How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey Page B

help create jobs so
that people can sustain their families and take care of their
children. I see a full recreation facility, a full theatrical
facility and a full technology center. I see facilities where
people can get counseling, do conflict resolution, develop life
skills.
    This motel—it was all about taking people’s
lives and destroying them. But the building that we’re going to
construct in its place is all about giving people life.
    There’s certain laws in the universe that
apply to everybody: When you try to do good, you get good back. And
in the end, I think that’s what really happened, you know? I spent
94 days on the roof, and I then one morning I got a $100,000 gift
from Tyler Perry.24 I came off the roof that same day. It just
happened so quick. There were so many emotions going on, it’s hard
to describe.
    When I came off the roof that night, it was
just people everywhere. Cameras, people, screaming, hollering. It
was amazing. It was almost like a ghetto-MTV-type thing. I don’t
know what you call it. It was like an awards show, only we weren’t
in L.A. We weren’t in Beverly Hills. We were on the South Side; we
were in the ’hood. To be a part of something that had so much
energy and excitement, and to see all the people in the streets,
all different races, was amazing.
    And when I got on the lift, I turned around
and said, “Goodbye, tent.”
    And then we started going down.
    It was a celebrative moment, but it was also
a preparation moment, a check for myself to let me know: This is
awesome, but this is not it; this is not the end.
    It’s not over.
    Epilogue: After buying and tearing down
the old motel, Pastor Brooks still needed another $15 million to
build the community center. So in the summer of 2012, he walked all
the way across the U.S. from New York to Los Angeles. He raised
almost $500,000 on the trip, but as he puts it, “We still have a
long way to go.”
    — Interviewed by Miles Harvey

    Endnotes
    18 West Point Missionary Baptist Church was
founded in 1917. Brooks was pastor there from 1997 until 2000. See
http://www.wpmbc.org/church-history/.
    19 Bronzeville was a cultural hub for
African-Americans who came to the South Side of Chicago during the
Great Migration in the early 20th century.
    20 The motel sits in what was once an
overcrowded area known as the Black Belt. Most African-Americans in
Chicago lived in this area until the mid-20th
century, when legal restrictions that had kept them from moving to
other
neighborhoods were lifted.
    21 On Dec. 27, 2011, Jawan Ross, 16, was shot
and killed at a Church’s Chicken on 66th and Halsted in the
Englewood neighborhood. Dantril Brown, 17, was also killed in the
shooting. Five others were wounded. See Tina Sfondeles, “Charges in
Deadly Church’s Shooting,” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 31, 2011.
    22 The second funeral was for Deontae Malone,
15, who was found shot to death just three blocks from his home in
Marquette Park on the Southwest Side. See Brian Slodysko, “Boy’s
Fatal Shooting Called Part of ‘Crisis’: Student is Second from Same
School Killed This Year,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 30, 2011.
    23 In 2011, unemployment among
African-Americans in Chicago was 21.4
percent. The city’s average was 8.6 percent. See Mary Mitchell,
“The Making
of the ‘Other’ Chicago,” online site of The American Prospect,
March 18, 2013,
http://prospect.org/article/making-other-chicago.
    24 See Ryan Haggerty and Cynthia Dizikes,
“Rooftop Vigil ‘a Victory’: 3-Month Stay Raises Nearly $500,000 to
Buy Old Motel,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 2012.

DON’T TRUST NOBODY

    ORA THOMPSON
    Ora Thompson—who requested a pseudonym—is a
17-year-old high school senior from North Lawndale. Once
prosperous, North Lawndale boasted over 140,000 residents in the
1960s. Its population drastically declined soon after, however,
when its primarily white residents fled from an influx of black
newcomers from Southern states and other parts of Chicago.