A crowd of teenagers is shouting obscenities in a vacant lot at 117th Street and South Michigan Avenue. Dark plumes of dust, kicked up by gusts of wind and the teenagers’ frantic feet, menace this cloudless spring day as the crowd forms a jagged semi-circle. In the center of this human Coliseum are three boys, who are about to fight, their faces contorted by fury and fear. One of the teenage gladiators has picked up a rock as big as a softball; another is back-pedaling, fists up, eyes wild and wide, searching for a weapon of his own.
There will be blood.
A bony boy on a blue bike looks away from the mayhem swirling in front of him and spots a middle-aged woman sprinting across the lot where a house of gospel and prayer once stood. The only thing left of the church is a basketball court-sized concrete slab, the mortal remains of its foundation. The lot is still supposed to be sacred ground, a patch of peace. The woman is its caretaker.
Maybe that is why she is so angry, so embarrassed, so hurt in this moment. For five years she has risked her life to stop scenes like this, throughout the struggling neighborhood.
The woman runs empty-handed into the heart of the crowd. She is fast for a 51-year-old with knees that swell when the weather changes. She can’t be much taller than 5 foot 2, yet the bony boy looks nervous at her approach. Around here, you never know where trouble will come from. Or what it will look like. Violence and gunfire can break out at anytime. So can love. No wonder the locals call this part of the city south of 99th Street the Wild Hundreds.
The woman is getting closer. The boy on the bike sounds the alarm.
“Hey, y’all, chill out,” he shouts. “Miss Diane is coming.”
That’s what teenagers up and down the Hundreds call the petite woman. The preachers, politicians and other grown folk she lobbies to join her crusade to “save our teens” call her Diane Latiker. She is the self-appointed matriarch of Michigan Avenue. “Miss Diane,” as one weary young veteran of the neighborhood’s street wars puts it, “she’s our second mama.”
Every time she steps out of her brick two-flat across the street from the lot, she’s armed to the teeth-with faith in God and redemption, with love, both tough and gentle, with hope and, some say, naivete, with compassion, patience and a big voice that can penetrate even the hard knuckle of a teenage head or the hardest heart.
She can be thick-headed herself. With a skimpy bank account, an expired cosmetology license and a few community college classes to her credit, this mother of eight is stubbornly trying to save her neighborhood one lost boy at a time.
By putting her home where her mouth is.
She has turned her house on the border of the Roseland and West Pullman neighborhoods on the Far South Side into an after-school community center for the kind of teenagers the social workers and academics describe as at-risk youth-or beyond risk, as Miss Diane puts it, the kids who end up in the police blotter and the obituaries, the shooters and the dead. Her door is open to both boys and girls. But it is the boys and young men, she says, who are committing most of the violence stalking the streets.
Miss Diane has christened her small, family-run program Kids Off the Block or KOB.
“She has a lot of respect in the community,” says Sheryl Holman, founder and CEO of Community Assistance Programs, which is part of a new violence-prevention coalition with KOB and six other groups in Roseland. “But she is playing with fire. It’s very dangerous what’s she doing. Everybody can’t do it and shouldn’t try. I really admire her.”
Holman is not the only one in the Miss Diane fan club. At an anti-violence rally sponsored by the coalition in May, Ald. Carrie Austin of the 34th Ward singled out Miss Diane for praise and a hug. “It takes a brave mother to open her door to kids on the block,” the alderman says. “She is someone special. We need 10 times more mothers like her.”
About 200 teenagers are signed up for tutoring, basketball and for field trips whenever Miss Diane can find the money. By making the last dozen or so suck in their stomachs, she has been able to squeeze 75 teenagers into her house at one time. “I still don’t know how we did it,” she says. The living room measures 12 feet by 10 feet.
Miss Diane has the teens under her watch six days a week from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. during the school year and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. during the summer. Before and after that, they belong to the streets. “The drug dealer,” she sighs, “is the neighborhood role model.”
Ordinarily the words “Miss Diane is coming” are enough to quash any beef in the lot where KOB plays basketball in warm weather. At least when she is physically present the fragile peace usually holds, as she shouts encouragement or displeasure for bad language, especially the use of the N-word.
“Hey, boy, watch your mouth.”
“Sorry, Miss Diane. My bad.”
But on this spring afternoon a few weeks ago, several of the boys have fallen off the precipice. Even as she approaches, the boys are busy searching for weapons, rocks, sticks, whatever they can find, just a few yards from the memorial Miss Diane built in the vacant lot to honor and mourn by name the city’s slain youth. A sign next to the memorial pleads, “Stop the violence, bring the peace.”
