S3E35 / Here All Along / Anthony Smith, AU Hogan, Kayla Hicks, Reverend Jeffrey Brown

Black and brown communities have borne the brunt of gun violence for decades. But when it comes to the national debate about gun safety or gun violence prevention, their efforts have largely been overlooked. Now that new constituencies have come to the table, how do we make sure POC don’t just have a seat, but a real voice?

Celine Gounder: Hey, everyone. This is Dr. Celine, Gounder. You may have noticed something different when you saw our show in your feed. We’ve been producing “In Sickness and in Health” for the last three years. But as the show has evolved, we decided it was time for a new name. One that better fits the kinds of stories we’re telling. So, from here on out, “In Sickness and in Health” is going to be known as “American Diagnosis.” New logos and art are coming soon, too. We may have a new name but some things won’t change. You still can expect interesting personal stories and in-depth interviews with experts on some of the biggest health issues facing America. So please tell a friend about our show today and help us keep building this community.

Celine Gounder: OK, now here’s the show.

AU Hogan: …some people call it a kid at risk, but it’s not a kid at risk. It’s a kid that lack of resources…

Kayla Hicks: You don’t have to have a PhD to be an advocate, to serve, to be committed to quality of life efforts and issues.

Anthony Smith: What are we doing on the back end to disrupt the root causes in the system that continue to push kids in harm’s way?

Celine Gounder: Welcome to “American Diagnosis,” a podcast about health and social justice. I’m Dr. Celine Gounder. This season we’re looking at gun violence in America.

Celine Gounder: Black and Latino communities in the U.S. are the most impacted by gun violence. But when it comes to the national debate about gun safety or gun violence prevention…. their efforts are largely overlooked.

Kayla Hicks: If this is the number one and number two cause of death for males, black males, fifty-five and under? … Why isn’t anybody looking at all of this as a public health issue? 

Celine Gounder: In the last couple episodes, we’ve been talking about the state of the gun violence prevention movement and how it’s gotten new energy… and how for many it feels like something new. But people in these communities have been fighting gun violence in their neighborhoods for decades.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: It baffles me… I’ve been working on these issues since 1989. 

Celine Gounder: Despite this fact, they’re often left out of the discussion when it comes to gun violence prevention. But that doesn’t mean communities of color haven’t been taking action.

Anthony Smith: Cities United is trying to achieve a world where all of our young people grew up in communities that are safe, healthy, and hopeful. …our big goal is… to reduce the homicide rate of young black men and boys by 50% by the year 2025.

Celine Gounder: In today’s episode, we’ll hear from community leaders across the country who have been fighting to make their neighborhoods safer. And why we’ll never fix this health crisis without them. This week on “American Diagnosis,” the hidden work of gun violence prevention in communities of color.

Celine Gounder: Several episodes ago, we talked about a program called Ceasefire. It began as a city-wide effort in Boston to reimagine gun violence prevention in the 1990s. It was wildly successful. Violent crime plummeted by almost 80%.

Celine Gounder: So, I want to introduce you to someone who was involved in that project, but who we didn’t yet get a chance to meet.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: I’m Reverend Jeffrey Brown. I am currently an associate pastor at the Twelfth Baptist Church in the Roxbury section of Boston.

Celine Gounder: We’ll talk more about Reverend Brown’s work with Ceasefire in a minute. But first, let’s go back a bit. Reverend Brown moved around a lot as a kid. His mother, Geraldine, was always his rock, a pillar of strength in his family.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Well my mother was very loving… She was the disciplinarian, of course, she was a single parent. And so she raised, you know, three boys… but my mother was the kind of person where we listened to… what she had to say.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Mothers in those days were no-nonsense. I mean, you know, if she told you to be home at dark, you were home, you know, a little before dark because you didn’t want to get in any trouble with her.

