling, my passion, my purpose, which God had given me. Now, as I looked around at the boys and girls at that press conference, I realized this was literally a life-and-death situation. Any one of them, even my own daughter, could end up like Blair if I didn’t do something. Whether a kid was a gang leader or a student council president, every single one of them mattered. Somebody loved them, worried about them, changed their diapers when they were babies. All of them were worth saving. And all of them were worth remembering. The urgency that had always filled me grew into an all-out frenzy as I watched my kids mourn in the parking lot. I’m gonna save these kids, I thought. I’ll meet with every single new kid. I’ll find out where they’re coming from and why they’re acting the way they do. I’ll find out why they’re asking for help. I gotta do what it takes to keep them alive.
The dust had settled about a week later when James and I pushed an orange cart down the Home Depot aisle looking for paint to fix up some chairs. Like any other trip, we wound up walking up and down the aisles, browsing the tools and plants lining the shelves, even though we didn’t need them. That’s when I noticed the terra-cotta garden pavers. Their flat sides slanted out into a curve, so that one end of rough stone was wider than the other.
I barely glanced at those pavers for more than a second before we were down the aisle, on to the next thing we didn’t need. I’d seen those stones a thousand times in friends’ backyards and gardens and never thought twice about them. But this time, something about them stuck in my head. They reminded me of something I couldn’t quite place.
A few minutes later, it hit me.
“James, let’s go back to those stones,” I said, tugging at his arm.
James hadn’t noticed them. “What stones?”
“The ones over there in that aisle. The ones that look like little headstones.”
“Diane, we all the way over here,” James fussed. “Now you wanna walk all the way back?”
I pushed the cart away from him. “Well, I’ma walk over there,” I said, knowing he’d follow.
James stood behind me as I studied those stones. Minutes ticked by as I looked at them, an idea forming in my head. I thought of all the young people gunned down in the streets, on their porches, on buses. I thought of the boys who weren’t like Blair, who didn’t make good choices, who didn’t have their deaths commemorated with marches and rallies, whose names weren’t even deemed worthy of the newspaper’s police blotter. How many young people are we going to lose before somebody stands up and does something? I thought.
James looked around impatiently, waiting for me to speak. Finally, I turned to him.
“I just want to shock the community,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I looked at the price below the stones—$1.37. I opened my wallet to see how much was inside. “I think I got enough for thirty stones.”
“Thirty?” James spat out. “What you gonna do with thirty stones?”
I waved off his question. Mostly because I didn’t know the answer yet. I was still figuring that part out. “Just help me load the cart.”
James fussed about lifting those heavy stones into the trunk and how he didn’t want to drag them out of the car. I was too lost in thought to tell him to hush.
What was I going to do with those stones anyway? I didn’t have a plan. All I had was a concept. For the last four years, I’d spent every waking moment trying to help kids stay in school, get their grades up, stay away from gangs. But no matter what I did, there were still kids out there dying every day. I’d done nothing to remember them. And now I had these garden pavers that reminded me of headstones.
We pulled in front of our house and parked in my usual spot. When we’d unloaded the pavers, I stood back and stared at the pile with my arms crossed, frowning. I had a vision now. A vision of Blair’s name and age written on a headstone. Ain’t nobody gonna forget Blair, I thought. Not if I can help it. Not Blair or no other kid who loses their life.
My eyes drifted to a woodpile in the corner of the lot. James had planned to build a bench with it for our basketball games. Now I couldn’t help thinking it might be put to better use.
I looked up at James. “Could you build me something to put the stones on?”
“Build what?” He shook his head as his voice grew loud. “You just asked me to build a bench with all that wood. Now you want me to build something else, but you can’t even tell me what it is?”
But before he could say another word, he caught a glimpse of my face and stopped. He could tell this was no harebrained idea. This was serious.
“I want to do this for Blair,” I said. “Please?”
James was quiet as he hauled out his toolbox and set up sawhorses. Before long he was hammering and sawing away. By now, I had kids sauntering up to my porch and giving James the side-eye.
“What you gonna do with all those stones, Miss Diane?” Jamal asked.
I wasn’t quite ready to explain yet. I gathered everybody up on the porch and took out my notebook and pen. “Can y’all tell me who’s been killed recently?”
The boys and girls were silent for a moment before somebody hollered the first name. Then another. And another. I scratched my pen across the paper, hurrying to keep up with their growing list.
I enlisted everybody to gather up any spray-paint cans they could find and make a sign with one of the boards James wasn’t using. Then I called up the guy who airbrushed our KOB T-shirts to spray names on the stones—their surface was too slick for even the ink of a Sharpie to stick.