Before the recent trouble started, Miss Diane had let her guard down. She went into her house for some water.
It was just a minute ago that the two teenagers now holding rocks and rage were among 30 others, running up and down the concrete slab, laughing and playing ball on the portable basketball stanchions Miss Diane keeps stashed outside on the side of her house. A delegation of boys had begged her to set them up. “Please, Miss Diane, there ain’t nothing to do.”
Now the young men seem willing, eager even, to have their names added to the memorial if that’s what it takes to prove, as one of them declares, “I ain’t no punk.”
Miss Diane and her husband, James, built the memorial last year “for shock value, to wake the community up,” she says. So far, there are more than 70 names printed in black on terra-cotta paving tiles that Miss Diane bought because they looked like headstones. She plans to tear the memorial down and build it back even bigger. She expects more names. Summer is coming, the height of the killing season.
Days earlier, during one bloody weekend, 33 people throughout Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods were shot, six of them fatally. The mayor and the governor expressed shock and outrage at the carnage. They called emergency meetings. They promised relief.
Miss Diane doesn’t want to offend anyone downtown or in Springfield, but to be honest, she’s sick and tired of promises with few resources to back them up while “our kids are steady dying.”
Five years ago, Miss Diane, a former construction worker and hairdresser, decided to do whatever she could to help keep Roseland’s teenagers alive.
What she did was remarkable. She opened her heart and her front door to other people’s children whether they were on the honor roll or hardcore gang members who had dropped out of school. It is the latter that she is particularly committed to reaching. Explaining this focus, she says: “No one is interested in working with the shooters, the so-called bad kids. Their minds are wired for the streets. We’re talking about kids who don’t even trust the ground they walk on.”
She turned the living and dining rooms of her modest home on the first floor of the family two-flat into KOB. She, her husband and their 17-year-old daughter, Aisha, live in the back of the house. The KOB members and Miss Diane’s family share the bathroom.
“I’m the one who told her to do it,” says Miss Diane’s mother, Ruth Ward, who also lives in the two-flat. Ward begins most mornings on her knees praying out loud for the teenagers of Roseland, for Buddha and Man and Red and all the rest. Sometimes the tough teenagers ask her to put holy oil on them when the streets get especially nasty. “The kids like Diane,” she continues. “They can tell who’s phony and who’s not. Everybody has a gift. Her gift is helping these kids. They call this the House of Help.”
To make room for the teenagers to sleep over, do homework, rehearse plays, work on computers and write, record and perform rap songs about life and death in the ‘hood, Miss Diane got rid of most of the accoutrements of normal American home life. She pulled up the plush red carpet she so loved running her toes through. She replaced her sofa with a folding table topped with donated refurbished computers.
She gave away her dining room set and, to her husband’s horror, sold their 52-inch TV. She used the money to buy snacks and to pay for field trips. They argued all night about that TV. “That broke my heart,” he says. Now he has to watch ballgames on a small screen. Sometimes the house full of teenagers is so noisy he can’t hear the commentators. “Diane, I can’t take this much longer,” he bellows.
“It doesn’t do any good,” he says. “She just keeps steady bringing them in.”
When she first told her husband that she wanted to turn their home, his castle, into an after-school program, he wondered if his wife had gone crazy being around hair chemicals all day. At the time, Miss Diane and her sisters operated a beauty shop on the ground floor of their two-flat. It was called Lat’s Hair World.
“What are you doing?” he asked her. “We can’t even support ourselves.”
The Lord will provide a way, she assured him.
“She knew I was going to say yes,” he sighs. “She knows she’s got me. I didn’t have a good childhood myself. I grew up kind of hard. I wasn’t no saint. I know what the kids are going through. A lot of them don’t have daddies. I do what I can to help my wife help the kids.”
“Tell the truth,” Miss Diane interrupts, “we’re having a blast.”
Miss Diane is searching the Internet with De’Vanta Howell. He’s 16 and has been a KOB member for four years. He’s helping research new names for the memorial stones.
Blair Holt’s was the first name to be placed on the memorial. He was 16 when he was shot and killed last year while shielding a classmate with his body on a CTA bus going home after school. Miss Diane’s daughter, Aisha, had attended the 9th grade with Blair. “She cried for three days when he got killed,” Miss Diane says.
Since Blair’s death, anytime a young person is slain anywhere in Chicago, Miss Diane adds the name to the memorial. De’Vanta finds a news article about a recent slaying of a Chicago public school student. “Miss Diane, that’s the boy who got killed with the bat,” he says. “And there goes Marcus. He got killed at 114th and Calumet. That’s just a few blocks from here. And did you get the name of the boy who went to Simeon?”
