A few days before a report blaming homicide as the chief killer of Chicago youth, Terrence Kizer was stopped by ”gangbangers” on a street near the Cabrini-Green housing project. ”What do you ride?” they demanded, asking Kizer to declare his gang colors. At first, Kizer was defiant, responding,
”What do I look like I ride?” But after a momentary standoff, he told them he belonged to the Jesse White Tumbling Team, and the gang gave him a quick, if grudging, pass.
As soon as he reached his destination, Jesse White`s offices at 1454 N. Sedgwick St., 18-year-old Kizer replayed the confrontation for his coach and teammates. Under other circumstances, it might not have caused much of a reaction. In this case, however, White was jubilant when Kizer told him what had happened, because it dramatically underscored a point he`d been making only minutes earlier in his office.
”My kids know that as long as they`re part of the tumbling team, they`re safe in the community,” said White, a 14-year state representative whose 8th District reaches from the Gold Coast to what he calls the ”Soul Coast,” an area whose most imposing, and notorious, landmark is the Cabrini-Green housing project. ”The gangbangers are not going to bother them. They don`t dare mess with my kids.”
White`s kids include not just Kizer and the 74 other members of his
”varsity” tumbling team, which he established in 1959, but the 10 girls in his dance troupe and the 500 or more tumblers enrolled in YMCA, park district, and school programs throughout Chicago. Besides the rigorous physical standards, candidates have to be ”tall and straight” in their personal conduct, White insists, observing a code that strictly prohibits gang membership.
”It`s simple,” White explained, during an interview in his storefront headquarters, which serves as a community center for both his political and athletic constituents. ”If you`re with them, we don`t need you. I have a waiting list of 3,600 kids for this program. If you want to be part of the gangbangers, go.” Of the team`s nearly 1,000 tumblers over three decades, fewer than 100 have ”gone,” White said.
It wasn`t necessarily gang and/or criminal activities that got them exiled but any of White`s numerous other rules and regulations, which he divides into two broad categories: ”poor hygiene and anti-social behavior.” Heading the list of punishable offenses are illegal ”roots, herbs and spices” (as he calls drugs in his exhortation to young audiences before the tumblers` performances), followed by ”drinking, smoking, swearing, negative thinking, and being unkind to your neighbors and friends.”
In his roles as coach and schoolteacher, as well as legislator, White likes to flavor his speech with locker- and classroom proverbs, such as, ”A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.” But perhaps his most frequently quoted maxim is, ”An idle mind is the devil`s workshop.” With his campaign to beat the devil, however, White has put the stress not so much on active minds as agile bodies, capable of mastering the rolls, dives, roundoffs, floorwalks, back flips and other complicated stunts that are part of his tumblers` repertoire.
Shortly after Terrence Kizer`s arrival at the storefront, White shouted,
”Gentlemen, let`s go.” With White at the wheel, more than a dozen tumblers jammed into the team van for the drive to Nobel Elementary School, on Chicago`s Northwest Side, and the first of two shows that day. During the summer, White`s Tumblers, who split up into three teams of 25 each, can give as many as 10 performances daily, a schedule that leaves them not only exhausted but safely removed from the temptations of the streets, White pointed out.
White`s aggressive efforts to provide his boys and girls with a way of escape from the crippling, often fatal effects of ghetto life have brought him the kind of national attention that made Marva Collins such a media phenomenon. From their modest beginnings as traveling acrobats in Chicago and suburban neighborhoods, at schools, block parties and street carnivals, the Jesse White Tumblers have become regular (and salaried) performers at Bears, Bulls, Sox and Cub games.
Their barnstorming hasn`t been limited to Chicago. White`s Tumblers have appeared at Detroit Pistons, Cleveland Cavaliers and Dallas Mavericks games, among many other sports events. They`ve made three trips to Japan, and have visits to China and Korea on their 1990 itinerary. They were featured in the film, ”Ferris Bueller`s Day Off,” on ”The David Letterman Show,” and a commercial for Coca-Cola, which has since become the team`s chief sponsor.
Like Marva Collins, White is finding even wider and potentially more enduring forms of recognition. He and his tumblers are supposed to be the subjects of a Hollywood film, due to be shot here next summer. ”I know it`s serious because they gave me three checks,” he said. Though his tumblers are paid for a majority of their shows, ranging from $100 to $1,000, White said he personally ”ate” a $14,000 deficit last year, which the Hollywood money will help erase.
Then there`s the publication of a new book, ”I Am a Jesse White Tumbler,” by Chicago photographer Diane Schmidt (Whitman, $13.95). With many color photographs, Schmidt`s book tells the story of Kenyon Conner, who joined the White Tumblers when he was 5 and having ”family problems.” Now an 8th-grader at Lowell School, Kenyon has ”become one of our premier tumblers,”
according to White, ”in spite of all the hardships he`s had.”