By the end of the evening, the kids and I sat somberly on my porch as we took in our work. Across the street, in front of the lot where we played basketball, stood a small wooden pyramid holding seven stones. “Blair Holt, 16,” was scrawled in black across the center stone. The big plywood board was now covered in brightly colored spray paint with the words “Save a teen. Do something. How many more?” My question was for everybody. The neighborhood. The city. State and federal officials. I wanted them to look at this memorial and seriously ask themselves how many more of our young people had to die before they invested in our community and did something.
All afternoon, the kids had buzzed with excitement. They bragged about their spray-painting skills and said they couldn’t wait for everybody to see our work. But now, as they stared at headstones, at the sign screaming out my plea, they were silent. Nobody moved.
A deep sense of peace washed over me as I patted Aisha’s knee and gazed at the memorial. I had done what I was supposed to do. That nagging sense of urgency I’d felt all afternoon gave way to overwhelming calm as the sun faded in the sky. Now they won’t be forgotten, I thought. Everybody’s gonna know these kids mattered.
“You think anybody’s family is gonna mind that we used their kid’s name?” Aisha asked.
My stomach lurched. The thought had not occurred to me the entire time we’d painted and placed stones. My only focus was on remembering these kids. But what if their parents didn’t like it? What if they got mad and demanded I take the stones down?
“I guess we’ll just have to see,” I said.
I couldn’t avoid marching forever. About a month after Blair’s death, when somebody invited me to a march with Mayor Richard Daley, I felt the Lord telling me to get over myself and go.
Chicago is always hot in the summer, and that sweltering June day was no exception. Add to that the fact that I was packed in with about four hundred people, and it was downright roasting. I stayed near the back of the crowd as we marched three blocks toward my house on Michigan. Mayor Daley was in the front with all the pastors and my alderman.
When we got to the north side of the lot by my house, Mayor Daley headed across the street to the corner gas station. I don’t know if that was on the route, but since the mayor went, everybody followed him. Somehow I drifted closer to the front, close enough to hear the alderman telling the mayor about how the city had cleared trees from the lot. You could see the back of the memorial right from where we stood.
This is my moment, I thought. I gotta get the mayor to see this.
I pushed and shoved my way over to the mayor until suddenly I was right next to him. Without thinking, I grabbed the mayor’s hand. Of course, he snatched it back. I’m sure he was thinking, “This lady is crazy.”
“No, no,” I said, holding my hands up to show I meant him no harm. “I’m Diane Latiker. I have an organization over here. With all due respect, Mayor, I just want you to see something.”
He looked at me skeptically as he let me take his hand—lightly this time. The whole crowd followed us as he walked with me to our little pyramid memorial.
Mayor Daley was quiet as he stood with his arms crossed, his intimidating figure hunched down small, as if he were really studying these stones.
“These are names of young people killed by violence,” I said quietly. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
I could see my alderman’s face turning red with fury. I wondered if maybe I’d made a mistake. Then I looked at Mayor Daley. To my surprise, tears were rolling down his cheeks.
When the reporters stuck their microphones in his face, the mayor cleared his throat and smoothed his tie before he turned to face the crowd and did exactly what I’d hoped he would do. He talked about the violence.
I did not have this big plan for a growing memorial. I didn’t think about what we’d do as we ran out of space for more stones. But in a neighborhood like ours, there were always more names to add, more young people whose lives were stolen. Before long, I had to ask James to rebuild the memorial to make space for more stones. And when we ran out of space again, I asked him to make it even bigger. And bigger. My kids took their cans of spray paint and created a mural of the city skyline, with our KOB logo in the middle of Lake Michigan. Along the bottom, my plea shouted out to the neighborhood in capital letters: “SAVE A TEEN. DO SOMETHING.”
Nearly every day, I’d write down a name as I heard about a murder on the news or from somebody in KOB. When I got an extra dollar or two, I drove out to Home Depot to buy more stones. There were never enough. I always had more names than I had stones and space.
As the years went by, our little seven-stone pyramid ballooned into a full-blown memorial with nearly eight hundred stones. James built a shelter with row after row of wire racks to hold the same little stone pavers. Even then, I was still four hundred names behind.
My little memorial became a place of healing for families. I’d come outside to find a father holding his son’s memorial stone, or a mother on her knees weeping. Once, when I heard somebody crying, I looked out my window and saw a boy’s mama wailing, clutching a stone to her heart. I recognized her right away. Her boy was in my program and was only fifteen when he got shot walking across the street holding a box of Church’s Chicken. I could feel the Lord telling me not to leave her over there by herself.
I walked across the street and gently laid my hand on her shoulder. She turned and laid her head on my shoulder, screaming her baby’s name. My heart ached as she sobbed and sobbed, her tears soaking through my T-shirt.
God, can You ease her pain just a little? I prayed. Even just the tiniest bit. My prayers were all I had to offer. The sound of her cries replayed in my mind like a record.
I wished her son’s name would be the last one I added to the memorial. But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.