Tyrone Thompson, a fierce advocate of education and nonviolence, was shot and killed on June 5, 2010 in North St. Louis County. But his work and spirit survived.
On Friday, Jan. 14, the Thompson family will unveil the Tyrone Thompson Nonviolent Institute, a mentoring program for hundreds of troubled St. Louis students in partnership with St. Louis Public School District and St. Louis Community College.
“You have to start at a very early age to teach these young people nonviolence,” said Betty Thompson, Tyrone’s mother and a former state legislator.
Because Tyrone was the president of the St. Louis Martin Luther King Non-Violence Support Group for children, his family started just months after his death to build an institute that would carry on his legacy of nonviolence.
The grand opening event will be on Friday, 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at the St. Louis Community College William J. Harrison Education Center at 3140 Cass Ave., where the institute will be based.
The keynote speaker will be the Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr., Freedom Rider and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He now serves as the Distinguished Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
The unveiling is part of the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Commission’s ongoing events.
The institute’s mission is to pair suspended SLPS students with college-student mentors who are trained in nonviolent communication. Typically, suspended students are sent home for two weeks, and the school loses funding, said Tony Thompson, Tyrone’s brother, CEO and founder of Kwame Building Group, and community leader.
Instead, the institute will set up a special room at elementary and middle schools where a mentor – a second-year male student from St. Louis Community College – will connect with suspended students, make sure they keep up with school work and work with them on behavioral issues. Volunteers also will have opportunities to support the program, organizers said.
The institute will train about 200 community college students, particularly those participating in the African-American Male Initiative. They will learn about community service while receiving a small stipend for their work. Parents will be required to attend a one-day workshop before the suspended student can return to class.
Currently many suspended students are unsupervised at home and most fall behind in their class work, Tony said. For some, school suspensions mark the beginning of a life of violence on the streets.
“Hundreds of kids are suspended every week,” Tony said. “These are not bad kids, and they are not dumb. All they want is somebody to care about them.”
The institute is based on a successful program that the Kwame Foundation initiated and funded at Dunbar Elementary School. The foundation funded a behavioral science instructor, who was a tutor and truancy officer rolled into one.
“They didn’t get by without doing their homework – they had a tutor who made them do it,” Tony said.
“A lot of these kids didn’t have fathers in their lives – now they had a father figure. And we saw their test scores start to improve. When we saw that it was working, we thought about how we could get it into all the schools.”
SLPS Superintendent Kelvin Adams said that the suspended students are the ones who normally don’t get the support they need. The program will help increase attendance percentages and provide additional resources to the students, the superintendent said.
“We are thankful to Betty and Anthony Thompson for their idea, vision and passion,” Adams said. “We think this is going to be beneficial for our kids.”
Tyrone believed that a good education system was at the heart of solving crime and unemployment, Tony said.
Tyrone was a state investigator, former City of Pagedale police chief and a former University City police officer. He also worked at Kwame Building Group. At the time of his death, he was developing a mentorship program through his alma mater, University City High School. He also raised his own three children single-handedly.
“As a police officer, he always demonstrated peace and love,” Betty said. “It’s significant that the institute is being unveiled under the Dr. Martin Luther King celebration – his legacy lives on through nonviolence.”
