Our Gang

A few weeks ago my part of Atlanta was galvanized by the issue of crime.

A white guy of about my age, outside with a weed-wacker on a Saturday morning, whacked and now in critical condition at Grady Hospital. He's still in intensive care, but they hope he will be out in a few weeks.

Best I could gather from reading between the lines of reports on our neighborhood bulletin board is that this was a gang initiation or, perhaps, a stupid loss of temper between two guys trying to impress the same girl. The suspects at this writing are still at large and until they're caught we won't know.

Last weekend a protest demonstration was held. We went. There were about 150 people there, including political candidates, cops and neighbors.

By my count over 80% were white. Kirkwood has changed a lot in the last decade but it's not 80% white. Far from it. More like 40%. Maybe less.

More important the whites of Kirkwood are different in important ways from our black neighbors. We're  wealthier. We're better educated. We're more likely to be in our 30s, 40s or 50s. We're more likely to be gay, less likely to be regular churchgoers. If we attend any service on Sunday's it's the "church of the brunch" which meets at every breakfast bar in town.

Most Kirkwood teens are black. Almost all of them, in fact, except my son and a few others. Most are being raised by grandparents, or by single parents with no time for them. They go to neighborhood schools through 8th grade, which are improving, but once they hit 14 they're sent across town, most often now to Grady High. I see them at street corners around 7:30 AM, obsessing over their hair or social position, and that's all I see of them.

What happens is they lose their connection with the neighborhood. The area's high school, Crim, closed a few years ago, and Crim was no prize. But at least it was around here.

My black neighbors make a big deal out of 8th grade graduations. I went along with it when my son graduated from Drew Charter School 4 years ago. His high school freshman class had 500 kids. His high school graduation class had 168 kids.

These are elements of the problem beyond neighborhood control. But there is something that can be done.

While in high school my son was made part of Drew Crew. This is a program, run by the charter school, for its alumni. Kids in high school can come by after school, do homework, maybe mess about on the Internet until their parents come home. They're supervised. And there is an annual field trip to area colleges. That's how my son found this great statue of Booker T. Washington, during a visit to Tuskegee junior year.

What if the public junior high school could do the same thing? What if someone were simply keeping track of these alumni after they graduated 8th grade, inviting them in for supervised activities, maybe encouraging them to tutor younger kids. What if someone were asking them about college, helping them plan for it, letting them know they were loved, that there was someone on their side?

What you would have then would be another type of gang. Our gang. A gang of kids with values, with education, united in a common purpose, to make something of themselves.

This won't work for everyone. Real gang life is hard to resist, if you only have one parent, if you're being raised by your grandmother, if  expectations for you from the high school are low, and crap-ass teachers can't be fired.

But if Kirkwood had its own gang, and that gang were supported by the community, you would be building a bridge across the color line, you would be helping heal real lives, and you might make events like the recent shooting harder to conceive of.