Photo Credit: Tom Jenz
On a cold day in late March, I met the Black activist leader Vaun Mayes on 41st and Burleigh on the upper rim of Sherman Park. The streets, lawns and curbs were pocked with trash from a winter of refuse. Mayes and his Community Task Force people were doing some clean up. The man is a powerful presence, strong and resolute. Yet now and then a gentle quality blooms, especially around the young people he mentors. We started talking about the trash problem, but the subject soon changed as subjects often do.
What’s going on here?
Gideon Verdin-Williams organized this neighborhood cleanup effort around Gunsdown Miltown. I joined in, myself and my organization, Community Task Force MKE. We believe in keeping our neighborhoods clean. We also want to keep our youth involved since they need something to do to stay out of trouble. The kids haven’t been in school due to COVID.
In the background, 10 or so young residents carried green buckets labeled “Big Clean Milwaukee.” They retrieved the litter with long-armed devices for releasing it into the buckets. Vaun, you know a lot about this area, don’t you?
Yeah, this street means a lot to me. I grew up on Burleigh. As a kid, I did a lot of my juvenile crimes up and down these streets. I’ve always ended up living somewhere close.
While we were talking, a reckless car ripped by at high speed, passed a car on the right, rode the curb and throttled on through the stoplight. Dust clouded the air. Vaun shook his head. That incident switched us to the subject of reckless driving and stealing cars, two problem issues for inner city residents.
There you go. Another reckless driver. Probably a kid. Maybe that car was stolen. This kind of behavior calls for more youth programs. We need to get our youth off the streets and involved in more positive activities, provide them with mentorship. In the inner city, we do have different leadership groups, but sometimes, these groups work at cross purposes. There is my group, Community Task Force, and there is Victor Barnett and his Running Rebels, and then there is Andre Lee Ellis and his We Got This group and their activities in the community garden on Nintth and West Ring. Victor and Andre were two mentors of mine.
The three of us all deal with troubled youth, and we have different styles on how to rehabilitate them. I think we could use a shared space to hold our meetings, our activities. I’d like to see us have a community center where we’d all get together and combine our efforts. One purpose. If we could be all inclusive, it would benefit the kids.
You have also talked about teaching programs for troubled youth.
Yes. We could also have teaching programs in the public schools almost like we would be teacher’s aides. Teachers might have 30 or 40 kids in a classroom and can be frustrated because of a few disruptive rebellious students. Our goal would be to do one on one involvement with those problem students. We could also create a hybrid classroom for kids who are doing suspensions or need tutoring.
For you to establish a shared community center, you would need a building, and you would need the support of local politicians and regulators.
There are politicians and there is red tape. I don’t know why more politicians don’t get involved. What is the hold up? There are abandoned school buildings in Milwaukee that could be used for a community center for our youth to meet and make good use of their time. The city owns these school buildings. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to implement something like that. Why would the mayor and the common council not want to sit down with us to discuss this? We could be provided with one of those school buildings to be used as a community center for teaching classes and for positive activities. Why aren’t these spaces being used?
We watched another car rip on past. I waited for the noise to subside. “You know, Vaun, when I drive around these neighborhoods and stop at a red light, when the light turns green, I usually wait a few seconds because a car headed opposite might run the red light. I’ve seen that too often.”
I know. That’s a big problem. Not obeying traffic laws. Some of those reckless drivers are in stolen cars.
On that subject, there is a kind of underground system in place for these car thieves. The older criminals recruit juveniles to steal cars because if the juveniles are arrested, they won’t be prosecuted because they are too young.
Yes, that is still going on. Just like the gangs in my day used to recruit us young kids to steal cars. I’m 34 now. From the ages of 4 o 14, I lived in Mississippi, and then I came back to Milwaukee, and I had no childhood friends. I ended up as a homeless teenager, and I got involved with guys who were already stealing cars. We got paid for some of the cars we stole, but others we used to sleep in or use for transportation. If you develop a reputation as a car thief, older guys would come to you and ask you to steal specific car models with good speakers or sound systems, things like that. We had a certain block in the Burleigh and the 20s area where we’d drop the cars for pickup, or we’d drop the cars where we were told to. When I was stealing cars back then, adults might pay us. We weren’t stealing cars for the fun of it.
With your troubled background, you certainly have street cred to help today’s young lawbreakers.
Yeah, it’s not much different today. When I first started my Sherman Park Youth program several years ago, the car thieves were driving the stolen cars around the park. There were maybe a dozen young car thieves. We zeroed in on the ring leaders, getting them off the street. Taking ‘em to do stuff, taking em out of the park, going to Bucks games, Brewer games. They had too much idle time, and they’d get into trouble. Today, you have the speed demons, joy riders, the reckless drivers. It’s worse now because schools are out. I don’t like the media narrative that young gangs are causing this. Stolen cars didn’t start when the gangs started. Car stealing is an historical past time. I don’t think kids who are involved in this are really criminals. They need adults to guide them, mentor them. It takes somebody to reach out and pull them in away from bad behavior.
