Street Soldier: The Book

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San Francisco Chronicle TUESDAY, APRIL 9,1996

Already nationally recognized as a "magical" program that has reversed the movement of African American teen males in the Bay Area toward drugs, gangs, and teen pregnancy, the Omega Boys Club on San Francisco's Potrero Hill comes alive in the pages of "Street Soldier," thanks to Omega's cofounder, Joe Marshall, Jr.

His charges are tough, sullen, vicious creatures with names like Monster, Bone or Little Disease, who've been arrested and jailed dozens of times, kicked out of every school in town and grown accustomed to making several hundred dollars a day selling drugs. Yet one by one, they end up quitting "the life," finding "straight" work, even attending college. We learn so much about them that finishing the book is like coming to the end of a good novel: You can't wait to see how it turns out, but you don't want to say goodbye to people who have become something like a second family.

The problem here and in most inner cities, says Marshall, is the belief that "being a predator so as not to be prey" is the only way to survive. Yet during his tenure as a teacher at Potrero Hill Middle School, Marshall writes, he began to realize "that the players of the urban game actually hate the game they play. Although few show it and fewer admit it, many of them inwardly despise the violence and the degradation that rule the neighborhoods ... They join the game only because they can't beat it..."

And who can blame them? he writes. These "homies" grow up dodging bullets from childhood, know little of their fathers and too often see relatives addicted to drugs, especially crack cocaine, "the worst thing to hit black America since slavery," Marshall writes. Add to this an overcrowded, underfunded school system, constant harassment by brutal police, grinding poverty and a culture that says black people are inferior, and you get the only "safe" environment to emerge from such elements, a gang.

Watching a Miracle

Thus to watch Marshall and his partner, Jack Jacqua, a fellow teacher and a white man whose revolutionary politics veer to the left of Malcolm X, is to see, from the inside, a miracle in the making. Witnessing an incredible bloodbath descend over Potrero Hill as one male student after another is shot and killed, Marshall and Jacqua begin the Omega Boys Club at the local, Neighborhood House, a recreation center.

We see them set up meetings for the initial 15 or so kids who attend, establish study halls, review report cards, introduce black history, invite speakers (Willie Brown and Doris Ward in the beginning), create outreach programs like "satellite study halls" in other parts of the Bay Area and visit incarcerated kids at San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center and Log Cabin Ranch reformatory.

The best part of "Street Soldiers^®," though, is Marshall's willingness to show us the failures as well as the successes - the many kids who got to college, only to be thrown out for fighting or lack of academic ability.

But knowledge was not enough. The boys had to dig out and vent the deepest anger, fear and pain they felt before they could walk away from the self destruction of the neighborhood and their own self-hatred. Talking about it in meetings was one thing, but "writing helped" most of all, turning the old "gottas" ("Gotta get my respect. Gotta pack a gun to watch my back. Gotta be with my potna, right or wrong") to new values and principles: "1. Life is the most precious thing an individual will ever have. 2. A friend will never lead a friend to danger. 3. Change starts with oneself. 4. Respect comes from within."

"Being Dissed"

Key to this is the understanding that drugs and killings in black neighborhoods create exactly the kind of slaughter that white bigots have wanted since Africans were brought to America. What kept slaves sane when they saw their loved ones lynched "was one thing," Marshall says: "unity. Black folks took care of black folks."

Today, Marshall tells kids - from the Omega Boys Club to listeners on his radio show on KMEL to new Omega groups in Los Angeles - that unity, again, is "the only thing that's going to deliver you out of this ... If black people loved black people there wouldn't be no turf." Incredibly, it's just as simple as that.