wo of Khalil Bridges’s high school classmates were dead, one stabbed repeatedly inside a classroom, and here he was, worried about whether he could get an ID in time to visit the White House.
The woman at the information desk of the Motor Vehicle Administration Express office, a white-walled room with blue-cushioned chairs, had already said no. The name on his birth certificate didn’t match the one on his Social Security card. There was nothing she could do for him.
He took a number and waited.
At least, he would say later, he wasn’t alone. Next to him sat Hallie Atwater, the social worker who doled out snacks and support to teenagers hungry for both at his struggling public school in West Baltimore, a mile from the epicenter of the riots that followed Freddie Gray’s death last year.
For most people, a last-minute invitation to the White House would come as a thrill. For Khalil, 18, a soft-spoken senior at Renaissance Academy, it meant a stress-filled scramble during the final week of February. He had just days to get an ID, and a suit, belt and train ticket that would take him into the nation’s capital. And if he was being honest, he also needed a haircut. He couldn’t walk into the most important address in the country with a “cruddy,” a hairstyle named for how it looks.
Problem was he had no money, no parents at home and almost no perspective beyond Baltimore’s boarded-up buildings. The White House invitation felt so distant from the concrete stoops where he grew up and once dealt drugs that when the information desk woman at the MVA told him he couldn’t get an ID, his first instinct was to shrug and accept her word as indisputable.
But Atwater demanded to speak to a clerk, then a manager and then another manager. Even before a year of record violence in their city and in their school, a team of adults at Renaissance had seen too many of Baltimore’s black boys derailed or destroyed by the mayhem around them. If they could help it, Khalil would not be one of them. In him, they saw promise, a young man who could graduate in June and go on to find success. But they also knew what they were up against: hallways filled with students so neglected and angry that a bumped shoulder could lead to a fight or worse, and a community still so divided by the riots that some days it seemed — forget all, black or blue — no lives mattered.
They could offer hope and help, but only Khalil could answer the most crucial question: Could he pull himself together in a city that was tearing itself apart?
A delivery truck dropped off the ID the next day, and, on Feb. 29, Khalil carried the card with him into the home of the nation’s most successful black man. There, in a slim-cut suit bought for him by his school mentor, Khalil spoke on a panel about his life and shook hands with men in ties. He didn’t meet President Obama but thought he caught a glimpse of him through a West Wing window. The teenager left Washington encouraged about his future, with a pocket full of business cards and promises.
Only when the day was done, and he was back home in Baltimore, would he learn that violence had claimed a third classmate.
So much blood’
“You should stand up for this one,” John Comer tells Khalil.
They are in a classroom-turned-bare-bones-studio at the school on a spring afternoon, heads bopping to music flowing from a used speaker that Comer, a former rapper and an activist with Communities United, brought in after the first student died. He figured that boys who didn’t want to talk about how they felt would rap about it. Khalil stands in front of a dozen teens who slouch at desks and show their solidarity through their sudden silence.
Kids surrounded by violence
A survey of 209 students who attend two West Baltimore schools that share a building — Renaissance Academy High School and Booker T. Washington Middle School for the Arts — reveals a generation with a stark familiarity with violence. The survey was conducted by Promise Heights, a support program run through the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
41%
reported knowing someone younger than 19 who was a victim of violence.
23%
reported being a victim of violence.
40%
reported knowing someone who has a gun.
Then faster: “Man, it’s crazy how my brothers end up dyin’ over nothing. People quick to blow your brains when you’re shinin’ though you’re runnin.’ ”
He writes when he’s irate or sad, feelings that creep up on him often, sending him into an uncommunicative, walled-off state. Otherwise, his demeanor is set in neutral, revving up only when he talks about basketball or his mother. Then, a smile slips across his face, pushing his sharp cheekbones out before quickly retreating.
Khalil raps about what he knows, and he knows a lot about loss. There is loss by choice: a father who didn’t enter his life until he was a teenager and then stepped back out. And there is loss by circumstance: Four friends from his old neighborhood have died from gun violence, one shot in front of him. He also knew all three students who went to Renaissance, located next to the public housing project that served as the setting for “The Wire,” before they were killed.
