The good ones listen
"On Alice Johnson's key chain hangs the key to a car stolen five years ago from one of the biggest dealerships in Gwinnett County.
The key was given to Johnson by Dre, a high school kid who came close to completely screwing up his life.
Dre called Johnson one night in 1999 and told her that he'd done something stupid. She imagined the worst. "What? What did you do?" she asked him.
"Stole a car," he replied.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" she asked.
Dre didn't have an answer. But Johnson did. She told him that if he wanted to avoid arrest, doing time, and maybe even avoid the police altogether, he'd have to tell the dealership what he did.
"Go tomorrow," she said. "I'll drive."
The next day, Dre, with Johnson at his side, told the dealership manager that he'd swiped a car from the lot by busting open the box where all the car keys are kept. The manager then did the most unexpected thing. He offered Dre a job.
At Johnson's request, we changed Dre's name. (His current employer, a Greenbriar Mall retailer, may not care to hear he once stole a car.)
To Johnson, the key to the stolen car is a reminder that not all car dealership managers are heartless -- and not all deviant teenagers are hopeless.
Johnson, 56, was raised in Chicago by blue-collar parents who told her she'd probably never attend college. The nuns who taught at Johnson's Catholic school thought otherwise, and their encouragement served two purposes.
The first was that their support pushed Johnson to make grades that would win her a four-year college scholarship. The other was that their perseverance showed Johnson that young people could go a lot further in life with the help of caring adults. Since then, Johnson has tried to be that type of adult.
She began her career as a teacher, but the rigidity of institutional schools disappointed her. After moving to Atlanta and volunteering for Andrew Young's first mayoral campaign, she took a job at City Hall answering phones.
Ten years later, in 1992, she became executive director of the Atlanta Fulton Commission on Youth, a group founded by Andy Young's wife, Jean Childs Young. (The name of the group was later changed to the Jean Childs Young Institute for Youth.)
Ever since, she's devoted her life to helping the type of kids most people cross the street to avoid.
She met her first real gangster in 1993, at a conference she organized on inner-city youth and violence in the wake of the Rodney King riots. Several members of the Crypts gang showed up. So did their rivals, the Black Gangster Disciples. The gang members didn't fight, nobody got shot, and nothing was stolen. They just wanted a chance to explain why their world was so violent, and why they had to carry guns with them everywhere they went.
"It became pretty clear that the stereotype of gang members as bling-wearing, Jag-driving hoodlums was certainly not typical," she says. "These were young men and women who came from pretty disruptive family lives."
For the past 12 years, Johnson has met with high school kids every Thursday to hear what they have to say. It struck her that the kids were incredibly bright but felt helpless to do anything about the deteriorating world around them. No one listened to them, and she was determined to change that.
When she first met with the Crypts and the Black Gangster Disciples, they said they were being harassed by MARTA cops at the Five Points Station. She set up a meeting between the kids, MARTA officials, and the Atlanta Police Department. An investigation ensued, and as a result, some of the MARTA cops accused of conducting excessive searches were transferred to different stations, Johnson recalls.
She also took up another big problem the gang members brought to her attention. The kids told her they carried guns because they feared they'd be jacked if they didn't have protection. It dawned on her that, despite conventional wisdom, society had become too violent to ignore the problems kids face each day.
"I began to realize that if we were going to be asking young people to not carry guns, we were going to have to figure out how to make the community safer," Johnson says. "And those decisions could only be made at the legislative level, and that was what started our advocacy to work on gun violence prevention. And we've been doing it ever since."
She started a side project called Georgians for Gun Safety, which sponsors gun buy-back programs and lobbies for stronger firearm regulations. Last year, the group assisted in halting legislation sponsored by Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, that would have allowed people to carry pistols to public gatherings such as political rallies, restaurants, bars, churches, and even football games.
[ :shock: Oh, no! :lol: ]
Johnson left the Jean Childs Young Institute for Youth in October to run Georgians for Gun Safety full time. The job doesn't pay, which is fine with Johnson because she's never really cared about making money and has enough savings to cover expenses for a while. She's lived for more than a decade in a modest house in Grant Park and drives an 8-year-old Chevy Blazer, which, she says, "I bought to drive the kids around."
By "kids" she means the teenagers she counsels every week. She doesn't have a family of her own.
Even though the focus of Johnson's work has shifted to gun control, she still keeps in close contact with the kids she's befriended. On a Tuesday night in December, she gathered with five teenagers in a meeting room on the 10th floor of the United Way building in downtown Atlanta. They ate sausage pizza, drank apple juice, and talked about the problems they're having in school.
When asked how school was going, Kelvin Ford told Johnson that he gets easily bored in class, "especially when the teacher goes over the same thing for the third or fourth time," he says. "I'd just get up and leave."
Johnson attempted to get the others involved in the discussion, but they were reticent. Instead of pushing the kids to talk more, Johnson let the silence grow longer and more awkward until someone else broke it.
Eventually, the whole group was talking about the bad teachers they'd had and the few good ones who really seem to care.
When asked how he tells a good teacher from a bad teacher, Ford answered, "The good ones listen."
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