Gang member Sherman Scullark was fed up. He walked boldly into rival gang territory in a rough neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side determined to send a message.
Scullark’s Chicago is a tough place. Violence there in 2016 and 2017 broke records in terms of shootings and homicides. This year, over the first weekend of August alone, 66 people were shot in Chicago. Twelve of them lost their lives.
But Skullark was unarmed when he walked up to his foes out in the open. He got straight to the point – The 32-year-old was tired of the violence. It turned out his old enemies were too.
They talked out their differences right on the spot. Less than 24 hours later, peace emerged in the Pullman neighborhood.
Eight months later the area had a new playground – built in part by the former gang rivals.
A rough neighborhood
The streets of Pullman have long been some of the city’s roughest, with minimal job prospects leaving residents vulnerable to poverty and violence.
Two rival gang factions, known as Risky Road and the Maniac Fours, battled for turf. In recent years alone, their conflict has claimed scores of victims, forcing children to stay inside homes or in their backyards.
It was often too perilous to play in public. Gang member Scullark called the Pullman area “just your average neighborhood in Chicago that’s plagued by all types of violence.”
A place to play
Hands that had once aimed guns at other people grasped the handles of wheelbarrows. Some carried mulch or poured concrete, while others painted sidewalks and playground equipment.
The materials came from corporate sponsors like the Chicago White Sox. Local nonprofit Chicago CRED organized the build, working alongside Kaboom!, a national organization that helps build playgrounds for impoverished children.
“It’s peace going on now,” Scullark told CNN affiliate WBBM. He said now Pullman kids “really could play – they don’t need to worry about anything.”
One gang member, who hid his face from TV cameras, said kids from both sides were welcome to use the playground. He hoped kids “don’t have to worry about dodging bullets, and none of the nonsense,” and added that the playground will come to represent a new direction for the next generation. “They won’t have to follow in none of our footsteps.”
Chicago CRED hopes to make the Pullman playground a symbol of what’s possible in other other gang-ravaged neighborhoods, WBBM reported.
Brokering a truce
But none of this would have been possible without Scullark’s courageous walk and the rival gang’s mutual weariness of fighting.
“None of them even knew what they were fighting about,” police Detective Vivian Williams told WBBM. Williams told the Chicago Tribune that Scullark approached her about brokering the peace, but managed to make the deal himself before she could get the police involved.
After that, Williams connected Scullark with Chicago CRED, and its president, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Gang members and CRED representatives began meeting in a local church, and Scullark told Duncan he wanted “a park for our kids to play in,” according to an interview on the organization’s website.
So far, the Pullman peace is promising. “You see more children riding bikes … More people are walking their dogs. You just see more people outside doing what people should be doing in the city of Chicago,” Williams told CRED.
How to help
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