This post is precipitated by the news yesterday that a young man was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Derrion Albert.

For those of us who live in Chicago, particularly those who work with youth, September 24th 2009 is a day that we won’t soon forget.  16-year old Derrion Albert was killed and the national media descended upon our city like vultures.

The death of a young black male in Chicago is sad on its face but it would have garnered little attention beyond that of his friends and family if his death had not been captured on a cell phone video.  The video showed Albert’s fatal beating as he walked into a melee, allegedly two gangs fighting, on a Chicago street.  The video captured a group of young people striking him with boards and kicking him as he lay on a sidewalk.

When the national media descended on Chicago, we were subjected to the following type of reporting….  Joe Johns of CNN earnestly assuring the audience that Derrion was “not a gang-banger.” Presumably, this was meant as a signal to viewers that Derrion was deserving of our consideration and of our compassion.

I sat in a peacemaking circle with a young woman who I will call Shania in early October 2009. She was struggling to make sense of the senseless. Her animating question was “Why?” “Why Did Derrion Die?” Shania said that one of her closest friends had known Derrion and that her friend was devastated by his loss. Her friend wanted revenge; she was demanding that the young men who were accused of killing Derrion Albert be given the death penalty for their actions. And yet, Shania was conflicted. She wanted to comfort her friend who was obviously hurting from the loss of someone dear while not losing track of the humanity of those young men who had been accused of killing Derrion. On that October day, those of us in the circle who were adults struggled to provide any sort of adequate answer to Shania’s troubling and important question of “Why Did Derrion Die?”

Yesterday, the first of the young men being tried for Derrion’s killing was convicted:

His attorney painted him as a foolish schoolboy who stumbled upon a fight he had nothing to do with as he walked home from school.

But a jury took little more than half-an-hour to reject that argument and find the 15-year-old guilty of the first-degree murder of Fenger High School honors student Derrion Albert.

Caught in a notorious cell-phone video that showed him punching Albert, 16, in the face, the teen collapsed into his chair and slammed it into the wall as the guilty verdict was announced at the Cook County Juvenile Court Wednesday.

As Albert’s mother dabbed her eyes and slowly shook her head, the convicted teen’s aunt ran from the courtroom screaming, “Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord.’’

The dramatic end to the two-day trial came more than a year after the cell phone video of the fatal Sept. 24, 2009 melee went viral and created shockwaves around the world.

During the trial, the boy’s attorney Richard Kloak, told jurors that his client was just 14 when Albert was killed in the 300 block of West 111th St.

Think about this… The trial took 2 days and a verdict was returned in 30 minutes. In that time, a fifteen year old, who was tried as an adult for a crime he committed at 14 years old, will be facing a sentence of 20 years to life in prison.

Here is what his lawyer is quoted as saying about the verdict:

“He’s only 15 years old,” Kloak said. “He’s got his whole life ahead of him, and he’s got to learn to deal with adversity.”

I don’t even know what to make of this sentence and I am not going to try to parse it. Suffice it to say that another young black man is slated to be sacrificed to the always ravenous prison industrial complex. It is a tragedy for the Albert family that their son was killed and it is a tragedy for this 15 year old’s family that they too have essentially lost theirs.

In the days following that circle with Shania, I struggled to think about how I could contribute to helping to foster spaces where youth and adults could grapple with some of the answers to the question of Why Derrion Albert died. I knew that it would be a matter of a couple of months before the national media left our city and that it was likely that Derrion’s memory would fade. I decided that a curriculum that would help adults to talk with young people about the root causes of violence might be a valuable and lasting contribution. Thus the Something is Wrong: Exploring the Roots of Violence Curriculum Guide was born. It was a collaborative effort and has since been used across the country by educators, youth workers, and others to help “young people channel their righteous rage” towards the actual sources of their oppression.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is organized in a conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. — Frederick Douglass.

The Frederick Douglass quote cited above speaks to the reality that violence is the glue that holds oppressions in place. It is impossible to understand violence without deeply probing and analyzing oppression and how it works. Violence is a real problem for many young people, though not always or even usually in the form of the sensational incidents that tend to dominate the headlines and create pressure for solutions. Youth encounter violence in every arena of their daily lives — at home, at school, through the media, or on the streets of their neighborhoods. Preventing violence before it happens means ensuring that young people have, at minimum, sound education, job opportunities, outlets for recreation, safe neighborhoods, supportive adults in their lives, protection from guns, good nutrition, access to affordable healthcare and stable housing.

In the Spring of this year, I returned to Fenger high school. Derrion’s school. The school that many of the young people who participated in that melee in September 2009 also attended. This time, I came as part of a celebration of peace with dozens of other people to run peacemaking circles and unveil a mural that was created by youth and adults together. As I kept a circle that included two public defenders, a Fenger teacher, and a number of students, I marveled at our capacity as human beings to overcome tragedy and to continue to hope in spite of the odds against us. The young people in that circle spoke about love for their neighborhood and their school and for each other. We celebrated our resiliency, The young people wanted it to be known that they had aspirations for brighter futures for themselves and their families. They did not want to be defined by the incident that had branded them and their peers as out of control savages. It was a good day. One of still many more to come…

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You can listen to Carolyn Elaine who is an amazing Chicago mosaic artist and Fenger high school graduate speak about why she came back to the school to lead a collective mural project. You can also see that way that peacemaking circles were integrated into the program.

You can see the Fenger Mural as it took shape here: