Photo Credit: Tom Jenz
I met Black activist Ajamou Butler at a big block party on a recent Saturday on 9th and Ring in the central city. The occasion was his own event, Heal the Hood, mostly Black residents coming together to promote peace and safety in their communities. The walled-off area was crowded and humming, the mood festive. In the center cross-block stood a raised stage for performers, surrounding streets lined with vendors, nonprofits and promotions.
Who is Ajamou Butler, also known as “Brother Heal the Hood?” At only 29, Butler is an educator, business owner and spoken word artist who has performed at venues across the country. Jaggedly handsome, charismatic, and above all intense, he roamed the crowd, meeting and greeting, emceeing the stage acts.
When you spoke of helping urban Black youth, you once used an interesting term: “high dose of self-love.”
For those of us in the Hood, we don’t see enough of people loving on themselves or loving on each other. A lot of these kids have family, community and social issues, and that leads to a lack of hope. I try to show them how to push through these doubts and embrace loving themselves.
I read that you grew up in poor circumstances, sleeping in a two-bedroom house with six people and two cats.
Yeah, my family was up to their ankles at times. There were periods where we were evicted. Sometimes, we lived in small motels on Appleton Avenue. We lived all over, the central city, Brown Deer, even the South Side. My parents weren’t living together, but they did a good job of co-parenting us. I got four sisters. I’m the middle child. My mom worked the night shift at St. Joe’s for many years. My dad did a start-up business, and he struggled for a while, but now his store is a success. I graduated from Rufus King High School.
You spent your youth in some dangerous neighborhoods. As a teenager living in the central city, did you get involved in gangs and crime?
I was living on 20th and Locust. Those were rough streets. My parents tried to keep me out of the streets, but I did get into some trouble. I went to college at UW-Green Bay for a year and hated that experience, almost all white kids, and I dropped out. Back home, I met a woman, and we had a kid, my son. He’s now nine years old. Early on, I was working a bunch of odd jobs and sometimes unemployed. I also worked at my dad’s store, Pursenality, an African cultural arts store in the SilverMill Mall.
Early on, you took an interest in Black social issues. What led you to becoming an activist?
I was in awe of activist speakers who could lecture for a couple hours and hold their audience. I knew I could do that, and I trained myself by studying teachers and lecturers. I started volunteering at the YMCA and at St. Charles Youth & Family Services, doing PowerPoint presentations. I came up with the idea of doing a block party, calling it Heal The Hood. I got some help from volunteers and the farmer’ market. We had the first block party on May 26, 2012, maybe 50 people came. In this block party here today, we will get about 1600 people attending.
Meanwhile, you are also running a full-time business.
Yes. My business is lawn care and snow removal, and we work all over Milwaukee, suburbs, city. I apply my activist principles to the business. I mentor a lot of my young students and hire them to work hard, learn responsibility. I teach them strong values. I’ve even hired ex-felons to give them a new start. For me, my work is a blessing.
What us the biggest problem you see for juvenile Black men in the central city? What do you try to help them with?
I try to get my young Black brothers to see outside of their current struggles. That takes dedication and imagination. Many have difficult home lives, lack of fathers, bad street influences. There is a certain level of creativity that Black boys lack. What is the root of all their issues? It’s emotional trauma. Not being able to express that pain, that trauma they go through.
Some of these young men act out, get into trouble because of the trauma, gangs, crime, robbery. They might tell themselves they’re gonna sell drugs or steal cars instead of working in a business. They can’t even do their homework because of bad personal decisions. I can’t tell a kid he could be an entrepreneur or run a non-profit because he can’t identify with that idea, he lacks the imagination. Look, a lot of people deal with adverse childhoods: Black, white, young, old, men and women.
Before the buzz phrase, “systemic racism,” hit the national conversation, you once said, “Systematic racism is the most serious issue facing the central city. The problem is way beyond what I do with Heal the Hood, but still I have to try to change the Hood culture”
It’s no surprise what systematic racism has done to communities of color throughout the world and especially in Milwaukee, one of the ugliest places as in the segregated physical boundaries and the incarceration rate of Blacks. You can literally drive north, south, east or west, and when you get to a certain street and cross that boundary, you are in a totally different neighborhood territory.
For Black people, systematic racism is number one, and self hatred is number two. There’s no people that hate themselves as we do because of the experiences Black women and men have endured throughout our history, all due to racism and white supremacy.
The old industrial cities, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, Milwaukee, those inner cities are the most segregated. I’m white. I can claim I understand, but I can’t live your life, and I have to admit that I really do not deep-down understand. But there is still that sensitive racism question: Are we ever gonna get along, whites and Blacks?
Probably not, at least not in my lifetime or even my son’s lifetime. Whatever social justice revolution we are fighting now has to be passed on down to the next generations to be even more passionate. Racism is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not gonna stop me from doing the work I do, but I’m not sure we can fully dismantle racism. I just don’t know.
Should there be more on-the-ground white participation in the central city? Blacks might say, “Come on into the central city, help us clean up, get to know us ….” that type of social behavior. Suburban whites are good at posting Black Lives Matter signs but not good at true activism.
Me, as a Black man, I want to be the Blackest man I can be. I really don’t care about white participation. I’m in the nature of two things: you don’t have to be physically present to support an initiative. You can write a big old check if you want. But I do believe in allyship whether Black, white, or LGBQ. If you believe in the betterment of that community and you want to do something, anything, then do it. I got friends on Facebook who’ve never been to a Heal the Hood event, but they will share my publicity releases.
If we are trying to get along as Americans and include people of different races, we have to understand the unique social cultures. If I visit a rural white small town, it’s a completely different culture than in the Black central city, the way people talk, act, interact, values, language and music. I wonder if having some respect for one another’s culture could help
I get it. That’s real, that’s real.
What needs to happen in order to heal the hood?
We need to create space for intergenerational healing and for social and emotional healing. We need to create space for economic empowerment and opportunity. We have to get education outside of the normal raggedy MPS system.
To heal the hood, we need to hold ourselves accountable as a community, for the trauma we inflict on each other, just like we hold outsiders accountable for the trauma they inflict upon us. Yours is a multi-level question with a bunch of complex answers. We gotta get our minds and spirits right, more than just goin’ to school, gettin’ good grades. One of the schools I work with, we emphasize science, technology and math because we want kids to understand that using your hands and your logical brain will help you grow. Heal the hood. We don’t even approach this block party concept as a destination. It’s truly a process.
What we see in the ghetto is shit that was inflicted on us 500 years ago. Slavery, Jim Crow, and then Civil rights, Back Lives Matter, and here I am talkin’ with you today. Everybody gotta play their role for holistic healing.
Ajamou Butler was the recipient of the Wisconsin Leadership Community Choice Award for Social Justice Leader of the Year in 2019.