Celine Gounder: Geraldine had a big influence on her son’s religious and political beliefs.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Making sure that we are aware of who we were as young African American men was really important for my mother. I should also say that my mother went to school in North Carolina A&T College, and she was there at the same time that Jesse Jackson was there. So she was down in North Carolina with the hundreds of other students who were protesting, you know, during that time, and that spirit, she carried into her children. And so, you know, among the books that we were reading in our household were books about black history, books about the Civil Rights Movement, books about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Celine Gounder: Boston is a very different city today than it was when Reverend Brown first started working there. Back then, he was a young minister in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’d graduated from seminary just a few years before. But his time at the seminary didn’t prepare him for what he saw in the streets.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: The violence was really a regional thing. And so it was happening all over the place. It was happening in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Lynn, Lawrence, you know, throughout the region, Brockton, you had all the violence that was happening, and all these guns that was showing up, and young people grabbing these guns and shoot one another.

Celine Gounder: This was not the world he grew up in.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: So when I was growing up in the seventies, and this was like the mid to late seventies, gun violence was a rarity.

Celine Gounder: Reverend Brown was young. Just twenty-five. But kids not much younger than him were shooting each other. One night in January 1990, Reverend Brown got a call. It was the police.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: They said, “There’s been a murder near the church, and you need to come.”

Celine Gounder: Two young men had been shot and killed near his church: Jesse McKie and Rigoberto Carrion.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: I’d asked the officers, I said, well, you know, what exactly what, what happened? How did this occur?

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: These two young men were coming home, and Jesse had, I believe, an afterschool job, and met up with a group of youth and then started having a conversation with them. And, according to those who told me the story, they started to rob Jesse of the jacket that he had just bought. Both he and Rigoberto started to fight the youth, and they killed them both.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: But what was unique about Jesse was that he started to run away from the scene, even though he was mortally wounded. He was running up the street in the direction of the church, and he died some a hundred, one hundred and fifty yards away from the church, and it was that fact that just stayed with me.

Celine Gounder: Reverend Brown met with the boys’ mothers. They prayed. There was a march.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: And I remember that march. It was freezing cold outside. I believe it was zero degrees, maybe a little below zero when we did this march. We marched from City Hall right to the housing projects there, and then they asked me to speak and to have prayer. And I did that. And I remember walking away from that and thinking to myself, we’ve got to do much more than this.

Celine Gounder: Reverend Brown was presiding over more and more funerals for young people: 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds. Remember, Reverend Brown was in his twenties then; not much older than the victims.

Celine Gounder: This all came to a head one day at the Morning Star Baptist Church in Boston when a funeral was interrupted by violence.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: A number of gang members were chasing a young man into the church. The pastor literally had to throw himself onto the young man in order to get them to stop stabbing him and kicking him and all of that.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: And they were doing all that in front of the altar, in front of the casket.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: They were almost killed him. The young man actually did not die, but he was in really bad shape.

Celine Gounder: There were more meetings. Debates about big structural changes: housing, education, healthcare.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: All of those were important issues, but what we were saying was look you got guns out on the street, there’s violence, and it’s very clear that the police were not going to be able to arrest everybody to eliminate the violence

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: And so we started to walk in the Four Corners section of Dorchester, and at that time was the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. And we were walking out there from ten o’clock at night to, you know, to at least one, two in the morning and doing the same thing that I was doing in Cambridge: just going out, finding youth, making connections, trying to build relationships.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: But it was very clear that what I was doing was unconventional. I mean, you know, there were folks who thought I was going out of my mind doing it.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: I can’t say that it was always, you know, a joy to be out there on the streets. Sometimes it really did feel dangerous. On occasion, you can hear gunfire as we were walking. A couple of times when we were in the community, we had to hit the deck. You know, a lot of things were happening around us, but, you know, by and large, I would say, it became clear that what we were doing was actually a key to, you know, finding a way forward in the midst of all of this violence.

