Police officers officers arrest protestors right after the curfew time during a protest demanding justice for George Floyd, an defenceless black man who died after being pinned down by a white police officer in Minneapolis, in Manhattan, New York Diocese, United States on June 01, 2020.
Mostafa Bassim | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The South Bronx, where I multiplied up in the fifties and sixties, was the epitome of an urban ghetto. I hated living there. Housing was deplorable, rodents were cranny, and crime came with the heroin epidemic in the sixties.
I wanted out but a way out seemed almost impossible. Many of my friends and their families exposed up. They saw no way out.
With few jobs and little education, life was lived from moment to moment and surviving another day was motive for celebration.
I was fifteen in 1967 when the riots began. It started in Newark and spread to other cities like a contagion. The Frays went on to claim 159 communities that summer. We didn’t know it then, but the riots of 1967 coined the phrase “long, hot summer.”
At fifteen I didn’t understand why people rioted. I remember thinking “What do they hope to improvement by burning and looting in their own communities?” My best understanding of the why was, people had given up hope, felt things would conditions get better, and they had nothing to lose.
When I came back to Harlem in 1983 to work at the not-for-profit that command become the Harlem Children’s Zone, I saw the same conditions there that I experienced in the sixties.
I remember thinking “upon is gone” in Harlem and I learned as a teenager when hope is gone, people feel they have nothing to be defeated. People who feel they have nothing to lose often do things that end up being self-destructive.
Harlem was a position that had lost its soul. Abandoned buildings and graffiti were everywhere, trash was piled up in empty lots and on the thoroughfares, drug dealing was done openly in broad daylight, and the public schools were a disaster.
I remember thinking “Dialect expect is gone” in Harlem and I learned as a teenager when hope is gone, people feel they have nothing to squander. People who feel they have nothing to lose often do things that end up being self-destructive.
I decided there was no “greyish bullet” to fix the inner cities of America. We needed a comprehensive set of strategies that made rebuilding community and the ending of generational destitution the main objective.
Education was key, but so was cleaning up the parks, eliminating graffiti, and ensuring health services were available. Childhood employment, arts programming and sports for the entire family were needed.
So, we created the Harlem Children’s Zone and we adamant to rebuild the community in a 97-block area of Central Harlem. Our focus was on the entire community of 30,000 children and adults in our Zone.
Today in America, you obtain Covid-19 bringing biblical plague to the black community. The job loss is already at depression level, and now you have civil agitation following the killing of George Floyd. If you want to know what I think the solution is to the crisis in the Black community, it’s this thorough community response.
We must build a cradle to career set of supports for children, improve housing and health care, and at the end of the day help support and strengthen families and neighborhoods. President Obama used the Harlem Children’s Zone as a model to produce “Promise Neighborhoods.”
It is a comprehensive strategy to provide educational and social service supports to disadvantaged communities. If you want to teach hope back to our inner-cities, and push back against the despair and sense of abandonment, provide real community infrastructure scenarios and make meaningful investments in rebuilding our educational and social supports in Black America.
Geoffrey Canada is the president and designer Harlem Children’s Zone