Three of the nation’s most influential African-American leaders brought a single message to those who gathered Sunday in Chicago for the gang-peace summit.
Jesse Jackson called for unity. Benjamin Chavis, executive director of the NAACP, called for unity. And Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, called for unity.
That these men, representing factions that have at times been at odds, should come together to endorse the goals of the controversial United in/and for Peace Summit seemed a symbol of that unity.
But by working with gang members, these leaders risk creating friction within their own community. For proof, one had only to go to the Bismarck Hotel, where U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-Chicago) and about 50 professional African-American men held a news conference, billed as the “African-American Male Anti-Gang Summit.”
Reynolds told young black men to look away from the gangs for their role models, and he criticized other black leaders for their involvement in the summit, which ends Monday.
“To those who support the gangs and attempt to legitimize them, we urge you to demand real constructive action by these so-called reformed gangbangers,” Reynolds said. “You should also know that you do not speak for us.”
Sunday’s events-the centerpiece of the five-day meeting of gang members and activists from across the country-dramatized the odd mix of passion, rhetoric, skepticism and political grandstanding that has marked the summit.
In an emotional speech at Operation PUSH, the civil rights organization he founded in 1971, Jackson called the gang summit the “new frontier of the civil rights struggle.”
“This ain’t no gang meeting,” he said. “We’re having an urban policy meeting.”
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To the 500 or so people who attended the morning rally, many of them young men, he said: “There will be attempts to discredit you. There will be attempts to separate you. But you are on the cutting-edge issue of our day.”
Jackson, who said he had been criticized for participating in the summit, defended himself, saying, “We must find people where they are and retrieve them.”
In a literal interpretation of this, he asked the young people in the audience to step forward, join hands and pledge to stop the violence in their communities. Virtually all of them did so, and some were moved to tears.
“They’re talking about our lives,” one 17-year-old gang member from Los Angeles said later. “This is about getting us together.”
But Jackson, like others who have addressed the conference, was short on specific plans, other than calling for the reallocation of federal savings and loan bailout money to finance a jobs-training program.
He left town before a hoped-for meeting among the three black leaders. Chavis and Farrakhan said they still planned to meet and hoped Jackson would join them, following up on their declaration last month at a forum led by Congressional Black Caucus chairman Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) to unite against gang violence.
Chavis, in an afternoon speech at Farrakhan’s Mosque Maryam on the South Side, called the coming together of the leaders the “most earth-shattering event to take place in America in this century.”
He drew a standing ovation from the crowd of more than 2,000 when he walked on stage carrying both a Bible and the Koran-symbolizing his efforts to reach out to the Nation of Islam, which has not been considered part of the mainstream civil rights movement.
It was Farrakhan, though, who had the strongest warning for gang members.
“You can’t come back and just say, `I’m going to lead now,’ ” he said. “There is no cheap seat here. We can’t come together to make peace on the streets unless we make peace in our hearts.”
For the summit’s organizers, who have faced skepticism since the conference started on Thursday, the endorsements signified legitimacy.
“This says that they are accepting our prodigal sons and daughters back into the family,” said Wallace “Gator” Bradley, a summit organizer. “These are the leaders in our community.”
But other black leaders disagreed.
“We are here today to show you another face of the African-American male,” Reynolds said at his conference. “African-American men who are not in gangs, who do not want to be in gangs and who do not believe that gangs are a viable alternative for our young people.
“We say to those young people who have seen the pictures of these gang members on TV and in the newspapers and to those young gang members looking for a way out, we say to you-these are not the role models you should emulate,” Reynolds said, to the applause of about 50 men who gathered for the briefing.
Reynolds said most of the men with him had been born and raised on the South Side, had gone on to earn advanced degrees and were accomplished business executives.
“There are African-American men right here in your community, right here in this room, that you can look to as mentors.”
” . . . We’re going to stop this nonsense about different nations within the African-American community. We all know what it’s like to be poor. . . . You don’t have to be in a gang. Look at these men. Look at these women. We’ve got something to be proud of in this society. And they’re just one small example of the tens of thousands of African-Americans. We want the rest of Chicago to know that we exist, too.”