Kindra F. Montgomery-Block

In 2018 and 2019, for the thirty months before the COVID-19 quarantine of 2020, there was not a single juvenile gun homicide in the city of Sacramento. Through a combination of collective impact strategies, coordinated program alignment, narrative change, deep OG neighborhood partnerships, funding, and faith, the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) seemed to have stopped gun violence. In this chapter I detail the connection and importance of the prophetic messages that facilitated BCLC’s formation and early efforts, thereby advancing change and building a common narrative around our collective goals.

I am held accountable by a community of folks for whom this is frontline stuff.

—Rev. Dr. Janet Wolf, Children’s Defense Fund

The Rev. Janet Wolf, director of the Children’s Defense Fund Haley Farm and Nonviolent Organizing, is a God-given force for justice and action. She is a national luminary among prophetic, social justice theology and seminary students, organizers, preachers, gangsters, and community members. Her guidance is one of the main reasons for the early success of the BCLC.

For three consecutive years (2016–2018), BCLC leaders visited Haley Farm where the annual Proctor Institute was held on the third week in July. The Proctor Institute (named after the civil rights leader Samuel DeWitt Proctor) is a week-long conference held on a huge estate once owned by Alex Haley; it features rolling green hills, ponds, creeks, log cabins, a modern Noah’s Ark, and a library named after Langston Hughes. It is a very special place. Attendees include seminary students, pastors and preachers, entire congregations, ex-convicts, law enforcement personnel, community organizers, public health officials, politicians, attorneys, civil rights leaders, teachers, professors, and young people of all ages. For many attendees, this is a spiritually fulfilling experience that makes them smarter and connects them to justice work, history, activism, collaboration, and political strategy. Early in the work of the BCLC, its leaders sat with Rev. Wolf and had cherished, encouraging, strategy conversations with her in the Ark at Proctor. She encouraged BCLC leaders to focus on the ten “patterns of possibility”:

1. Figure out ways to listen with no sense of power. Go to where people are and listen. Listen to youth!
2. Compare your listening with data. Data only tells part of the story. It misses some of the harsher places and crises that people are going through.
3. If we don’t listen, then we jump into solutions that don’t work.
4. There are deep theological justifiers for so many of the systems that sabotage young Black folks. We need to redefine theological education.
5. If you believe that every child carries the mark of the Divine, then it is really hard to consign them to a cage in the juvenile justice system or not give them health care or adequate housing.
6. Nonviolent organizing—not movement building, but organizing—is slow and relational.
7. Primary voices matter. Dig deeper roots. Collaboration is important.
8. Be unapologetic for focusing on Black children. Whether you are standing in the street listening to stories or reading the newspaper, there is no question that Black people are the death-bound subject (JanMohamed 2005). If we can liberate, engage, and transform these death-dealing systems, it will benefit everyone.
9. End the cradle-to-prison pipeline.
10. You have the right to be in the room with people who have power.

The Proctor Institute and the patterns of possibility with which we wrestled played a large role in determining the early direction of the BCLC. Returning from the 2016 institute with a transformed commitment to BCLC’s work, we decided to re-create a similar conference experience for BCLC stakeholders in Sacramento. We called our conference G.L.O.R.Y. (Giving Love to Our Rising Youth), and it was held for three consecutive years at the South Sacramento Christian Center in Valley Hi. In its first year, we invited the Rev. Michael Brandon McCormack to present the keynote address. A prophetic young Black Baptist pastor and faculty member in the Pan African Studies Department at the University of Louisville, McCormack addressed the more than one hundred attendees, motivating us with these five precepts:

1. Build faith. Prophetic ministry is connected to the need to speak truth to power, and life to the powerless. Speak out against policies and practices that marginalize vulnerable populations.
2. Connect trusted messengers. There is a need to show and bring life to places where people are suffering.
3. Undo intergenerational cycles of suffering and black trauma. Black women carry an undealt with burden in communal violence and healing. It is essential to invest in and focus on Black women.
4. Show up. Don’t just send resources. You have to be in the places in which children are suffering. You have to see and feel the sorrow.
5. Stretch yourself. When you are dealing with communities of color that have been on the receiving end of violence and pain, it is imperative to connect with the spiritual to have the strength and power to heal your community.

Through McCormack’s powerful, prophetic message, BCLC leaders were able to build strength in our partnerships, fellowship with our community, and authenticity in our approach. We built commonality in our struggles and used the narrative “tail winds” of the current movement for Black lives to create community change.

The first death-bound youth to die of gun violence after the establishment of the BCLC was killed in June 2016. It was a hot Friday afternoon. BCLC leaders received a call from Chet Hewitt, CEO of the Sierra Health Foundation. A call from Chet on a Friday afternoon is never a good call. Chet asked, “Have you talked to Greg?”

“Nope, why what’s up?”