Miss Diane jots the names and ages down on a yellow legal pad. “We’re going to have to get more stones,” she says.
De’Vanta worries about having his name added to the stones someday. “I be scared,” he says. “I try not to show it.”
At this time of the afternoon, De’Vanta should still be in school. But he cut the last hour of class at nearby Fenger. There were several fights at school and he didn’t want to “get caught up in it.” He and his buddy, Ra’Sean, 15, headed for the one place they knew would be safe, KOB.
“There’s really nothing positive” in the neighborhood, Ra’Sean says. “Shooting, robbing, killing.”
“It’s all negative,” De’Vanta agrees. “Miss Diane’s is about the only positive thing.”
“The streets around here ain’t no joke,” Ra’Sean says. “She does her best to get us off the streets. You know some people want to change.”
“Some people,” De’Vanta says, “don’t get a chance to change.”
A couple of days later, De’Vanta is back. He’s sitting at the computer table, checking, as he always does, the Illinois Department of Corrections Web site. He likes to see who from the neighborhood has been locked up. He hands Miss Diane his progress report from school. She studies it carefully.
“You’re having a hard time in algebra,” she says, frowning.
“The whole class is,” he says.
“I guess I can’t fuss at you too much,” she says. “You got Cs all the way down except for algebra. We’re going to have to get you a tutor.”
Aisha comes in on the verge of tears. “One of our friends just got shot,” she says, her voice cracking.
“When?” Miss Diane asks.
“Just now.”
Aisha hurries to the hospital to be with the boy, who was shot in the leg walking down the street. He would occasionally attend KOB events but was not a member.
De’Vanta turns to Miss Diane after Aisha leaves. He has more violence to report. “You know Travis, who used to come to KOB?” he asks. “Some boys jumped him yesterday.”
Miss Diane’s mother shakes her head and says, “It’s starting early this year.”
So far, the Lord has answered Miss Diane’s prayers. She has never had to bury a KOB member. But she’s come close to the grave’s edge. In April, her daughter’s boyfriend was shot and wounded for the second time in less than six months. And late last summer, a 19-year-old called Pooh, one of the first kids to join, was ambushed around dusk a few blocks from her building. He was on his way to visit family when someone stepped out of an alley and began shooting. The gunman didn’t say a word. Pooh was hit in the left thigh, the right thigh and the groin. Everybody thought he was dead.
Miss Diane heard the shots. She was outside in front of KOB with several other members sweeping the street. She and the boys ran to the scene. Pooh was already in an ambulance on his way to the hospital.
He survived, but something inside of him died, he says. “I have nightmares all the time,” says Pooh. “That incident changed my life a whole lot. For it to happen to me, it left me in a state of mind that there ain’t no good out here.”
He was no angel. He knew his way around the mean streets of Roseland. He could handle his business. But he graduated from high school on time and he goes to work every day at a sandwich shop downtown to help support his two small daughters. “I have to work a thousand hours to get a decent check,” he says.
Recently, the shop manager put him on the late shift. He is terrified about having to commute home in the dark. “Street lights come on, I like to be in the house,” he says. “But I really don’t feel safe in the daytime either. I am scared for all the right and wrong reasons.”
There are at least five different street gangs around the KOB two-flat. For the last two years, Miss Diane has heard the rumors circulating through the neighborhood that some of her members have formed a sixth gang, the “KOB Mob.” She says that is not true. “They were in mobs before they got to KOB,” she adds.
She has, however, been burned by teenagers unable to get the street out of their system. She points to a photograph of the KOB basketball team. The two gangly kids in the back row are in jail right now, she says. They were robbing people in the suburbs. “They’re going to be gone for a while,” she says.
She gets disappointed, not surprised. She knows who she is dealing with and how steep the mountain is she is climbing. She has faced down teens wielding bats, bricks and, earlier this year, a gun. Over the years, she’s been advised by some of her supporters that she should focus on less hardcore youth. “You don’t think I want these kids to change?” she asks. “Of course I do. That’s what I’m trying to do every day. But they want kids who are no trouble, the model kids. One thing my mind is made up on. I’m going to continue what I’m doing.”
Miss Diane started KOB in the summer of 2003. In the beginning, the teenager she wanted to protect most of all was her own, Aisha, the youngest of her eight children.
