Original reporting · The Trace
How to Ensure Kids Don’t Inherit a City as Violent as the One They Were Born Into
What happened
For its Violence Interrupted series, The Trace spoke with K. Durell Cowan, who founded Heal 901 in 2018. Heal 901 is a violence prevention nonprofit that works with young people in Memphis, Tennessee. The Trace reported that from the start, Cowan knew his small team was up against long-standing social and economic conditions that keep violence in young people’s lives.
According to The Trace, Cowan does not pretend those conditions away. “I understand the systemic oppression, the racism,” he told the outlet, and then: “I can’t erase that.” What he can do, he said, is help young people get through it “until this country does better.”
The Trace wrote that Cowan holds to an African proverb: “if children don’t feel the love of their village, they will burn it down to feel the warmth.” He told the outlet he wants a safer life for the children in his community, so they do not inherit a city and a country as violent as the ones he found.
In earlier reporting from September, The Trace described how Heal 901 started out working with teenagers in schools and then moved into violence intervention on the street as gun violence surged in 2020. The goal is to stop retaliatory shootings and settle conflicts before they escalate. That story also followed a worker who returned home in 2020, whom Cowan helped turn his own history toward intervention work, which The Trace said gives him credibility with young people who distrust systems.
Our reflection
A child born into a hard neighborhood never agreed to any of it. They inherit funerals and old grudges before they are old enough to name them, and somewhere along the way they pick up the habit of striking first. Then we judge them for what they do with that inheritance.
The proverb Cowan carries is hardest on adults. If the fire is a child looking for warmth, someone has to answer for how cold the house got. Some of that answer is policy and money. Some of it is us. We lock church doors from Monday to Saturday and stop learning the names of other people’s kids. And when the shooting happens across town, plenty of us feel a quiet relief. Fear has made a lot of decisions in American cities, and numbness has made more. I have felt both. Jesus said what defiles us comes from inside, and a cold heart is one of those things.
The exiles in Babylon had a proverb too: the fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It meant: we are stuck paying for what came before us. Through Jeremiah, God did not deny the sour grapes. He promised the saying would end, and he tied that promise to a new covenant written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:31 to 33). Ezekiel told the same exiles that no child is sentenced for a parent’s sin, and called everyone to turn and live (Ezekiel 18). What we inherit is real. It does not decide who we become.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it did not know what would bring it peace (Luke 19:41 to 42). Then he walked into that city and let its violence land on his own body. When his disciples tried to send children away, he was indignant (Mark 10:14). The cross is where the debts of every generation were carried. The empty tomb means no one’s story ends at the worst thing done to them, or the worst thing they did.
Cowan’s honesty is why I trust him. He knows he cannot fix the country by himself, so he stays close to young people while it gets fixed. That is credible-messenger work as The Trace described it: people from the neighborhood who carry their own history and step in between a grudge and the next shooting. A profile of one leader is not an evaluation, and I will not claim more than the reporting shows. At We The Revolt, our JCVI work in Miami, Chicago and Houston aims at that same first contact, before a record exists, and then stays with young people through re-entry.
You don’t have to start a nonprofit this week. Find the people in your city who already answer the phone at 2 a.m., and stand with them. The steps below are a place to begin.
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
Jeremiah 31:29
Your move
Source: The Trace, “How to Ensure Kids Don’t Inherit a City as Violent as the One They Were Born Into”