In relating his experiences to Diane Schmidt, Kenyon told how he moved out of Cabrini-Green to live with his grandmother because ”my mother didn`t want me to stay with her.” Even so, he emphasizes the positive, concluding: ”I wouldn`t say I`ve had a hard life. I`ve had an easy life-very easy, because I haven`t gotten into trouble. Being on the team has helped me a lot.”
Though Kenyon was in class and missed last week`s bus trip to Nobel school, his upbeat words were echoed by a number of his teammates, among them Terrence Smith, 22. During his 11 years on the Tumblers, he said he`d been to Miami, Detroit, Dallas, Washington and ”a lot of other places I never would have seen. If I hadn`t joined the team, I might just be hanging around the neighborhood, doing nothing. This way you take the risk out of getting hassled by police or catching a stray bullet.”
For many of the tumblers, ”borderline types,” according to White, whose lives were previously circumscribed by the 20-square blocks of Cabrini-Green, the van trips around Chicago have been instructive in themselves. ”We`ll ride though a nice neighborhood, and somebody will say, `Look at that bad house.`
Or, `Look at that sharp car.` And I respond by telling them that if they want that bad house or that sharp car, the way to get it is by education. Or hard work.”
”The youngsters who live in housing projects are some of the most talented and nicest kids you`ll find anywhere,” he said, noting that his team is basically designed to help prevent juvenile delinquency. ”But they`re right on the cutting edge-they could go either way. You have to work with them, guide them, and mold them like a piece of clay. In doing so, you`d be amazed at the kind of people you`re able to develop.”
As the most successful ”graduate” of his tumbling team, White offers the example of Richard Blackman, who went on to get his law degree at Notre Dame. Few other tumblers have attended college (as ”paid” athletes, they`re prevented from playing college sports). ”But most have found their niches, as plumbers, teachers, carpenters, electricians, postal workers, the list is long. They`re not involved with drugs, public aid or jail. They`re taxpayers rather than tax eaters,” White said.
Raised himself in a neighborhood that was to become the Cabrini-Green project, White went to Schiller Elementary School. After graduating from Waller High (now Lincoln Park Academy) and Alabama State College, where he was a baseball and basketball star, White was drafted in the late `50s by both the Cubs and the U.S. Army. The Army won, and after serving with the 101st Airborne, White returned to Chicago and Schiller, where he taught for the next 26 years.
Because he`d learned how to tumble as a boy, White was asked to stage a gymnastics show in 1959, while moonlighting with the Park District. He put together such a ”hotshot” team, he said, that ”the word spread and we started getting requests from parks, YMCAs, block clubs, art festivals, schools, the Cubs . . . . The bottom line is that it started a chain reaction,” one that eventually catapulted his tumbling team into
international prominence. (One of White`s earliest tumblers was his stepson, Kevin Franklin, who also played basketball for Gordon Tech, danced in ”The Nutcracker,” and is now a lieutenant in the Air Force).
When they reached Nobel school, White reminded the team members that they all had to help unload the mats, trampolette and other equipment, saying,
”Gentleman, many hands make work light.” With his tough manner and tone, White sounded like a Marine D.I., although one who addresses his troops as
”sir” and never uses profanity to chew them out.
Still trim and limber at 55, White occasionally gets into the act himself. But recent laser surgery on his knee has restricted his participation to the simpler routines.
”If your heart is not strong, this is not the place to be today,” White cautioned the audience during his warmup speech at Nobel school. Considering all the cheers, shrieks and shouts that that rocked the Nobel gym as the tumblers performed, however, he might have warned them about potential damage not to their hearts but to their ears.
The decibel meter hit its peak when Derwin ”Superman” Patterson, the team`s senior tumbler and assistant coach, did the ”human chain,” springing off the trampolette and somersaulting over 15 crouching teammates, an act that literally stopped the show. Afterward, ”Superman” was surrounded by schoolchildren, seeking his autograph. ”It`s my life, I`ve been doing it for so long,” said the 27-year-old Patterson, who has been a White tumbler for nearly 20 years.
The children`s enthusiasm for Patterson and the other tumblers provoked another warning from White before the team packed its equipment and left. ”I don`t want you attempting anything on your own that you saw us do today,” he told them. ”It`s very easy to hurt yourself without proper instructions.”
Riding back to Cabrini-Green neighborhood in the van, White said he hadn`t exaggerated the danger to aspiring tumblers, talking about injured backs and necks, as well as broken beds. More hazardous, perhaps, was the stretching routine they borrowed from singer James Brown, he added. ”Then parents would come to me later and say, `Mr. White, you do a wonderful job of teaching tumbling. But would you please discourage my son from trying to do the split.”`
