About Joseph Marshall, Jr.

As Joe Marshall was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, he often heard his grandmother say, “The more you know, the more you owe.” He wasn’t sure what she meant.

But then he grew up and looked back at his life. Unlike many of his friends and acquaintances, he was raised in a strong, intact family. During the day his father dug ditches for a local utility company; at night his mother went to her job as a nurse. As Joe and his siblings grew, one parent was always there to offer support and discipline. Working together, the Marshalls managed to send all nine of their children to college.

Joe realized what an extraordinary gift his parents had given him. He accepted the idea that he owed it to his family to pass on that gift. He worked for years as a middle-school teacher, doing what he could to offer his students the kind of support he had received at home. But the problem was, he discovered, “At school, the bell always rings. But there’s no bell on the street.”

In order to touch more lives more effectively, Joe and a colleague, Jack Jacqua, founded the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco in 1987. Omega Boys Club is an organization aimed at teaching young people how to stay alive and free from violence while stressing academic achievement. Today Omega has seen more than 8,000 members graduate from high school or earn their GED, while more than 130 have graduated

from college with the club’s financial help. Joe Marshall and his organization have received an Oprah “Use Your Life” award and have been honored at the White House, given an Essence award, and profiled on network news programs. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio program Street Soldiers.

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Joseph Marshall, Jr. Speaks

If I had the chance to sit down with you and talk face to face, here are a few of the things I’d like to say.

I’d start out by saying it is really tough to be a kid today. I think it is especially tough to be a young Black male. There is so much stuff coming at you from different directions, and for many of you, 90 percent of that stuff is negative. All that stuff is programming you to fail. Let me say that again—you are being programmed to fail.

I run a club for boys called the Omega Boys Club, and I have a radio show called Street Soldiers. I meet young men who have just about everything in their lives steering them in the wrong direction. The streets are coming at them from every conceivable angle. They’re being guided down the wrong path by their friends, their neighborhoods, their homes—even the music they listen to.

When I first meet a young man, he thinks I’m crazy. He’s grown to be 15 (or 17 or 19 or whatever) believing that normal is abnormal and vice versa. He thinks it’s normal to die at an early age. He thinks it’s normal to go to jail. It’s normal not to do well in school. It’s normal not to graduate. It’s normal to go to funerals for teenagers. It’s normal not to have a father. It’s normal to have a mother on drugs.

I have to tell him, “No, that’s not normal. That is all abnormal.” At first he doesn’t believe me. Many young men—and maybe this applies to you—are so used to those conditions that they accept them. They accept the idea that they won’t see 40. They accept the idea that prison and jail are in their future, the way other people accept the idea that they’ll get their wisdom teeth.

It’s always been hard to be a Black man in America. But it’s harder now; oh yes, it’s harder now. I call where we are now the “A.C. Era.” A.C. means “After Crack.” Crack cocaine has changed everything.

There has always been a string of significant dates in Black American history. For instance, there’s 1619, when the first African slaves arrived on these shores. There’s the slavery era, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil rights movement, and the Black power movement. Now, add 1980 to that list. That is about when crack cocaine entered the Black community. Crack cocaine, my God—it did something even slavery couldn’t do. It did what the Ku Klux Klan couldn’t do. And that is, it stopped the African American woman from mothering her children. Even in slavery times, mothers would take in other people’s kids and care for them. Papa may have been a rolling stone, but Momma and Grandma were always there. They were the rocks of Gibraltar. They were the glue.

But crack put the men in jail and destroyed the mothers. It set the African American community back 100 years. Throughout our history in America, the one stable factor that allowed us Blacks to fight against whatever forces oppressed us was the family. Crack has destroyed that family structure. And our communities, neighborhoods, and larger society can only be as good as the families.

So that’s where the Omega Boys Club and the Street Soldiers radio show come in. We are much less programs than we are a family. We step into the gap, trying to provide the structure that a healthy, functioning family would provide.

So maybe you’re thinking, “Well, great, but Omega Boys Club is in San Francisco. What good can that do me?” I really wish I could be in your town and hear your story and talk to you personally. But I truly believe that my years of experience can give you some tools to help yourself. Let me tell you a little more about how I see young men who are walking on a self- destructive path and how I try to intercede with them. You can internalize what you read here and apply it to your own life. You can even spread it to those around you.

If you’re caught up in the “abnormal as normal” mindset, you may be used to people seeing you as a bad kid, an evil kid, a kid who just doesn’t care. You may even feel some pressure to live up to those labels. I don’t see you that way, because I think we’re dealing with a health problem here. Yeah, a health problem. You’ve been infected—infected with a faulty mindset. That doesn’t make you bad. I’m fighting the flu right now myself. Does that make me bad? No! I just got infected and got sick. But in too many cases we say to infected kids, “You’re bad, you’re worthless, go to jail.” And what happens when they go to jail? They meet other infected people, and they get worse. They never get treated for what ails them, so they just do the same things over and over. We can build all the prisons we want, but that won’t change anything. Prisons are not the hospitals for the sickness we’re dealing with.

How do kids get infected in the first place? They get infected through bad advice, bad information, bad examples. The sneaky thing is that this bad advice doesn’t look bad. In fact, it looks like what everybody wants— survival skills. It usually comes from some older person in the hood who seems to know the score. He might say to you, “I’m gonna help you. It’s rough out here; you gotta know how to survive.” Well, any animal wants to survive, right? So you hear that word and it’s like, BING, yeah, tell me. Then you hear, “You gotta handle your business. Don’t be no punk. Get your respect. Get your money on. Don’t let nobody disrespect you. You gotta carry a gun. You gotta sell dope.”

