Original reporting · The Trace
What happened
On a Friday evening in mid-July, Martin Luther King Jr. Park in South Memphis was crowded with people, according to reporting by The Trace. The Trace described carnival rides, food trucks, goats to pet, games and face painting.
Under a tent, The Trace reported, a young woman airbrushed “901,” the city’s area code, across a young man’s forearm. Anti-violence workers were moving through the crowd, according to the outlet. Its report is headlined “What It Takes to Have a Friday Night Without Violence.”
This brief draws only on the opening scene of The Trace’s story, published October 13. The full report at The Trace covers the people behind that night and the work they do.
Our reflection
A park full of families on a summer Friday should be ordinary. The headline The Trace chose tells you that in a lot of places it has to be built. Somebody planned that night. Somebody walked it.
I have stood at enough cookouts and block parties to know what some people are carrying while the music plays. There is the young man who came anyway, even though somebody he has history with might show up. There is the worker watching the edge of the crowd while everyone else watches the rides. Peace on a night like that is paid for by people who do not get to relax.
The rest of us carry something we rarely admit. Most of us only learn a neighborhood’s name when something goes wrong there. We read the shooting story to the end and scroll past the festival. That habit trains us to see a young man with “901” on his forearm as a risk before we see him as somebody’s son who loves his city. Jesus said what defiles a person comes from inside (Mark 7:20 to 23), and pride and an evil eye are on that list. Respectable people carry them quietly. I have carried them too.
Zechariah wrote to exiles coming home to a ruined city. God’s picture of a rebuilt city was small and specific: old men and old women sitting in the streets again, staffs in their hands, and boys and girls playing there. That is the test. Can the most vulnerable people be outside after dark?
Jesus moved through crowds with that kind of attention. In Mark 5, with people pressing on him from every side, he stopped because one woman had reached for him. His disciples thought the question was absurd. He kept looking until he found her. Violence intervention done well asks for the same thing: knowing the one face in a crowd that is carrying something, and going to that person before a hard night becomes a funeral.
That is what our JCVI work is built for. We run it out of Miami, with hubs in Chicago and Houston. We reach a young person at first contact, before a record exists. Then we stay with him through re-entry. The work is slow, and it runs on trust earned one conversation at a time. Nobody leads the evening news with a quiet Friday. We keep going because the tomb was empty. If God brought Jesus out of a sealed grave, a block can learn peace, and a young man can be known for something other than his worst night.
No city gets a night like the one The Trace described by accident. Pick one step below this week and help make one Friday safer where you live.
And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.
Zechariah 8:5
Your move
Source: The Trace, “What It Takes to Have a Friday Night Without Violence”