Celine Gounder: These night walks would eventually be folded into a larger city-wide effort called Ceasefire. Violent crime fell by seventy-nine percent during an eight-year period.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: What gets cut out of that narrative is the community efforts of the many, many, many people who put their shoulders to the plow and, and pushed to, you know, eliminate violence and to make it better.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: It’s sort of like, in the same way, the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, my mother was a part of, you know, the marches and the citizens, but, you know, if I wouldn’t have told you, you would have never heard her name. There are so many folks in Boston who were a part of, you know, eliminating and reducing violence in the community, but you’ll never hear about them because they’re the community mothers. They’re the uncles who cared about, you know, groups of young people to get them out of the community every now and then and give them different experiences so that they could see that the world was larger than the six blocks that they lived in. It’s those folks who made a difference. And I always say that whatever you do in terms of criminal justice reform and violence prevention, you need to see it as, um, a moment of community empowerment…

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: You can’t come in with a community solution and not have the community involved in it and say that this is good for the community. The community has to own it themselves. The community has to embrace it, and that’s the only way that you’ll get real reform is when that happens.

Celine Gounder: Programs like Ceasefire and other violence interruption programs can’t succeed without the community’s support. But there’s a perception that clouds participation. It has a lot to do with how we talk about violence in African American communities in the United States.

Celine Gounder: One day, for example, Reverend Brown got invited by The New York Times to participate in a panel about gun violence. There were families from the Sandy Hook massacre, survivors of mass shootings, and gun-rights advocates, all talking about guns in America.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: But then, you know, one of us, you know, whose had these inner-city programs on anti-violence spoke up and said, you know, we’re going back and forth about, you know, the NRA and all of this but, you know, I got people who are bringing in, you know, guns all the time in inner cities, and we’re dealing with this, and we need help with this. It was almost like an afterthought for many of the folks who were there. And so this issue of gun violence, if you really want to understand how it affects the human spirit, talk to folks who live in the inner cities who deal with it every day.

Celine Gounder: Reverend Brown says there’s a prevailing wisdom that inner-city gun violence is different from the gun violence that the rest of America faces.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Yeah. I think what the disconnect is that there is this assumption that what people experience in the inner cities is somehow a result of their own choices, or it’s their fault.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: They have no idea or no understanding of how inner cities have ended up the way that they are; that it’s not the fault of the community, but it’s the way things have been structured over years when you talk about decades of failed housing policies, I mean, decades of it. You talk about, you know, race and redlining and all of that, and then when you talk about poor educational institutions and how schools in the inner cities are routinely underfunded.

AU Hogan: …some people call it a kid at risk, but it’s not a kid at risk. It’s a kid that lack of resources… If you take the same kid and put him in a different environment, it’s going to be a different kind of kid.

Celine Gounder: Meet AU Hogan.

AU Hogan: Okay. AU Hogan, Chief of Streets Life Camp, Inc. President of Baisley Park Houses, Jamaica, Queens. Uh, that’s why I am.

Celine Gounder: AU has been working in gun violence prevention in the South Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York since the early 2000s.

AU Hogan: …the goal right now is to stop people from shooting each other. And so we, we go out to people who’re either potential suitors or people that are potentially, uh, can be shot.

AU Hogan: And we try to change through theater… try to change the way young people look at things and giving them different opportunities. There’s no music in school no more we’re at, you know, there’s no more drama in schools that we’re at. So we try to be the school that’s no longer there.

Celine Gounder: AU grew up in this same neighborhood, but he says it’s changed a lot since then.

AU Hogan: Uh, I grew up in a town where there was, there was mothers and fathers at home. Uh, it was an area that people were looking for upward mobility. People went to work. People got along.

Celine Gounder: AU says that after crack cocaine hit his neighborhood, things got really bad.

AU Hogan: Well, you know, my closest friends were doing different things.

AU Hogan: The money of crack coming through the community was an interesting, interesting opportunity, not to be poor anymore… And inadvertently, you know, they became millionaires for maybe three years and the rest, you know, they were prosecuted… some of them lost their lives. Mostly my closest ones, they didn’t lose their lives, but they’re still in prison and have been since maybe 1980, 1989.

Celine Gounder: He said there could be as many as two hundred killings a year. And he brought up an interesting point.

AU Hogan: You can kill a hundred people in the ‘hood, and then not consider that a mass shooting.

