HE TELLS THEM , 'DON'T FALL DOWN'

Archye Leacock Among Group Trying To Save Black Kids From A Life Of
Crime - Or Death

THE YOUNG MEN are baby-faced but old and world-weary around the eyes.
They have been caught with a gun or a knife for the first time. They
haven't shot or stabbed anyone. Yet.

Some of them are only 14. All of them are juveniles on the brink of
embracing the street life that could kill them, maim them or land
them in jail for destroying another human being.

Because they are so young and theirs is a first weapons offense, the
district attorney and the juvenile courts have given them a choice:
Do time at "Don't Fall Down in the Hood" or do time behind bars.

Those who choose "Don't Fall Down" find themselves facing executive
director Archye Leacock, 50. They give him nothing but the cold
stare. It works on the street. It doesn't work on Leacock.

"I don't see the hard stares that cause other people to fear them
because I have been blind since I was 14," he said in the cadence of
his native Trinidad.

"All I hear is the young man's voice. I tell him, 'My brother, how
are you doing?' He's thinking, 'The blind guy ain't afraid of me.'
Before you know it, he's telling me his story.

"Young people put on that face, develop that look," Leacock said,
"because it is like putting on their army fatigues so they can
survive in the jungle of their neighborhoods. If you get past that
look, they are vulnerable."

Their stories, Leacock said, have a heartbreaking sameness.

"Ninety-five percent of the young men in the program were raised only
by their mothers, so they have seen no male involvement in their
lives," he said. "It's as if an adult male is a completely different
species. They don't know what it is to look up to a man who gets up
in the morning and goes to work.

"These guys are 14, 15, 16 and they're the man of the household,"
Leacock said. "They see males with women only when nature calls. You
ask them, 'What role do you have with a woman other than just
dropping sperm?' They don't know."

Leacock relates the hopelessness of his young charges to the
desperation he felt at 14, when he was struck in the eye by a ball
while playing cricket in Trinidad.

Complicated by the glaucoma he had suffered since early childhood,
the infection that followed the accident left him blind in both eyes.

"I was completely lost," Leacock said. "I didn't see a future. I
didn't see where I was going. I couldn't get around my house. My
mother had to take me outside to sit me on the steps. I lost all my
friends. I was suspended with no direction. For months, I just sat
there and I was numb.

"I identify my struggles with these guys in 'Don't Fall Down in the
Hood,' " he said.

"They're in America but they can't make it in America. They don't
have a mentor. They don't have a dad. They're getting into drugs and
guns. They feel hopeless. They need someone to believe in them. I
believe in them."

Leacock, whose eyes were removed for health reasons in 2002 and
replaced by prostheses, has an unshakably hopeful vision for the 100
endangered, predominantly black youths in his program - and six
months to convince them to share it.

Funded by the city's Department of Human Services, "Don't Fall Down"
mandates that the young people take 30 after-school hours weekly of
life and job skills classes at Temple University, mostly taught by
successful young black men from the same crime-ridden neighborhoods
as the teenage offenders.

Harry James, a former juvenile-detention officer who directs the
program, said, "You hear these kids talking about 'It's my
lifestyle,' meaning drugs and guns.

"I tell them, 'A lifestyle indicates a style that is conducive to
living. But if you continue with your lifestyle, you might lose your
last opportunity to live.' "

Lonelle Parks, 17, from West Philadelphia, said he was sitting in a
stairwell at University City High, "cracking the Dutch" - putting
marijuana in a hollowed-out cigar - when he "saw a shiny bald head
coming up the stairs."

It belonged to a security guard who found a switchblade in his
pocket. Parks was expelled.

At a "Don't Fall Down" counseling session last week, Leacock praised
Parks for doing well since he started the program in January, but
wondered about his failing a recent urine test.

Parks said that he was "hot-boxed" - sitting in a car with rolled-up
windows - next to friends who were smoking blunts (marijuana-filled
cigars) but that he wasn't smoking.

"Lonelle, my brother, we love you dearly," Leacock said with a warm
smile, "but it doesn't get into the blood system through your pores.
Science tells us that you have to smoke it."

Having made his point pleasantly, Leacock asked Parks how things were
at home. Parks said his great-grandmother, whom he lives with, was
proud of him because he was working two jobs and coming to the program.

As soon as he mentioned his great-grandmother, Parks' face lost its
defensive look and broke into a loving grin.

Leacock, who couldn't see the grin, sensed it - and the two men were
suspended together in a moment filled with hope.

Leacock said it's hard to convince juvenile offenders that they can
make smarter choices than deadly weapons and drugs because many of
them don't believe that such choices exist.