Aisha was 13 at the time, tall, smart, pretty, athletic, a boy magnet. She hung out with a group of about 10 other young teens. They spent hours on Miss Diane’s front porch and, as she says with a wince, “tearing up my grass.”
Miss Diane didn’t worry about them as long as they stayed close to her porch. She could always get more grass. But they were getting older and restless for something more exciting to do. The streets were calling, yelling their names. Miss Diane gave them an alternative.
She was determined that she would do for Aisha everything she didn’t, or couldn’t, do for other children.
Miss Diane was born in Drew, Miss. She was two weeks old when her mother brought her to Chicago. They settled on the South Side and Miss Diane grew up avoiding the streets gangs that haunted Woodlawn in the 1960s and 1970s. She saw people beaten and even killed over “a corner that didn’t even belong to them.”
“This madness isn’t new,” she says. “But it is worse.”
When she was 16 she dropped out of high school, got married and had her first child with her first husband. Nine years later at 25, she was a divorced single mother of six. She hit the streets and the clubs, looking for fun. “I thought I was reclaiming something since I had gotten married so young,” she says. “I was confused and overwhelmed. I was lost.”
She sent her children to live with friends and relatives. She reasoned they would be better off until she could get her act together. Slowly, she got back on her feet and reunited her family. She returned to school. At age 35, she earned a GED. “I tried to make amends with my kids,” she says. “But it would never get right.” She’s working on a memoir called “Unforgiven Mother.” Except for Aisha, all of her other children are grown and out on their own, scattered from Roseland to Minnesota. Sadly, Miss Diane adds, hard feelings remain. “It’s hard to get over the past,” she says.
She and James got married in 1985. They have lived in Roseland for 20 years. When she discovered she was pregnant with Aisha, she says, “It was the happiest time in my life.” She had another chance to “be the best mother in the world.” She’s still trying to make amends. Running KOB is part of her penance. “I feel there was so much I couldn’t do for my own children,” she says, “that now I can do for these kids.”
At first it was fun for Aisha having her friends over all the time, having her house become the place to be in the neighborhood. Then word started to get around and more and more kids started showing up, kids she did not know. The novelty wore off. “I had to clean up after them every time they left,” Aisha says. “I could not get over these boys here every single day. My mother and me, we used to clash a lot about that. I would feel she was treating them better than me.”
One day Aisha overheard a boy say that Miss Diane was “the mama of everybody” and you could get anything from her. “That’s when I thought they were using her, taking advantage of her,” Aisha says. “I didn’t want them here anymore.”
Aisha confronted her mother.
“You can’t be everybody’s mama,” she said. “You’re my mama.”
Aisha says now that she was selfish and jealous then. Most of the other kids who walked through her front door didn’t have what she had, a two-parent household. Aisha was surrounded by loving family. Her aunt lives upstairs. Her grandmother lives downstairs. “I’m cool with it now,” she says. “But I still want my house back.”
When KOB first started, Miss Diane didn’t know anything about applying for grants or what a 501c3 was. What little money she had for activities came out of her pocket or her mother’s purse. “I just wanted to help the kids,” she says. “All I had to offer was me and love.”
She threw herself into her new mission. She went to every community and church meeting she heard about. Everywhere she went she preached the urgency of “saving our youth,” not tomorrow or next week but today. She’d raise her voice at times, her soul on fire with passion and commitment. “People said I was much too emotional,” she says. “They said I wasn’t educated enough and I needed to go back to school.”
The criticism hurt and embarrassed her. She was afraid to open her mouth. Then she decided it didn’t matter that she used a double negative or two when she got excited. A person pulled out of a burning building doesn’t care how the firefighter talks. “I was handling it through love,” she says. “I didn’t think a book could teach me that.”
For the first two years, KOB operated on whatever nickels and dimes Miss Diane and her family could pull out of their own pockets. It wasn’t much. Her husband does odd jobs, carpentry and auto repair. But as word spread about the working-class hairdresser and what she was trying do, KOB began receiving grants and contributions from politicians, community groups, foundations and the African American Legacy Initiative, an arm of the Chicago Community Trust.
Miss Diane is a true believer in an old adage: It takes a village. But until recently, her village was a lonely place. “I pretty much did my own thing,” she says. Now she is part of a coalition of seven social service agencies, the Roseland Safety Net Works.
The coalition is funded through one of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s anti-violence initiatives, the Safety Net Works, which was created after the Chicago-based anti-violence program, CeaseFire, lost its state funding, ostensibly because of budget cuts, but political wrangling also played a part. There are 17 Safety Net Works coalitions throughout the state, slowly getting up and running.