“Give Greg a call; something is going on. A kid has been shot, and the whole school is up at the UC Davis Med Center. Two hundred Sac High kids have been there for two nights and days.”

We jumped on a call with Greg King, CEO of Always Knocking, Inc., an innovative social rehabilitation program serving at-risk and incarcerated youth in the Sacramento area and the community OG first responder to local youth violence. King confirmed that a young Black Sac High School student had been shot, and the UCD medical staff were saying that he was not expected to pull through. The emergency department was full of Sac High students standing vigil; most of them had not eaten or slept since the news of the shooting. Hospital staff requested help clearing the youth out of the waiting room, but the situation was tense. Greg asked if we could order pizzas for the students and volunteers and make space for fellowship in a small outdoor quad off the emergency department waiting room. That, he said, would help deescalate the situation and provide a respite for students dealing with a traumatic situation.

I will never will forget the scene at the hospital when we arrived. There were teenagers everywhere—sleeping under tables, on planter boxes and chairs, and in stairwells. It was a frightening and sad mess. We also saw the victim’s mother for the first time. She was outside the hospital, obviously distraught, smoking a cigarette, and being consoled. The BCLC volunteer team ordered the pizzas and, with the help of a few adults, were able to take the students outdoors. We could see, hear, and feel the group’s mood change. As the pizza line started to get shorter, Greg walked up to us and asked, “You see that table way over there?”

We all looked up at the young men who sat slouched, “Heads up, 7up”-style, around the table. Their faces were not visible because their hoodies were drawn so tightly around their heads. It was too hot to have their hoodies up: something was wrong. When young people experience the tragic gun death of a peer, you can see in their faces that their world has become a dark place. Greg proceeded to tell us, “Those kids at that table are not hungry. They ain’t talking; they are hurting. They know exactly what happened; they are losing their brother and they know it. I am going to go love on them.” And he walked in their direction.

Greg King is good at listening, the same kind of “listening without power” that Rev. Wolf speaks about. We did not personally meet with or talk directly to those young men, but we did listen. The events of that day shook all of us deeply. The young Sac High student did succumb to his injuries. But that is not the end of this story because that young man’s life and legacy live on through his mother, who has become one of the most beloved BCLC advocates and a Community Intervention Specialist trained to provide crisis response and violence reduction strategies to help other gun violence victims in her community. Her leadership has been instrumental to the Oak Park and Fruitridge/Stockton BCLC teams. Her healing approach comes from her ability to provide servant leadership, which focuses on the well-being of those being served and follows Rev. McCormack’s call to stretch yourself.

This event was a pivotal moment for the BCLC. We knew we had to change the culture of gun violence crisis responses if we were to be a whole-family system of care. Dismantling death-bound systems was not going to be easy and could only be achieved through an ecological, upstream approach to violence disruption. Failure to prevent the loss of of a child’s life is unforgivable, and in that moment, in the quad at the UCD Med Center, we could hear Reverend Wolf’s voice: “Listen to the youth!”

We did listen to the youth and the faith-based leaders who provided a vision for BCLC. But this was not just listening according to the English usage of the word, meaning to give one’s attention to sound. Instead, BCLC listening comes from the Spanish verb, escuchar, which means to listen with your heart. We doubled down on “heart listening” and purposefully built youth–adult partnerships. Sierra Health Foundation’s leadership made Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) a grant priority, with youth participants receiving stipends; in addition, Community Incubator Leads (CILs) received annual funding, and the programs it supported were regularly assessed to ensure they aligned with BCLC priorities. Quarterly, BCLC youth and adult met at Profound Purpose Institutes (PPIs) for professional development training and focus group work. BCLC’s CIL leaders became very familiar with the annual Sacramento County Annual Child Death Data Reports and were able to combine secondary health equity data gathered by BCLC with YPAR primary data to develop specific strategies to lift neighborhoods by prioritizing youth voice and engagement. For example, the YPAR team in the Arden Arcade neighborhood published a youth-led book of poetry about child abuse and neglect. The young poets used personal stories to direct the community’s attention to the issue. Many YPAR teams also doubled as CIL youth leadership teams, building direct block-by-block access and connections to youth voices, leadership, and civic engagement. BCLC teams found an authentic “sweet spot” in listening to youth and building skills to develop health equity solutions that came directly from those most affected by death-bound issues.

BCLC leaders successfully applied to the California Board of State and Community Corrections for several grants to reduce youth gun violence. The spin-off initiative is fondly referred to as “Healing the Hood”: its goal to provide comprehensive community violence intervention, prevention, and empowerment strategies for youths, families, and community members living in Sacramento neighborhoods with high levels of intergenerational violence. Healing the Hood now serves as the leading initiative to curb youth gun violence and the crisis response mentality in Sacramento. And that is why, for in 2018 and 2019, there was not a single juvenile gun homicide in the city of Sacramento.