How Long Will I Cry? Read Online Free Page B

for example.
But the way the program is structured, it is taking away the
dignity and the responsibility of those who are receiving it. So
our people have been given and given and given and given to, and
because of that, parents don’t have that sense of responsibility
anymore. And so, the kids are kind of left to their own
devices.
    A lot of the time, kids I work with don’t
even want to go home. And this is why they end up doing some of the
things they end up doing out on the streets. It opens up the door
for them to get involved in what we in our community call “traps.”
A trap house is an abandoned building that has been overrun by
gangs in the neighborhood—they do drugs there, they sell drugs
there, a lot of times there’s sex involved there—and they do what
people do on the streets. And so our kids are hanging out at the
trap instead of going straight home.
    Then you have a situation where some kids are
actually growing up in the trap. Can I just keep it real with you?
Their situation is that everybody in their family gangbangs. That’s
all they know, that’s all they do, that’s what they’re about. It’s
their lifestyle. It’s what is considered the norm in their
home.
    I knew that this was a community that was at
risk when I moved here. I knew full-fledge what I was getting into.
I was not going in blind. So while one event in my life, the
killing of this young man, took me aback—yeah, it did—it’s a kind
of event that has long been known to happen in Roseland. Until
Derrion’s death, it just wasn’t publicized.
    I knew about the video even before it hit TV
and the Internet. There was some police officers at the Agape
Center right after Derrion was loaded onto the ambulance. They
asked if they could view our video footage. We have a control room
where you can play back all of the video and all that, and they
asked if they could go up. And one of the staff members there said,
“There’s another video. There’s a guy with a video camera.”
    It was not a cell phone as the media has
often reported—so let’s just correct that. It was one of those
small video cameras—handheld. She said the guy doing the filming
tried to enter the Agape Center to follow me in when I was bringing
Derrion into the building. She shoved him out of the building and
told him that he could not come in.
    I turned to the police officer, and I said,
“YouTube. They’re going to post it on YouTube.”
    He said, “What do you mean?”
    I said, “Sometimes they do that if there’s a
fight or something like that. They’ll record it and then upload it
to YouTube.”
    And then, a few days later, one of the kids
said, “We saw you on TV.” I thought that they were talking about
seeing me on TV from the initial interview that I’d done with the
media about the incident. But they said, “No, we saw you on the
video. It’s on the Internet.”
    So that’s when I discovered that Fox News had
the breaking story, you know: Derrion Albert, teen boy beaten on
the South Side, and this, that, whatever—and you see the whole clip
of video. And at the time, I knew it would probably go viral, but I
didn’t know it would go viral like that .
    The publicity surrounding the case has been
very hard for our community. I’ll give an example. The year that
Derrion was killed, I had a group of seniors from Fenger High
School that I was working with at the time—they’ve since gone on to
college. It was a group of five girls, and they were sending in
their college applications and trying to pull themselves together
from everything that happened, being surrounded by the media. Some
of my girls went to college fairs, and I remember a specific
instance where one of them had given her transcript and her résumé
to a particular school, and they asked her what school she was
from.
    And she said, “Aw, I’m from Fenger High
School.”
    And the person said, “We’re not accepting
applications from there.”
    And I had kids looking for