Eleven year old Karon Brown was among seven people in a period of 5 days shot dead in DC.  Every child that dies by gun violence in DC, Maryland and Virginia, I consider them a personal lost.  I am all in when it comes to our children no matter their ethnicity.

Karon’s violent death hit close to home.  He attended Stanton Elementary school and he was a member of the Woodland Tigers football team, once known as the Woodland Raiders.  The team was found by my partner, youth advocate and DC boxing legend the late Calvin Woodland.

The Woodland Raiders practiced on the field adjacent to the school.  Calvin was the CEO and coach of the team.  He ran the team with an iron fist (sometimes literally).  I was his assistant coach and I had his back and he had mine.

The kids and their parents trusted, loved and respected him.  The Woodland Raiders became legends in the community and were the pride of SE Washington.  I remember when his son little Alexis was born and became the apple of his father’s eye.  Big Calvin was a great all-around athlete, football, basketball, baseball and his first love boxing–he excelled in them all.

Little Alexis grew up to be a decent athlete but nothing like his father.  Sometimes Calvin pushed him a little too hard not wanting to show favoritism and little Alexis would rebel.  When Calvin suffered a stroke and died suddenly in January 2010 it shook up the community and especially little Alexis.  Calvin was 60 years old.

I tried to become a mentor to little Alexis, but he was stubborn like his father and I eventually lost him when I moved to Bowie, Maryland.  Someone shot and killed him in the streets of SE DC.

That is me with my left arm wrapped around little Alexis and my right arm wrapped around gospel singer Robin ‘Sugar’ Williams.   We were the guest of gospel artist Ed Gerald on his gospel television show on TV 7 in NW DC.

That is little Alexis standing front and center at my annual Kids In Trouble Christmas toy party.  NFL legend Jim Brown is Santa’s Helper at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in NW DC.

Children from all walks of life enjoy a Kids In Trouble toy party at the Marriott Hotel in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Calvin Woodland is seen here with me and Don King.  He stood 5’3 but walked around in his SE neighborhood like Wilt Chamberlaim.  There was no Napoleon complex with him.  The likes of Calvin Woodland has been replaced by hustlers and frauds claiming to “Make Children First”!

This is for the kids who die to include eleven year old Karon Brown and the late Alexis Woodland all black young men.  It does not matter whether they were killed in the streets of DC or in Chicago by a cop’s gun or in the halls and classrooms of Sandy Hook, Columbine and Parkland by a classmate’s gun, but kids are certainly dying. There are good cops and bad cops, the good cops go along to get along. Their problem, they lack courage to say, “Enough is enough”.  The old and rich will live on awhile, as always, living in their gated communities, eating caviar and lining their pockets with gold, while letting little kids die.

Kids have died in the swamps of Mississippi organizing sharecroppers, kids have died in the orange groves of California just for telling others to organize and stick together, but kids have certainly died.

While, blacks, whites, Latinos, and Mexicans all kinds of kids will die because they don’t believe in stealing other people’s ideas and making them their own while becoming wealthy, selfish and dysfunctional, or the Capitol Hill gun lobbyist who tell lies, and bribe anybody and everybody at any cost.

There are politicians on both sides of the isle who are there to serve themselves and not the people—all the reasons while kids have died.

The wise of course and the learned will pen Fake News editorials in the papers, and the ladies and gents with Dr. in front of their names, white and black will live on pretending not to know or understand what is going on—while kids die.

There will be surveys and written reports with words to smother the kids who die.

And the sleazy courts and sleazy attorneys, and the bribe-taking police, and the blood-loving generals, and the money-loving preachers, will all raise their hands against the kids who will die, beating them with made up laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets, to frighten the people.

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—and the old and rich don’t want the people to taste the iron of the kids who die. They don’t want the people to get wise to their own power to believe in our youth of today, or even get together and listen to kids who die—Maybe, there will be no monument for them except in our hearts.

Maybe their bodies will be lost in swamp or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, or the jail where they are hung by their necks and they will call it suicide.

But the day will come—you can be assured that it is coming—when the marching feet of the masses will rise up for the kids who died with a living monument of love, and joy, and laughter. And black hands and white hands are joined together, with a song that reaches the sky—the song of the life triumphant–for the kids who died.