stipulation: Parkland kids would speak only when paired with a local kid—and the interview had better focus on the locals, or they would walk away. That infuriated some of the reporters, but it was an astute tactic. The kids tended to be one step ahead of us. They couldn’t force us to write Chicago stories, but they could force us to hear a few. And they got how we operated. We tend to move in packs, and come in with our stories mentally prewritten. The only way to alter that is to give us a better story. And the Chicago kids had amazing stories.
Trevon Bosley told one of them. His brother Terrell was shot and killed stepping out of church on Chicago’s Far South Side in 2006. “He was getting ready for band rehearsal,” Trevon said. “He was loading drums out of his friend’s car outside of church.” Terrell was eighteen, just starting college, making his way out of the neighborhood. Trevon was seven.
“The killer of my brother is still free because, many people don’t know this, but only seventeen percent get convicted,” Trevon said. These kids knew their statistics, cited them constantly, and they checked out. “It’s the code in Chicago that if you talk, something might happen to you,” he said. “If everybody talks, they might come after everybody.” The police tended to drop the ball too, Trevon said. His family had gotten an anonymous tip and passed it to the detectives, but they never followed up. “But when it was an ATF agent that was shot here in Chicago, they got that case solved in like the same week.”
Trevon joined BRAVE when he was ten or eleven, and he was still active as a junior at Southern Illinois University. BRAVE was doing amazing work, he said, but what a struggle for resources. Media attention was crucial to building a donor base, but that was a struggle too.
“We did a press conference probably like three years ago, and there was no press at all,” he said. They had organized a big collection of advocacy groups to maximize impact at a critical moment, but the media passed. “A month of shootings had happened where it was probably fifty-plus shootings. The youth were tired of it, the kids were tired of it. We had some little kids; they spoke. No media came. We still had our press conference, because we still wanted everybody to understand, at least the people that did show up. That was tough. They say, ‘We care youth are dying, oh we care about it.’ But when we call you to show up for us, where are you?”
He said that had begun to change since February. Media interest in their efforts had picked up—not enough, but a start. And that weekend was a huge infusion. If they came back.
Was it a little insulting that it took the Parkland kids to bring in the press?
“It was a little upsetting at first, but then you have to realize at least it’s here,” Trevon said. “You can’t just dwell on the past.”
They talked about the future, what they hoped to see five years down the road. “I’d love to see a lot of the youth activists, whether it’s Peace Warriors, BRAVE, any of those different groups, I’d love to see some of us in office by that time,” Trevon said. “I’d love to see us holding down political spots. As well as I would love to see divisions start to disappear. Chicago’s a tale of two cities. Whether you’re downtown or you’re on the South Side, it’s going to be completely different. I’d love to see more equality throughout the city. I want to see gun violence just go down immensely. I want to see the education system change. I know that’s a lot to ask for.”
“Don’t say it’s a lot to ask for,” Aalayah Eastmond said. “We deserve it.” Aalayah was a Parkland student, African American, and one of the recent additions to the team.
“I want to see happiness in my community,” Alex King said. “I want to see the next generation, I want to see them being able to play outside. Being able to sit on the porch and nothing happen to them. Being able to go to their neighborhood park, being able to go to a friend’s house. Being able to go to church. Being able to go to school and be safe. I want to see that joy. I want to see the sense of people