Meanwhile, CeaseFire outreach workers in Roseland still respond to shootings, trying to prevent the bloody cycle of retaliation and revenge. They have been working without pay since July, says Bob Jackson, head of the Roseland CeaseFire office. “The light bill is paid out of our pockets,” he says. “Diane Latiker is doing a great job. But every program in our community is vital. No one program can do it all.”
The Roseland Safety Net Works Coalition receives $280,000 in state money. KOB’s share is $30,000. The coalition is a diverse group that includes Willie Cooper, a former gang member turned youth outreach worker. Cooper is 6 feet 8. When he was gangbanging he was known on the streets as Too Tall. Nowadays, people call him Big Will. “I used to be part of the problem,” he says. “Now I want to be part of the solution.” The coalition also includes Youth Voices Against Violence. Its board of directors is made up of Roseland teenagers, who are currently making a documentary about youth violence. An early cut of the documentary is on YouTube.
The coalition also includes Wendy and Rogers Jones. Rogers puts on an annual elementary and high school gospel choir competition. He is starting a Peace Choir, made up of Roseland teenagers, to tour the neighborhood.
His wife, Wendy, is a former Chicago public schoolteacher. She owns and operates an interactive children’s educational center called Pretend Town. She is recruiting teenagers for a new program, The Roseland Peace Center, which will teach conflict resolution. “I take my hat off to Diane,” she says. “She’s very passionate about what she does. But as an educator, I’m very passionate about saving the kids before they even get to that point.”
In the vacant lot, the two boys begin wearily circling each other, spewing threats and insults, a prelude to bloodshed.
Miss Diane throws herself between the warring teenagers like a referee at a heavyweight fight, fearless but dwarfed by the boxers who keep throwing punches long after the bell.
“Stop. Stop,” she yells, holding them apart with her outstretched arms. “This don’t make no sense.”
One of the boys is huge. The other is skinny but out of his mind with anger.
“He talked about my grandmother,” the smaller teen screams. “Nobody talks about my grandmother. I’m going to kill him.”
You get the feeling that if his homeboys weren’t watching he’d start crying, thinking about all that his beloved grandmother means to him. Later, Miss Diane explains that the boy is being raised by his grandmother. His mother is on drugs, his father missing in action. “It’s complicated,” Miss Diane says. “There’s so much hurt and anger inside these kids.”
Miss Diane grabs the boy from behind and pushes and pulls him to the side, shouting over her shoulder at the other boy to go home. “NOW.”
“Get off my back, Miss Diane” the skinny boy snaps. But he doesn’t curse or push her. He’s careful not to hurt her.
She loosens her hold, though. She knows his goodwill toward her won’t last too long, not when he’s under the spell of the street.
He breaks free, his face and bare chest covered in sweat. He charges the bigger teenager, jumps in the air and hits him in the face with his fist.
Then the offended boy’s brother moves in. Like a power pitcher, he hurls back and throws a big, jagged rock as hard as he can, narrowly missing the big youth’s head.
The rock slams into a wooden fence, resonating like a gunshot.
Lucky to be alive, the big teenager retrieves the softball-sized rock and is about to launch a counterattack.
“Give me my phone,” Miss Diane shouts at her husband, who has followed her to the lot, still holding the bowl of cereal he was eating. “I’m going to call the police.”
In the streets, you don’t call the police. You do your own policing, you handle your business. Stitches for snitches, the kids say. But everybody knows Miss Diane is different. She will call the police in a heartbeat. She does not mess around. “I’ve had kids arrested in front of my own house,” she says. “One of them was a KOB member. Anything breaks out, I’m calling 911.”
Her husband hands her a cell phone while he steps in front of the huge teen now holding the rock. Mr. James, as the kids call him, isn’t much bigger than Miss Diane.
“Don’t throw that rock,” Mr. James tells the boy. “You’re better than that.”
Somehow, the words get through all the yelling and anger.
The teenager puts the rock down.
There will not be blood-at least not now.
Miss Diane is drained and depressed after the teens have scattered before the police arrive. “I’m a wreck,” she admits. She slowly ascends the stairs of her two-flat. She needs to get some rest. Tomorrow the teenagers will be back-if they survive the night.
Miss Diane will be waiting for them, as she always is, with her heart and front door open, doing whatever she can to get the kids off the block.
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dterry@tribune.com
See also related story “A TEEN’S BLOODY SAGA / FROM BASKETBALL STARDOM TO TWO-TIME SHOOTING VICTIM: LIFE IN THE VORTEX” on Page 13