[He wanted to be an architect, but he didn’t get to finish high school.]
One of Jolley’s best friends, who raps that day alongside Khalil, is still haunted by the blood. “So much blood,” says the 17-year-old junior.
“When I come into this building, that’s the first thing I think about,” Khalil says.
It’s hard not to. Jolley is gone and yet everywhere. His name is scribbled on walls, heating vents, a basketball backboard in the gym. He has become a motivational mantra for seniors, who wear Graduate for Jolley T-shirts. Wax from a candlelight vigil in his honor still streaks the sidewalk outside the school months later, and weather-worn stuffed animal tributes hang limply from a pole in front of the building.
Even the school’s principal, Nikkia Rowe, keeps his unframed picture on a shelf behind her desk.
“He’s a constant reminder of why I can’t quit,” she says, glancing back one morning. “This is the toughest work I’ve done in my life. He’s a reminder of why we have to fight.”
For nearly a month, Jolley held on in the hospital. Then on a Sunday night right before Christmas, Rowe received a call saying he was gone. She sent a text to staff members and “braced.”
Last year was the deadliest in Baltimore in more than two decades, as the city grappled with the fallout of 25-year-old Gray’s death from injuries he suffered in police custody. Long after the fires and looting had ended, crime in Baltimore continued to soar. In total, 344 homicides were recorded. Most of the victims were black males, not unlike those who walk the burgundy and yellow halls of Renaissance.
Here, where the number of students fluctuated from 27o to 326, 100 percent are African American, most live with families earning less than $15,000 a year, and two-thirds are male. Many come from homes headed by single mothers, or they are being raised by grandmothers, aunts or other relatives. Some have arrest records. A few enroll not knowing the alphabet. On the last standardized English test, two-thirds of the school’s students received the lowest possible score — a 1 out of 5.
As soon as she arrived at Renaissance nearly three years ago, Rowe recognized the need to offer teens more than just an education. “These kids don’t look like kids,” she told her staff at the time.
“I was like, this kid!” she recalls. “What’s up with this kid?”
Khalil doesn’t remember the encounter but says he was a different person then. It’s now hard to see that defiant child in his demeanor. He hugs Rowe when he sees her.
If Jolley’s name captures what people remember him for most — always joking, always laughing — then Khalil’s last name is also telling. Bridges. A means of crossing an otherwise impassable barrier.
Just a year earlier, the teenager tensed at the touch of adults, and he peddled marijuana to make money no one else was giving him.
“Growing up, I told myself I wouldn’t be the person on the corner,” he says. “Long story short, I felt I didn’t have a choice.” The language of those sales still slips easily off his tongue: 3.5 grams is “half a baby,” and if you have two of those, it’s a “Michael Vick,” whose jersey number was 7.
Now, instead of selling weed, Khalil takes as many shifts as he can at McDonald’s. He has also become one of Renaissance’s most vocal advocates. When there was talk of shuttering the school late last year, he submitted an op-ed to The Baltimore Sun. In it, he described how the staff at Renaissance helped him with things beyond their walls, “like washing my clothes, transportation and applying to jobs.”
“I’m changing to make a difference because others’ expectations are for me to fail,” he wrote. “Renaissance keeps me so busy that I don’t have time to screw up my life anymore. I’m happy that I found Renaissance, and I know that I will be able to graduate this year and go on to college.”
He repeated the same words in March in front of Maryland lawmakers at a House Ways and Means Committee meeting in Annapolis. Afterward the chairwoman, Del. Sheila Hixson, a Democrat from affluent Montgomery County, remarked that she wouldn’t be surprised if one day he became a politician.
But what he didn’t say at the time, what he never says unless pressed, is that despite prodding from school officials he hadn’t applied to any four-year colleges and that once he graduates — if he graduates — he doesn’t know how he’ll pay for even community college.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/lo...op-table-main_khalil-610a-s7_1:homepage/story
The woman at the information desk of the Motor Vehicle Administration Express office, a white-walled room with blue-cushioned chairs, had already said no. The name on his birth certificate didn’t match the one on his Social Security card. There was nothing she could do for him.
He took a number and waited.