Usually there’s some tiny germ of truth at the center—like “Stand up for yourself.” OK, that can be good advice. But the other stuff attached to it is completely bullshit. It’s packaged as survival skills, but it’s nothing of the kind. That kind of advice won’t help you survive; it’ll only help you die. Somebody looking at it from the outside can see it’s crazy, deadly stuff, but if you’re surrounded by that talk 24/7 . . .

I’ll give you an example. I say to the young men at the club, “What’s 2 + 2?” They say, “4.” I say, “No it’s not. It’s 5.” They laugh. But I say, “What if your mother told you it was 5? What if all the OG’s in the street said it was 5? What if they’d been telling you it was 5 as long as you could remember? You’d believe them, right?” It’s the same principle. You’ve been told that if you do these things, you’ll come out on top, you will survive. But look around you. Are the people who are living by those rules surviving? Are they living well? You can see they aren’t. They’re the same ones whose funerals you’re going to. They’re filling up prison cells. And yet you hang on to the idea that 2 + 2 is 5. Maybe the people who told you that really believed it. You can have well-intentioned people giving you bad information. But their good intentions don’t change the fact that it’s bad information.

So if I were meeting you today, and I saw that you had been programmed for death and incarceration, I would do what I could to pull that programming out of you. I’d try to help you unlearn the abnormal, risk-taking behaviors that you may believe are normal.

If you’ve learned that carrying a gun is normal, that using language that provokes violence is normal, that putting material values over people is normal, that seeing women in a negative light is normal, that using and selling drugs is normal—I’d tell you, “No, son. Those are not normal. Let me pull those behaviors out of you.”

And then what?

I’d give you something better to put in those behaviors’ place. I’d say, “Let me give you some rules to live by that will decrease the chance of your becoming a perpetrator or a victim of violence. These rules will steer you back onto the right track.” I’d tell you the truth—I have never lost a young person who genuinely lives by these rules.

Time would be short. So I’d give you only two rules. The first and most essential rule is something you can take and use right now.

A friend will never lead you into danger.

And here’s an important corollary to that rule: A gang member cannot be your friend.

I can hear you telling me, like a thousand young men have told me before, “What are you talking about? He’s my homie! He’s got my back! I can talk to him!”

I say no. If you think that a gang member is your friend, it is because you don’t understand what friendship is.

Think about it. Say you’re in a gang with your “friends.” If you decide you want to leave the gang, what do they say to you? They say, “I’ll kill you.”

These are your friends and they’re going to kill you?

It’s a very simple test. A true friend will never put you in danger.

Danger should be your filter for everything and everybody.

I have a little exercise I’d like you to do. Write down the names of everybody you call your friends, your family, your loved ones. Then go through that list and beside every name, write “S” for Safe or “D” for Dangerous.

I wish I could see your list. If it’s like a lot of lists I look at, I’d see maybe 20 names. Maybe two of those names are marked “S” and 18 are marked “D.”

And still, the kids who make those lists try to tell me, “Bullets don’t have no names on them,” or “Anyone can be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” or “It can happen to anyone.” I’m telling you, that is bull. YOU’RE AROUND 18 DANGEROUS PEOPLE! That is why something bad is going to happen to you. Your danger quotient is 90 percent! It’s not the neighborhood you live in—it’s the PEOPLE you’re associating with!

A friend will never lead you into danger. Memorize that. Live by it. Your chances of survival have just increased enormously.

OK, here’s a second rule I want to leave with you today.

Change begins from within.

Remember I was talking before about having the flu? I’ve been sick for three weeks. But I’m getting better. You know why? I went to my doctor. He gave me a prescription for medication. He told me some things to do to take care of myself. But that’s all he can do. He’s didn’t go with me to the pharmacy to pick up the medicine. He doesn’t come to my house at 10 p.m. to remind me to take that pill.

You see what I’m saying? The prescription absolutely works. But it’s only good if I take it. Nobody else can do that for me.

But when a young man with his life ahead of him takes the prescription—takes the responsibility for changing his life from within—damn, there’s no stopping him.

Let me tell you real quickly about one kid. His name is Andre, and I first met him in the streets of Oakland when he was 17. He’d had a hard time when he was younger. He was picked on because he was a short guy and he was smart and a good student. One day a friend of his father’s told him, “Don’t let them punk you. You gotta fight.” So he went to school and went nuts on the guys who were hassling him. He fought them. And suddenly instead of being picked on, he was getting all these props. It was, “Hey lil’ cousin. You need anything?”

So soon he was fighting every day, skipping school, doing all this stuff because along with the germ of truth about standing up for himself, he had bought the whole package. And a few years later there he was on the street, selling drugs and gangbanging and headed for prison and an early death.

When I came along and started telling Dre what I knew, and he started coming over to the club, it was such a beautiful thing. It was so much fun reeling that kid in. To make a long story short, he went back for his GED, then college, and he ended up teaching at the school he was kicked out of. He was an assistant principal for ten years. Now he’s back here working with me at the Boys Club. He’s my operations manager, my second in command. He’s married and has two kids—he’s no baby daddy; he’s a husband and father. He’s the most moral person I’ve ever met.

Every kid is Dre. There is so much good in them. And there is so much good in you.

We’re in hard times, here in the A.C. Era. But you know what we’re involved in, you and me? We’re in a marathon relay race, going through the breadth of Black history. I’m looking back to all the people who came before me, back to the pharaohs in Egypt, through Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson. They’ve been passing the baton on for generations, and now it’s come to me. I owe all those people. If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t be here having the chance to do what I’m doing. I’m handing on the baton to each of the young men I’m reaching. I hope you’ll pick it up and run the race of your life.