A.G. Gancarski
A tide of violence flows through the streets of Jacksonville, and no neighborhood is exempt. From the battlegrounds of the Westside, where two girls were shot in the head on a school bus this month, to Grand Park and Soutel, to Arlington and Mandarin, violence has become a reality. The lead story on the news to some of us, the inescapable constant to others.
Amid all of the bloodshed and loss, young people are crying for help.
Is anyone hearing them?
Local ministers and community leaders, in collaboration with Duval County School Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, are attempting to heed the call. A few of the pastors involved, along with a local black fraternity alumnus, participated in a Thursday morning press conference promoting A Call for 1,000 Men. The men-only meeting is to be held 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Open Arms Christian Fellowship Church on Dunn Avenue on Jacksonville’s Northside.
A Call for 1,000 Men is an effort to engage 1,000 men and potential mentors to be volunteers at several different Duval County Public Schools, including Ribault, Raines, Jackson, First Coast, Lee and Westside High Schools and Gilbert, Ribault, Northwestern, and Jeff Davis Middle Schools during the final week of school.
Given the recent violence at Duval County schools, as well as the violence perpetrated by at-risk boys against each other after school hours is over, the effort has been framed as a critical response to an epidemic of violence by those participating in Thursday’s media event.
Bishop John Guns, of Operation Save Our Sons, did most of the talking at the event, mentioning that they hope to place 1,000 men in the aforementioned schools “starting Tuesday,” with the “100 percent support” of Vitti, who says that their presence is “necessary.”
“The last two weeks of school can be challenging,” Guns said, because students who may have otherwise behaved during the school year are prone to act out at the end of the school year
“It’s not about black men only,” he said. “Young men need to see us; young men of any race.”
“One school, one hour, one day.” That’s the commitment Guns hopes 1,000 men make on Thursday night.
The timing is critical. First Coast High School held a football jamboree on Thursday afternoon without a crowd being present. The reason? The threat of violence was too real.
“This is a symptom of a sick society,” Guns said. “We’ve got to change the climate and the culture.”
Guns told the assembled media about how he spoke to several dozen teenage boys and their families on a recent night. He asked one what the biggest challenge that he faced every day was. It was “going to school every day” with the fear, always palpable, that something might happen, to him or in general.
Pastor R.L. Gundy spoke along similar lines, saying (we) “cannot operate in an atmosphere for fear” and that streets must be turned from “battlegrounds to playgrounds.”
Meanwhile, Pastor John Allen Newman spoke, in his usual understated and eloquent way, about the importance of recognizing that “when the forest is on fire, we all live in the forest.”
“We need firefighters, not pyromaniacs,” he said.
Newman added that “through Operation Save Our Sons, a principal or school administrator can make a phone call and say that ‘we need men’ [at schools], and we can dispatch them.”
Florida Politics will be at Thursday’s night’s call to action, and will have a report about the event on our site Friday morning.
