Representative Chaka Fattah and Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. went through the House of Umoja and were witnesses to the transformational process of young people who identified with individual gangs. Many of these gangs were started in the fifties and expanded throughout the sixties. However in 1968 gang warfare became much more deadly. Once the body counts went up gangs wanted to even the score. It took two dedicated parents who were not only concerned about their own children but their community as well, to set in motion a transformational process which started with their own house and in five years ripped across the city. Through these well organized gangs young people had seen the mean things they could do to each other. David and Falaka Fattah showed them the beautiful things they could do, the importance of community and civic duty. They connected them with both family and African tradition. This is a story that must be told and cannot be forgotten.

Like so many big cities in the United States, Philadelphia has suffered from a strikingly high murder rate over the past fifty years. Such tragic loss of life, as Eric C. Schneider demonstrates, does not occur randomly throughout the city; rather, murders have been racialized and spatialized, concentrated in the low-income African American populations living within particular neighborhoods. In The Ecology of Homicide, Schneider tracks the history of murder in Philadelphia during a critical period from World War II until the early 1980s, focusing on the years leading up to and immediately following the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court decision and the shift to easier gun access and the resulting spike in violence that followed. Examining the transcripts of nearly two hundred murder trials, The Ecology of Homicide presents the voices of victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as the enforcers of the law—using, to an unprecedented degree, the words of the people who were actually involved. In Schneider's hands, their perspectives produce an intimate record of what was happening on the streets of Philadelphia in the decades from 1940 until 1980, describing how race factored into everyday life, how corrosive crime was to the larger community, how the law intersected with every action of everyone involved, and, most critically, how individuals saw themselves and others. Schneider traces the ways in which low-income African American neighborhoods became ever more dangerous for those who lived there as the combined effects of concentrated poverty, economic disinvestment, and misguided policy accumulated to sustain and deepen what he calls an "ecology of violence," bound in place over time. Covering topics including gender, urban redevelopment, community involvement, children, and gangs, as well as the impact of violence perpetrated by and against police, The Ecology of Homicide is a powerful link between urban history and the contemporary city.

The entire purpose of being a Corner Boy was rooted in the concept of the ultra-masculine male The highest honor a Corner Boy could aspire was becoming a martyr for the gang The second highest honor was to carry a wound from battle that could be observed without the removal of ones attireThe third highest honor was going to jail and doing time In my young mind, Corner Boys came to represent the highest level of manhood and the epitome of moral virtue. says the author. But what was the truth? Of Stiletto and Soul: The Memoirs of Gangster Mike The Last West Philadelphia Corner Boyis a comprehensive and smooth recollection of the authors childhood experiences, family, youthful exploits, and his life with Philadelphias legendary Corner Boys. Honest, hopeful, challenging and absolutely inspiring, this book is about a unique life spent in a tough setting. In this book, King recollects his memories and deals with the most serious realitieslife, family, relationships, and the exigent world of his youth. This memoir is inspired by several factors, all of them pertinent to todays climate where some of the experiences of the author could serve as helpmates to those who may find themselves in similar situations. Here, he shares how both positive and negative influences in his life helped him developed a social consciousness. The book also relates certain historical events and personalities and packed with personal commentaries, insights, and psychosocial outlooks that readers may find relevant and favorable.

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing. Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. He shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality.

Karima "C.R.E.A.M." Thomas, who has been held as an accomplice in the murders of two drug dealers, is acquitted based on the deathbed confession of her lover, Duane Faison. But triumph soon turns to tragedy when Karima's mother is found dead of an apparent suicide. Karima refuses to believe that things are as they seem. She believes that her mother was murdered, and when the police won't listen, she takes matters into her own hands. She soon finds that her mother's death is just the first indication of a scandal that could rock the very halls of power. Captain Kevin Lynch joins Karima in the search for the truth, despite his family and career on the line.

It Is Finished By: Thierry R. Lundy Imagine that, for most of your life, you’ve accepted the idea that your life consisted of just one level. This level is made up of everything you could see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. Now imagine one day you are abruptly awakened to the fact that there has not just been one level to your life, but a second one that you never knew existed. To take it a step further, imagine one day someone reveals to you that your life has never been about what you’ve always thought it was about. Imagine that this person tells you that there has always been an invisible hand working in your life in an invisible realm, and creating a story that is invisible to the naked eye. Well, I can imagine it because this brief illustration is the nutshell that is packed with my visible and invisible story that conveys the depth of God’s goodness.

This book concerns the origins, structure, purpose, meaning, and significance of libation, developments and change within the ritual, and its distribution in the Afrikan world. Libation is a liquid offering by and behalf of all humanity, those living and those yet-to-be-born, to the Creator, to other divinities, to ancestors, and to the environment. Through this ritual Afrikans affirm and re-establish cosmic balance, interconnection and interdependence: the harmony and balance, connection and interdependency within, between and among humans, the environment, the spirit world, and the Creator. The text connects the practice of libation throughout the prodigious time/space correlation occupied by the Afrikan experience of life, connects Afrikans to their social history, and so to themselves across generations in different spaces and times. The methodology is at once both multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. The methods and techniques of history, linguistics, cultural studies, literature and other human sciences are deployed to develop a comprehensive reconstruction, description and analysis of a ritual that has long been antique, but has never become antiquated.