Something special happened Monday night in Rock Hill at the city's first “Break the Silence Teen Summit.”
That something wasn't the solution to the violence and problems affecting the city's teens — especially the city's black teens. That something was the voice of teens themselves. Strong and loud, straight and clear.
They want better from the rest of us. They are demanding it. And to save those kids, the kids themselves said we better give it to them.
“I learned tonight listening to all these people talk that when it comes to teens, adults have to understand what we are saying, to listen more,” said Jared McIlwain, a 15-year-old sophomore at Rock Hill High School.
McIlwain was among a crowd of more than 200 people at the Emmett Scott Center. In that crowd were teenagers by the dozens, parents and community activists who helped pull the summit together. There were cops and teachers, politicians and lawyers, preachers and guys with work shirts on their backs. Probably half teens and half adults.
There is a word for that complete group of people: community.
The community decided, on a chilly Monday night in by far the largest gathering of its kind in Rock Hill's recent memory, that it is time to save our young people. There was debate and talk, hugs and cheers.
The summit was organized to give teens a forum to say what it is really like out there at school, in neighborhoods and on the streets. And those teens, from former gang members and drug dealers to straight “A” students, said there is nothing out in the streets but drugs, despair and hopelessness.
The hope is in community programs, and school groups, and even civic groups such as the Boy Scouts.
“It is all in the choices you make,” said James Swaringen, another 15-year-old sophomore at Rock Hill High who sat with his buddy, McIlwain. “You have to choose your friends wisely. Do the right thing.”
Anthony Gomez, a freshman at the University of South Carolina just out of Northwestern High School, told the crowd that the kids he was friends with in elementary school are either out of school or deep in trouble with the law because of drugs and violence.
“Don't let that happen to you,” he told the crowd.
A 13-year-old just in middle school sat on that panel and said how he took drugs and brought brass knuckles to school but realized he had to go to school to have a chance in life. Another teen from Northwestern High School admitted that earlier in his young life, he sold drugs, used drugs and had to go to drug court. He got an ovation when he said, “I'm making good choices now and making good grades.”
A feisty former gang member named Dee Dee Byrd, 18, spoke about how teens know there is a drug problem in the streets, in schools, and that adults need to know about it. She made it clear to others that smoking dope was no future for them.
Kourtney Tolbert, a senior at Rock Hill High who has avoided trouble through good choices, told the crowd that teens need more options, more things to do, to keep the young from the lure of the street. She put it plainly: “We need more opportunities.”
The awful truth about Monday night's terrific give-and-take between teens and adults, teens and one another, is that a pair of killings in Rock Hill led to the gathering. It took the deaths of 18-year-olds Tyrone King and Tommy Barber, shot in separate incidents on two different sides of the city last month, to get the community behind a search for ways to keep young people from dying in the street.
There were some contentious moments. Some adults admitted that parents must do more, take more responsibility and be better and stronger parents. Some adults, including the Rev. C.T. Kirk, made it clear they were willing to listen to what these teens wanted that would make all of our lives better, stronger, safer.
Melvin Poole, Rock Hill NAACP president, said afterward: “It's a start, a great start, toward reclaiming our community and the young people.”
He wants no more killings in the streets. He wants scholarships, not funerals and trials.
So many people of all ages gathered in an auditorium Monday to talk and listen. They made it clear that they are not going to sit by anymore and watch more kids go to jail, or die.
Andrew Dys — 803-329-4065
@Nyx.CommentBody@