At least, he would say later, he wasn’t alone. Next to him sat Hallie Atwater, the social worker who doled out snacks and support to teenagers hungry for both at his struggling public school in West Baltimore, a mile from the epicenter of the riots that followed Freddie Gray’s death last year.
For most people, a last-minute invitation to the White House would come as a thrill. For Khalil, 18, a soft-spoken senior at Renaissance Academy, it meant a stress-filled scramble during the final week of February. He had just days to get an ID, and a suit, belt and train ticket that would take him into the nation’s capital. And if he was being honest, he also needed a haircut. He couldn’t walk into the most important address in the country with a “cruddy,” a hairstyle named for how it looks.
Problem was he had no money, no parents at home and almost no perspective beyond Baltimore’s boarded-up buildings. The White House invitation felt so distant from the concrete stoops where he grew up and once dealt drugs that when the information desk woman at the MVA told him he couldn’t get an ID, his first instinct was to shrug and accept her word as indisputable.
But Atwater demanded to speak to a clerk, then a manager and then another manager. Even before a year of record violence in their city and in their school, a team of adults at Renaissance had seen too many of Baltimore’s black boys derailed or destroyed by the mayhem around them. If they could help it, Khalil would not be one of them. In him, they saw promise, a young man who could graduate in June and go on to find success. But they also knew what they were up against: hallways filled with students so neglected and angry that a bumped shoulder could lead to a fight or worse, and a community still so divided by the riots that some days it seemed — forget all, black or blue — no lives mattered.
They could offer hope and help, but only Khalil could answer the most crucial question: Could he pull himself together in a city that was tearing itself apart?
A delivery truck dropped off the ID the next day, and, on Feb. 29, Khalil carried the card with him into the home of the nation’s most successful black man. There, in a slim-cut suit bought for him by his school mentor, Khalil spoke on a panel about his life and shook hands with men in ties. He didn’t meet President Obama but thought he caught a glimpse of him through a West Wing window. The teenager left Washington encouraged about his future, with a pocket full of business cards and promises.
Only when the day was done, and he was back home in Baltimore, would he learn that violence had claimed a third classmate.
So much blood’
“You should stand up for this one,” John Comer tells Khalil.
They are in a classroom-turned-bare-bones-studio at the school on a spring afternoon, heads bopping to music flowing from a used speaker that Comer, a former rapper and an activist with Communities United, brought in after the first student died. He figured that boys who didn’t want to talk about how they felt would rap about it. Khalil stands in front of a dozen teens who slouch at desks and show their solidarity through their sudden silence.
Kids surrounded by violence
A survey of 209 students who attend two West Baltimore schools that share a building — Renaissance Academy High School and Booker T. Washington Middle School for the Arts — reveals a generation with a stark familiarity with violence. The survey was conducted by Promise Heights, a support program run through the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
41%
reported knowing someone younger than 19 who was a victim of violence.
23%
reported being a victim of violence.
40%
reported knowing someone who has a gun.
Then faster: “Man, it’s crazy how my brothers end up dyin’ over nothing. People quick to blow your brains when you’re shinin’ though you’re runnin.’ ”
He writes when he’s irate or sad, feelings that creep up on him often, sending him into an uncommunicative, walled-off state. Otherwise, his demeanor is set in neutral, revving up only when he talks about basketball or his mother. Then, a smile slips across his face, pushing his sharp cheekbones out before quickly retreating.
Khalil raps about what he knows, and he knows a lot about loss. There is loss by choice: a father who didn’t enter his life until he was a teenager and then stepped back out. And there is loss by circumstance: Four friends from his old neighborhood have died from gun violence, one shot in front of him. He also knew all three students who went to Renaissance, located next to the public housing project that served as the setting for “The Wire,” before they were killed.
“He” is Ananias Jolley, a 17-year-old who dreamed of becoming an architect and whom Khalil describes as the Kevin Hart of their school, always making people laugh. Surveillance video from the November day Jolley was stabbed shows Donte Crawford, the teenager later charged as an adult, pacing outside a third-floor biology class, “waiting for staff members and teachers to leave the area” before entering the room, according to the police report. In the next images, Crawford runs out, followed seconds later by Jolley, who collapses in front of students and staff members. The knife had pierced his heart.