Celine Gounder: Why don’t we call these killings mass shootings?

AU Hogan: If there was five people shot on my block and it was five people shot on your block…. We have to frame it the same way because you, you go out and the media doesn’t look at it. It barely looks at it. Just a bunch of people of color shooting each other. But when a white person shoots eleven people, twelve people, it’s a mass shooting you know, not somebody just shooting a bunch of people.

Celine Gounder: Remember the mass shooting in Gilroy, California last July? Twenty-one people were shot. Only a day before, twelve people were shot on at a playground in Brownsville… a neighborhood in east Brooklyn in New York City, which has struggled with gun violence for years. But the Brownsville shooting wasn’t called a mass shooting. It wasn’t talked about in the same way.

Celine Gounder: Here’s New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio on PBS:

Judy Woodruff: You had in New York City, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville the weekend before this, a shooting, and one person dead, eleven wounded.

Bill De Blasio: Yes.

Judy Woodruff: You waited several days before you called that a mass shooting.

Bill De Blasio: Yes.

Judy Woodruff: Why?

Bill De Blasio: Judy, I have since said I understand why people of the community wanted to make sure that somehow there was not a different value given to one of these tragedies in one kind of community versus another kind of community.

Judy Woodruff: What do you mean by that?

Bill De Blasio: Meaning I think the fear in the Brownsville community — first of all, I went out there the next morning. And folks were first and foremost concerned that the whole community not be painted negatively because of the acts of a very few. We don’t know all the facts yet, but they appear to be members of a local gang. I didn’t want to in any way add to the negative impression that people were worried about. On the other hand, some voices came forward and said, we don’t want to be undervalued. We don’t want that — a shooting that affects black lives to be seen as less important than some of the other shootings, for example, on some of the college campuses. And I heard that point, and I recognized it. And I said, “That’s fair. I will refer to it as a mass shooting.” Even if the — even if the motive may have been different…

AU Hogan: The mayor… made sure he stayed very careful about saying it was a “mass shooting.” There’s a different kind of resource that comes behind a mass shooting. You’re aware that. And there’s a different kind of funding and support that comes when someone says there’s a mass shooting.

Celine Gounder: There’s a different standard for gun violence in black versus white neighborhoods. The common framing is “black-on-black crime.”

Kayla Hicks: When I see the media make a statement about black-on-black crime.. it reminds me of how far we have come, but how far we have to go.

Celine Gounder: This is Kayla Hicks. She’s the Director of African-American and Community Outreach for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Kayla Hicks: I wanted to help and change the narrative and make sure that people were focusing on this is a public health narrative and not just as all those black people are shooting everything up, and the baby mamas, they should get off of welfare, and just having that ignorant conversation that we hear nationally. That it’s us. It’s our fault.

Celine Gounder: Kayla sees the root of a lot of gun violence in the communities where she works as a question of resources.

Kayla Hicks: …these communities can get a gun quicker than they can get a job, quicker than they can get social services, health care, a diploma, like everything is difficult to get but a gun. And that’s probably the worst conversation that I have still to this day because people have the conversation, and then don’t do anything about it.

Celine Gounder: It’s hard for Kayla to look at moments in history, like the crack cocaine epidemic, and now the opioid crisis, and not see a double standard.

Kayla Hicks: I watched the crack epidemic, you know, just ruin families and generations, and nothing was done but criminalization, and then I got a chance to watch the opioid crisis start where the whole world stopped because it was impacting white people instead of black people, and now that became a public health crisis we needed to take care of.

Celine Gounder: So Kayla is focused on building leadership to demand those resources. Empowering local communities to have a greater voice in policy discussions about gun violence.

Kayla Hicks: What I do for the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence is to make sure that communities of color that are mostly impacted have a seat at the table, not forced, not taken, but invited and welcomed, and are able to contribute to the policy and legislative conversation. And what we’ve developed is a program called Engaging Impacted Communities, and that program specifically recognizes that we have to engage communities of color in the work to reduce and prevent death by gun violence.

