The man behind the Boston Miracle

Reverend Eugene Rivers

A quadruple homicide 10 days ago at 43 Bourneside St. four young men, ages 19 to 22, shot and killed in a makeshift basement rap recording studio was the worst multiple killing here in 10 years. The murder total is up this year in Boston (71 to date), which is an unwelcome departure from an otherwise positive trend. The "Boston Miracle" has been praised far and wide for reducing youth violence, and the man most responsible for that miracle, the Reverend Eugene Rivers, will be in Toronto next month to speak to police, clergy and community leaders on how to battle a growing culture of youth violence in Toronto's rough neighbourhoods.

Rev. Rivers knows a thing or two about rough neighbourhoods. Seventeen years ago, he moved from the pleasant groves of Harvard academe to fight the gangs on their own turf. It's not a long drive from Cambridge, Mass., to the Dorchester "Four Corners" neighbourhood where he now lives, but he realized that you can't do it from a distance.

When "the Rev" first arrived, he met "a sassy, smartass, tough-talking, gunslinging mother-shut-your-mouth," as he has described Selvin Brown. Touring Rivers through the local crackhouses, Brown explained why the gangs owned the streets: "I'm there when Johnny goes out for a loaf of bread for mama. I'm there when he walks to school in the morning and walks home at night. I'm there, you're not. I win, you lose. It's all about being there."

"That lesson really changed how we looked at things," said Rivers. "We knew from that moment on that for every Selvin there had to be two of us."

Then in 1992, at a funeral for a young murder victim at the Morning Star Baptist Church, a gang chased a kid into the church, beating and stabbing him in front of the astonished mourners. It was a turning point, a wake-up call. After Canada's own funeral shooting on Nov. 18 at Toronto West Seventh-day Adventist Church, is it any wonder that the call went out to Rivers?

Rivers led a coalition of black ministers who preached tough love to their own community, and challenged the (largely) white Boston Police Department to move policing from racial confrontation to community prevention. Every Wednesday morning, neighbourhood clergy meet with police, probation officers and school principals to identify what is politely called "atrisk" youth. Then teams of clergy, social services personnel and police make home visits, and see what needs to be done: food, clothes, sneakers, after-school programs, court advocacy, literacy training, counseling, a foster home, a job. And the fact that it is all led by clergy puts a moral focus at the centre: responsibility and self-control are the best policing of all.

It works. In 1990, there were 152 murders in Boston. In 1998, there were just 34. Even given the upsurge in violence in 2005, there are still only half as many murders as in 1990.

The Ella J. Baker House is at the heart of the "Boston Miracle." A sprawling, grand Victorian home, Rev. Rivers transformed it from a crackhouse (he has a flare for the dramatic) into the principal "safe haven" on the streets of Four Corners. Kids drop in after school to do homework, take part in various programs, or just to hang out.

Jimmy, the youth director who knows the 'hood from the inside, is wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and has the dreadlocks to match. He explains to me that helping the Baker House kids is not for the faint of heart. They are teenagers who don't have two parents at home, and may well be raised by their 40-something grandmothers.

There is one boy who was failing until Baker House found him, and now he gets straight A's. His academic success is all the more impressive considering that he lives on a gang block, and wears a bulletproof vest under his baggy urban clothes as he walks to the Baker House. Stray bullets are just as lethal as intended ones.

Then there are the middle-school students in the girls' program, who are encouraged, as one might expect, not to become mothers before they finish high school. But this is sex education of a rather more robust kind they are told how to resist the exploitative advances of high school men (boys?) who would pressure them into prostitution. Saving kids in an environment of high school pimps and middle school hookers is a miracle pure and simple, no need for the quotation marks.

Miracles depend on your perspective. Jimmy told me that he was happy in his work, and a lucky man: "I got to 30 without catching a bad one." A bad one a fatal shot.

Those are the streets of Boston, and perhaps before long the streets of Toronto. Jimmy, the Reverend Rivers and their colleagues believe they have to know the streets from the inside out if they are to save them.