Thomas Carter, 16, from Northeast Philadelphia, said he was hanging
out in front of his house after robbing a kid when he saw a bunch of
the victim's friends coming down the street.

"I ran in the house and grabbed my loaded .20-gauge [shotgun],"
Carter said. "They shouted 'Burner!' [gun] and ran. I ran after them.
That's when the cops showed up and arrested me."

Carter told the story matter-of-factly - as if there was nothing
unusual about robbing or having a loaded .20-gauge shotgun or coming
close to shooting someone with it.

But when Carter was hanging out between classes with his friend
Parks, the two of them laughing and talking about music, girls, jobs
- - they were just two typical teenagers, starting to enter their adult lives.

Leacock said that most of the juveniles in the program have been so
"abused" by their upbringings that they literally see guns and drugs
as normal life.

"Some young people are truly pathological," Leacock said. "Some of
them are so hurt that they will hurt you. I'm not that blind. But
most of the young men who come to us, we can help get back in school,
get jobs, stay out of jail, survive."

District Attorney Lynne Abraham, whose prosecutors work with Juvenile
Court judges to get first-time nonviolent offenders into "Don't Fall
Down," said one focus is to "put a real face on what death and injury
are like."

She said the young men attend workshops at Albert Einstein Medical
Center, where an emergency-room doctor demonstrates what happens when
a gunshot victim is brought in.

"The E.R. physician," Abraham said, "tells them, 'Those nice shoes
you're wearing? You'll be dripping blood all over them. Those nice
clothes you have on? We'll rip them right off your body before we operate.'

"The juveniles visit the homes of shooting victims who became
quadriplegics - young men who cannot scratch their nose without the
help of a caregiver for the rest of their lives.

"We tell them, 'Think about having your mother give you a shower when
you're 25 years old or having to empty your colostomy bag. You don't
grow another arm or leg or spine. This is the way you are forever.' "

"Don't Fall Down" training includes a team-building effort to
transport a raw egg sitting precariously in a metal ring that is kept
aloft by long strings tied to it and held taut by the young men.

One false move during the tense trip from the classroom to a cup in
the hallway and the egg is history.

Life-skills teacher Joel Austin attempted an equally difficult trick
when he said, "If you love a girl enough to make her pregnant, you
should love her enough to marry her and help raise your child."

None of the young males agreed. Austin reminded them that in a class
exercise moments earlier, they all had written angry letters to their
absentee fathers, vowing not to make the same mistake in their own
children's lives.

Austin could not get the young men to see that their distrust of
committing to a woman could someday cause their children to write
similar letters to them.

And he could not convince them that protected sex, rather than what
they all called "raw dog" sex, is the way to go until they are ready
to settle down and be a father to their kids. But he vowed to keep trying.

In another life-skills class, instructor Jonathan Gibbs handed out a
personal note about how he draws strength, when the world is getting
him down, from a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X shaking hands.

"If they could smile in the face of personal danger and certain
death, all in the name of freedom," Gibbs wrote, "then I can smile
and drag my a-- to work."

"You drag your a-- to work?" a young man asked.

"Every day," Gibbs said, keeping eye contact with the kid, hoping the
concept was sinking in.

Going to jail for committing a crime, Gibbs said, is a sucker's play.

"You come out of jail," he said, "you'll never make as much money as
you would have if you didn't go to jail. If I'm hiring you, I know
you ain't going to find a job nowhere else, so what I got to pay you
good money for? They know they can work you like a runaway slave."

After 15 years of trying to save the city's most endangered young
men, Leacock still exudes the same never-say-die spirit that brought
him here from teaching classical piano to handicapped children at the
Settlement School of Music in the '80s.

While working on his master's degree at Temple in 1991, Leacock said,
"A fellow graduate student came to me, concerned about what we were
seeing on TV every night: black kids being arrested; black kids with
drugs; black kids this, black kids that.

"Temple is an oasis in the middle of a ghetto. We wanted to help a
few students from the ghetto prepare for the SATs on Saturdays and
get into Temple."

They started with seven students in the spring. By the fall, through
word of mouth, the group had grown to 200 - "all black, all wanting
to do something positive with their Saturdays," Leacock said.

The SAT classes, now in their 15th year, begat weekly sessions for
teenage fathers, which begat "Don't Fall Down in the Hood" for young,
predominantly black offenders.

"So many adults are scared of young black men at the very time in
their lives when they need us the most," Leacock said. "My colleagues
and I have been running this program for years with the very kids
that the school district throws out.

"We don't have a single police officer. We don't have a single metal
detector. And we haven't had a single incident in our program.

"We are not afraid of our young black men."