[He wanted to be an architect, but he didn’t get to finish high school.]
One of Jolley’s best friends, who raps that day alongside Khalil, is still haunted by the blood. “So much blood,” says the 17-year-old junior.
“When I come into this building, that’s the first thing I think about,” Khalil says.
It’s hard not to. Jolley is gone and yet everywhere. His name is scribbled on walls, heating vents, a basketball backboard in the gym. He has become a motivational mantra for seniors, who wear Graduate for Jolley T-shirts. Wax from a candlelight vigil in his honor still streaks the sidewalk outside the school months later, and weather-worn stuffed animal tributes hang limply from a pole in front of the building.
Even the school’s principal, Nikkia Rowe, keeps his unframed picture on a shelf behind her desk.
“He’s a constant reminder of why I can’t quit,” she says, glancing back one morning. “This is the toughest work I’ve done in my life. He’s a reminder of why we have to fight.”
For nearly a month, Jolley held on in the hospital. Then on a Sunday night right before Christmas, Rowe received a call saying he was gone. She sent a text to staff members and “braced.”
Last year was the deadliest in Baltimore in more than two decades, as the city grappled with the fallout of 25-year-old Gray’s death from injuries he suffered in police custody. Long after the fires and looting had ended, crime in Baltimore continued to soar. In total, 344 homicides were recorded. Most of the victims were black males, not unlike those who walk the burgundy and yellow halls of Renaissance.
Here, where the number of students fluctuated from 27o to 326, 100 percent are African American, most live with families earning less than $15,000 a year, and two-thirds are male. Many come from homes headed by single mothers, or they are being raised by grandmothers, aunts or other relatives. Some have arrest records. A few enroll not knowing the alphabet. On the last standardized English test, two-thirds of the school’s students received the lowest possible score — a 1 out of 5.
As soon as she arrived at Renaissance nearly three years ago, Rowe recognized the need to offer teens more than just an education. “These kids don’t look like kids,” she told her staff at the time.
The first time Rowe met Khalil, she was just weeks into the job and stopped the sophomore in the hallway to tell him to remove his headphones. He looked her in the eye, she recalls, and then purposely ran his foot over her open-toed, cream-colored Isaac Mizrahi shoes, tearing a nail and leaving her shoes bloodied and unwearable.
“I was like, this kid!” she recalls. “What’s up with this kid?”
Khalil doesn’t remember the encounter but says he was a different person then. It’s now hard to see that defiant child in his demeanor. He hugs Rowe when he sees her.
If Jolley’s name captures what people remember him for most — always joking, always laughing — then Khalil’s last name is also telling. Bridges. A means of crossing an otherwise impassable barrier.
Just a year earlier, the teenager tensed at the touch of adults, and he peddled marijuana to make money no one else was giving him.
“Growing up, I told myself I wouldn’t be the person on the corner,” he says. “Long story short, I felt I didn’t have a choice.” The language of those sales still slips easily off his tongue: 3.5 grams is “half a baby,” and if you have two of those, it’s a “Michael Vick,” whose jersey number was 7.
Now, instead of selling weed, Khalil takes as many shifts as he can at McDonald’s. He has also become one of Renaissance’s most vocal advocates. When there was talk of shuttering the school late last year, he submitted an op-ed to The Baltimore Sun. In it, he described how the staff at Renaissance helped him with things beyond their walls, “like washing my clothes, transportation and applying to jobs.”
“I’m changing to make a difference because others’ expectations are for me to fail,” he wrote. “Renaissance keeps me so busy that I don’t have time to screw up my life anymore. I’m happy that I found Renaissance, and I know that I will be able to graduate this year and go on to college.”
He repeated the same words in March in front of Maryland lawmakers at a House Ways and Means Committee meeting in Annapolis. Afterward the chairwoman, Del. Sheila Hixson, a Democrat from affluent Montgomery County, remarked that she wouldn’t be surprised if one day he became a politician.
But what he didn’t say at the time, what he never says unless pressed, is that despite prodding from school officials he hadn’t applied to any four-year colleges and that once he graduates — if he graduates — he doesn’t know how he’ll pay for even community college.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/lo...op-table-main_khalil-610a-s7_1:homepage/story
