Three months before his death, actor Michael K. Williams spent the day at a block party in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. In a way, it had a block party feel to it. A DJ moving people, kids riding bikes in the street, oil his drums, smoke rising from his grills.However This wasn’t just a Brownsville summer day. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists persuaded seven politicians who hoped to become New York City’s next mayor and created a forum explaining why they deserved the support of the black community accustomed to being ignored. gave to them.
one by one, Candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block Answered tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there.among those young people belonged to a gangMany had lost friends and family to gun violence, and few believed in the government’s ability to protect them.
When Eric Adams arrived wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We can end gun violence,” Mr. Williams said the words “law and order” at a recent debate. expressed concern about the use of He chose his words carefully and concentrated the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
“Do you think having police on the streets is the way to deal with violence in our community right now?” Williams asked.
“We don’t need police overgrowth. People commit crimes,” he added. “Because the scarcity of resources came from the city.”
Mr. Williams had a deep understanding of violence resulting from lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, a gay stick-up artist with a strict moral code on the TV series,wireHe was the child of the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres in East Flatbush, a predominantly Caribbean region deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life” In The Veer, due out this month, he recalls that block parties were both a vibrant place with a “family-cooking atmosphere” but also a scene of deprivation and pain. . During the so-called crack epidemic, police called the local intersection “the front page.”As a teenager, Mr. Williams watched his friend get shot dead in front of him. saw.
Towards the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s black community safer. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and other organizers will “revitalize the block” throughout Brooklyn and at the Mayors Summit in Brownsville. We’ve reached a climax. Teenage activists participate in conversations about the political process with their neighbors and register to vote. The group deliberately chose a block that the police deem to be the gang’s base, and surprisingly persuaded the police to get out of the way. “It was a way of saying you can take care of yourself,” Williams wrote in his memoir. As he pointed out, none of these events were interrupted by violence.
Last summer, We Build the Block embarked on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a black police captain who was interested in an unconventional approach to reducing crime, they planned to pay a group of young people exposed to gang violence to join a “healing circle.” started to stand. In August, one of Williams’ collaborators, Dana Lachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Williams that one of their funding requests was out “in space.” . Mr. Williams replied.
That was the last time she heard from him. A week later, on Sept. 6, Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in her Williamsburg apartment.
Healing circle started next month. In the first session, the facilitator used his singing bowl to encourage the children to meditate. It didn’t work. As the children ridiculed the activity on horseback, Ms. Rachlin thought of Ms. Williams. If he had been there, she thought, the children would have followed his lead. And she thought about her one of the reasons Mr. Williams was so good at connecting with people. It is his sensitivity to the pain of others. She knew these boys had lost friends too.
Williams’ interest in organizing communities It can be traced to his mother. He describes her in her memoirs as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a daycare center in the building, and built a network of relationships with community leaders. . He loved her and admired her. he was also afraid of her. When he was 11 years old after his father left, his mother forbade him to fight, trying to protect him from violence. Frustrated by his rebellion, she sometimes told him that he was unworthy of God’s love.
In memory of Michael K. Williams
The actor who starred in the pioneering HBO series ‘The Wire’ was found dead in his Brooklyn home on Sept. 6, 2021. he was 54 years old.
He wrote that he was “the softest kid in the project”. After being groped by two older men, he was “fallen into a dark void.” His willingness to relive his most painful memories for roles as an actor, and to venture into that state, was the quality that most clearly defines him as an artist. The scars from the razor burn on his face seemed to speak to a deeper wound. “We are all broken,” he says in the book. “And people know it’s amazing to see the inside so much visible.”
He was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. Fans of ‘The Wire’ may have thought the man playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, anger at the war on drugs, but the fifth and final season has aired. At the time, he still knew “near zero” about politics. That started to change when I declared myself a character.
Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested twice in six months for DUI charges. Since he was a teenager, he has struggled with addictions to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder. What started as a duty became a passion. While Barack Obama’s admiration sparked interest in the political forces influencing his community, a visit to the school inspired him to the possibility of “redeeming” himself by working with young people. But it will be years before this becomes a guiding insight in his life.
In 2016, he starred in the HBO drama The Night of about the moral corruption of New York’s criminal justice system. Playing a charismatic ex-boxer imprisoned on Rikers Island, he often thought of his nephew Dominique Dupont, who was convicted of second-degree murder at the age of 19. DuPont, who served 25 years of his life sentence, began a mentoring program and was pardoned by his governor, Andrew Cuomo, in 2017.
“The Night Of” tells a less redeeming story, and the performance took Mr. Williams into a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters people loved the most.” After a period of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set of an actual prison in upstate New York. As his memoir revealed, it was so bad that filming had to be shut down for a day.
While promoting the series, Mr. Williams found himself wanting to learn more about the mass incarceration of neighborhood youth like him. And I decided to produce a documentary “Raised in the System” that captures neglect. Rachlin, who met him while finishing the film, helped organize a series of screenings for police officers, corrections officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted those in power to bring compassion and empathy to the young people, their families and communities in front of them,” she said.
Ms. Rachlin was, in some ways, an unlikely ally. She grew up in her island home of conservative Staten. During her teenage years, she campaigned for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, when she worked as a crime victim advocate in a Staten Island court, she first found herself spending time around young people who had been arrested and imprisoned. rice field. It was an eye opener for her. She soon began working with troubled youth and eventually started a non-profit organization.
As Mr. Williams became more and more prominent as an advocate for criminal justice reform, Mr. Rachlin continued to work closely with Mr. Williams, connecting him with nonprofits in the field and teaching him about the inner workings of government. Mr. Williams used his fame to draw attention to his work and acted as “Uncle Mike”, a personal mentor to the organization’s children. played the role of
Then, in the summer of 2020, as protests against police violence surged in New York and elsewhere, Williams spoke with Rachlin about ways to strengthen the role black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public. started. security policy. With radio host Shani Culture and her five high school students from Brooklyn, she launched We Build the Block, a community organizing campaign.
Royal Highness Allah, one of the young people who helped kick off the initiative, recalled how Williams was always pragmatic when it came to block activation. “He was outside at every event,” he said. Safer
“He was unique,” said Eric Gonzalez, a reform-minded district attorney in Brooklyn. “Many of his celebrities have taken to social media or donated to causes, but he has kept it quiet.”
In 2019, Mr. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams went to Darby St. Fort, a police captain who works with them in a healing circle. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “Despite his success so far, he didn’t feel like he deserved it,” he said. “I’ve felt the same way at times.” “He saw the pain of those who caused pain,” said Captain St. Fort. Arresting them doesn’t change their view. So the trio devised the expected strategy.
This is how the Healing Circle was born. Despite the skepticism within the Metropolitan Police Department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even joined the Circle. Although he didn’t think his children would trust him, he admitted that he had made mistakes in his life and was open with them. Slowly, he said, teens were opening up, too. “Often they felt that they had done so much damage to their lives that they didn’t deserve help,” said Capt. St. Fort. “We had to try it. I said to them, ‘You deserve it.'”
Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, are now volunteering as community organizers. One recent afternoon they met in the basement of the Public Library with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Lachlin, and representatives from the Office of Public Defenders, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups. A back-to-school event for the younger kids in the neighborhood. Both had stable jobs through the program and neither had been arrested since the session began.
They had never met Mr. Williams, but Mr. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the scarred man they had seen on television. “That’s something I absolutely love to do,” Garrett said. He wanted his children to know something. “I am here and they are loved.”