At the Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club “Maleness to Manhood” workshop this Saturday, one of the club’s youth, Jahkem Webber, was asked by his mentor what he was best at doing. Jahkem, who is moving into the 6th grade in the St. Louis Public Schools, responded, “Coming up with new ideas out of the clear blue.”
Once he had recovered from the shock of this startling response, the mentor asked for an example of Jahkem’s new ideas. The 11-year-old boy then described his new idea of a 5th Grade Involvement Group, where he organized other youth his age to provide positive leadership and examples for younger children in their school. Jahkem then pointed out that he had now left the 5th grade and was moving onto a new school, so he had another new idea: to meet with the principal of the school he is leaving in order to come up with what adults would call a “succession plan” so that his brainchild, the 5th Grade Involvement Group, continues after its mastermind moves on.
Anyone who commits time to young African Americans in St. Louis will have moments such as this with youth like Jahkem, when it seems anything is possible and the future is nothing but bright. It’s for dreamers like Jahkem, who come up with “new ideas out of the clear blue” and work to make their ideas a reality, that many of us struggle to improve the public schools, the only institution mandated to teach all of our children, regardless of their parents’ circumstances. And it is in the hope that we can protect and nurture such precious youth so that they survive long enough to have a future that many individuals and agencies, such as Mathews-Dickey, strive to steer our youth away from the street culture of drugs and guns.
“I know you are leaders,” ESPN radio personality Randy Karraker said to the “Maleness to Manhood” youth from his emcee podium on Saturday. “So I need you to go back and tell the other kids you know: There is nothing good to come from using a firearm to solve a conflict.” Karraker was not speaking “out of the clear blue” when his thoughts turned to gun violence during a peaceful, positive mentoring event. He said he was disturbed by the fact that the previous week 17 people had been shot on the streets of St. Louis in one single night. “One shooting in our city is unacceptable,” Karraker said, “but to have 17 alone in one night …” He did not finish the thought; perhaps it’s too unthinkable to finish that thought.
To sit with someone like Jahkem Webber, it’s possible to forget, for a moment, the crises in the city and the world around us. Talking to such a person, drugs and guns are literally the last things that would come to mind. One thinks, instead, of “new ideas out of the clear blue” and the work and dedication it takes to make new ideas into a concrete reality that outlives our personal efforts to sustain them. In this great metropolitan region with its resourceful people and our collective, vast, mostly unrealized potential, we are humbled by this young person and his belief in the value of “new ideas out of the clear blue.” We think of his 5th Grade Involvement Group and the youth whom he and his principal will anoint to lead it now that Jahkem is gone. We think of what we might call, after Jahkem, our collective “St. Louis Involvement Group” and our responsibility to provide positive leadership and examples to those coming behind us.
We consider ourselves challenged by this bright-eyed youth to think of “new ideas out of the clear blue” to collectively improve our condition. Everyone in this metropolitan region is interconnected, and our response to our challenges must be collective, because the challenges we fail to address will have increasingly negative consequences for our entire region.
