Less than two weeks ago, Sarah Silins was a homecoming queen leading a parade of teenage well-wishers before a football game.
On Sunday, Silins led another parade, but it required no dressy costumes or guys in football uniforms. It required only the conviction that it is time to stop violence in Evanston.
At least 500 students, parents and community leaders rallied behind Silins on Sunday as the 17-year-old Evanston Township High School senior led them through town, as part of an effort to rally the community to end the violence directed at Evanston youths.
Forming a blockslong parade, the ralliers marched from the high school to downtown Evanston at Fountain Square. They came on foot, on bikes and on strollers. Some came with their pets. Most came with the determination that only a united Evanston, adults and children together, can stem the worrisome increase in youth violence.
“Realistically, we can’t stop violence with one march or even 10,000 marches,” said 17-year-old Jason Trace, a senior at the high school. “This is just our first step.”
At Fountain Square many townspeople hugged one another and cried as speakers paid tribute to 13-year-old Wayne Hoffman and 15-year-old Evanston Township sophomore Ronald Walker, two Evanston residents recently slain in separate attacks. Family members of both victims spoke to the crowd.
Silins read the names of 14 others who have died since 1973 as a result of violence in the north suburb.
Ralliers tried in vain to light vigil candles swept by wind.
“Let us use the flames before us, as both a reminder of vital people in our community whose lives have been taken by violence and as a flame of strength for the future,” she told the gathering.
It was Silins’ second community march for peace. The first, in June, attracted about 75 students, when she rallied classmates on the anniversary of the deaths of four youths slain in the preceding year. That march occurred days after the shooting of Hoffman, killed by a stray bullet during an argument between two adults.
Silins, who said she did not know Hoffman, was outraged when she went to the funeral and found that she was one of only a handful of whites in attendance. That lack of racial balance, she said, is what prompted her to organize a group against violence.
“He was a member of my community and went to my school. . . . We shouldn’t be so blatantly segregated,” Silins said last week in an interview. So, after summer vacation, she decided to start an organization called First Step, Evanston Students Together Against Violence.
“We started with about 15 people, and now are up to 45 people and it’s growing,” she said. The purpose of the organization is to bring out violence as a community issue, she said.
“A march in and of itself does very little to effect change, but it does motivate people and get them involved,” said Silins, who hopes it will serve as “an alarm clock ringing through the streets to wake people up. Violence is an Evanston issue, and no one else is going to take care of it.”
Silins’ said the genesis of her activism was nurtured by a summer spent in Israel. She said she saw a similarity between the attacks on people whose lives are threatened by terrorism daily and the shootings in Evanston, which have taken the lives of more than a dozen students in the last several years.
“So many of these problems exist here and yet as a country and society we tend to be silent instead of trying to change things that can be changed,” she said.
More Top Picks Ihealth Track Smart
Her message apparently has been heard by Evanston students who unexpectedly voted her homecoming queen, even though it is not something she campaigned for or even thought about.
“I’m not exactly the homecoming queen type,” she said.
But Silins has a magnetism not often found in teenagers and an ability to attract followers, adults as well as her peers.
“She is not a cheerleader type. . . . The last thing you expect is for her to be a homecoming queen candidate,” said Donald Baker, executive director of Youth Organization Umbrella, an Evanston non-profit organization.
“Her election as homecoming queen was a referendum by the high school kids that says, `This (anti-violence issue) is so important that we want our homecoming queen to symbolize what we are trying to do here,’ ” Baker said.
Sunday’s anti-violence rally was one of a number of community events planned to promote a spirit of civility in Evanston.
The civility campaign was begun by a high school safety task force that spent a year and a half studying the problem after a freshman was shot in the high school cafeteria. A gun misfired after being taken to school by a classmate.
The idea is that peaceful resolution of conflict–whether it is over perceived insults or simply another driver cutting off someone in traffic–can keep a disagreement from escalating into deadly force.
“Evanston is like a ball of clay and we can make it into whatever we want,” Silins said.