Celine Gounder: One of the programs Kayla oversees is called Education in Action. That’s where she met a woman named Margaret Eaddy.

Kayla Hicks: Sure. Margaret Eaddy. I absolutely adore her. That— she was my first, well my second, individual that I’ve met in this space, in this work. Her son was murdered, and in her words, you know, when I met her, she was in a space of where she just didn’t want to live anymore.

Celine Gounder: But Margaret found a way out of that dark place through advocacy.

Kayla Hicks: When I met her, we began to talk more about what policy and legislation meant, what elected officials’ roles were and what their responsibilities were, what our responsibilities were, what the power of people could do. And she began to start to dig and research and before you knew it, she knew more laws and bills than I did. She could track legislation better than me.

Kayla Hicks: She went from the corners of some of the hardest and most impacted communities to the halls of Congress where she sat in protest and got arrested. And we, we were happy to bail her out because she understood from the corner to Congress is a conversation that could literally change lives…

Celine Gounder: And when people in these neighborhoods are successful in beating back gun violence, there can be other problems. Here’s Reverend Jeffrey Brown again.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Something was happening when people would experience success, in places like Oakland, for example, you know, they would see this reduction in violence and then this phenomenon would occur where, you know, developers would come into the community… but then the folks who were pushed out would not be able to afford to get back in.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: …and a lot of the folks who do the work are community residents who you never really hear about, but they worked very hard in order to make their community better only for them to be pushed out of the community as you know, so-called gentrification would happen…

Celine Gounder: So Reverend Brown founded an organization called My City in Peace. It works with developers to help people stay in their neighborhoods after they’ve helped make it a better place to live.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: And so that organization works with developers to find ways to keep the anchor residents of a community, you know, embedded within their community as the community improves so that they could reap the benefits of the peace that they’ve worked so hard to create in their neighborhoods.

Celine Gounder: This is a great example of the kinds of blind spots people have around gun violence in neighborhoods of color. You might not see an obvious connection between affordable housing and gun violence prevention. But that’s why it’s so important to have voices from these communities represented at the table.

Celine Gounder: Education and employment are also at the root of gun violence. These are core issues for organizers like Anthony Smith. He’s the Executive Director of a program called Cities United. Cities United has big goals.

Anthony Smith: Cities United is trying to achieve a world where all of our young people grew up in communities that are safe, healthy, and hopeful. …our big goal is… trying to make sure that, to reduce the homicide rate of young black men and boys by 50% by the year 2025.

Celine Gounder: Anthony was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. The city roughly divides on east-west lines: white folks on the east side, black folks on the west.

Anthony Smith: You can see the differences, right? If you think about… the different zip codes… there’s a seven to eleven-year life expectancy difference. And when you think about the income and you think about access to ownership of housing to cars and transportation, those neighborhoods, the East and the West, are very different.

Celine Gounder: And Anthony saw both sides. He grew up in West Louisville, where his mom had family. But when he was a teenager, they moved across town.

Anthony Smith: Better opportunities, right? I think mom wanted us at a better school, my mom wanted to be in a more, you know, I’m putting quotes up, “safe neighborhood.” Uh, and just the American dream, right? You always want to move up, if you can afford it and move out. And I think that’s part of the issue that we’re also dealing with, is that a lot of folks who could be helpful to the communities have moved out of the community just because they had an opportunity to. So I think it’s both ways. So I think my mom remarried and saw an opportunity and took it.

Celine Gounder: But Anthony struggled with the move.

Anthony Smith: I dropped out of school in the twelfth grade. Uh, and I dropped out because I was, one, very disconnected from school, from the sixth grade through to twelfth, and by the time I got to the twelfth grade, I didn’t have enough credits to get anything done. I probably would’ve been there another three years.

Celine Gounder: Anthony says there’s some changes he’d like to see in how students of color are taught.

Anthony Smith: I mean, I think there’s a number of things, right? One, having people who looked like me that I could identify in the school building. Two, teaching a curriculum that I could relate to. I didn’t find… I was just talking to folks that the day, I didn’t know anything about the Harlem Renaissance until I was about twenty-four, twenty-five. And it’s a movement that I think a lot of young black kids and kids of color could relate to, and authors and musicians and artists that they could connect to in different ways, but it’s just not taught in the school system.

Celine Gounder: Anthony had jobs since he was sixteen. When he dropped out of school, he got a job at Chuck E. Cheese. He worked his way up to assistant manager. But there was one problem.

Anthony Smith: You had to have a GED or high school diploma. So I went back and got my GED at like twenty-one.

Celine Gounder: That set Anthony on his path to becoming Director of the Mayor’s Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods in Louisville and eventually, Cities United.

Anthony Smith: …a big part of my purpose is to make sure kids who felt disconnected or not connected to schools have some of the same opportunities I had to then move forward. Right? I think kids always need a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance. But they also need people to help point them on their way.

Celine Gounder: There was one more story Reverend Brown told me.

Celine Gounder: So very last question, and thank you for being patient with me. I read that you once tried to rap a sermon. What did that sound like and how did that go over?

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: Ummmm, I did. This was, you have to understand, when I tried this rap sermon it was during a time that, you know, rap was becoming really prominent. … I should say rap and hip hop were becoming, you know, like, the music to be heard, you know, within city. And so I tried to do this rap sermon. Now, I’ll be honest with you, when I did it, I, I, I had some confidence.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: I mean, you know, I had words that rhymed. It just sounded good to me.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: At the end of the service, I had a young man wait until everybody, you know, left the church so he could talk to me. And so he walks up to me, and he literally says, a rap sermon, huh Rev? Well, I said, I looked at him, and I said, “Yeah, yeah.” I said, “What you think about that”?” He just looked at me and said, “Don’t do that again, Rev.” So I was like, “OK.”

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: But there is a part of that story that I, that I don’t usually tell because the young person said to me afterward, “Don’t, don’t, don’t do that again, Rev.” He says, “If you want somebody to rap in your sermon, ask me to do it, and I’ll get up, and I’ll do it.” For me, it was a lesson that, you know, it’s not something that I can do alone, but I can do it with someone and, and together we can make a difference.

Celine Gounder: I think this story sums up a lot of what we’ve been talking about this episode. You need buy-in from the community if you want your message to resonate. That’s why it’s so important for more voices like those we’ve heard this episode to be involved in the solutions to gun violence.

Celine Gounder: Over the last couple episodes, we’ve talked about some of the new constituencies who’ve joined the gun violence prevention movement: moms and kids, veterans, and health care providers. They each have their reasons, much of which has to do with the toll they’ve seen gun violence take on their communities.

Celine Gounder: But for many, this has been a relatively new development. There are communities who’ve been living with the violence for years, and now that there’s a table to gather ‘round and take action on gun violence, it’s important that they aren’t crowded out and have a seat at the table.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: I think, I think the role of… of leaders of color and young people of color, young leaders of color is crucial in dealing with the issues around gun violence.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: The day-to-day experience of dealing with gun violence is really crucial for any larger effort to try to understand what’s around, you know, what we need to do as a society around gun violence.

Reverend Jeffrey Brown: There’s a young man who… one of the survivors of the Parkland shooting in Florida. His name is David Hogg, and, you know, I met with David, and I believe it was in September of last year. He’s a student now at, at Harvard, and he reached out to me… if you really want to understand gun violence, you really need to understand the inner-city context. So he reached out to me and said, “I need to learn. I’m trying to educate myself.”

Celine Gounder: In the next and final episode of this season on gun violence, we’ll hear from David Hogg and Tyah-Amoy Roberts, two survivors of the Parkland shooting, about where we go from here. That’s next time on “American Diagnosis.”

Celine Gounder: “American Diagnosis” is brought to you by Just Human Productions. Today’s episode was produced by Zach Dyer and me. Our theme music is by Allan Vest. Additional music by The Blue Dot Sessions.

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Celine Gounder: I’m Dr. Celine Gounder. This is “American Diagnosis.”