The Peacemaker: An Interview With Aqeela Sherrills

By Adam McKibbin, April 14, 2008

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Aqeela Sherrills traded retaliation for reconciliation and helped broker peace between the Bloods and Crips.

Aqeela Sherrills came of age during the '80s in South Central Los Angeles's Watts district. He watched numerous friends and family members fall victim to gang violence and, as a Crip, threw himself enthusiastically into the cycle of revenge. Sherrills could have easily become a statistic himself; instead, he stepped away from the streets, entered college and found a new perspective, inspired by a pioneering professor's wisdom, author James Baldwin, and civil rights leaders like Malcolm X.

When Sherrills returned to Watts in 1988, a new fire burned in his belly: unity. The war between the Bloods and Crips had escalated as the rival gangs became entangled in the drug trade, and violence levels shot up across South Central LA. He pounded the pavement in an effort to recruit like-minded youth and influential gang leaders from both the Crips and Bloods factions, venturing into enemy territory armed only with an earnest appeal. He attracted the attention of, among others, football legend Jim Brown, who worked with Sherrills in founding Amer-I-Can, a foundation that continues to push for social change today.

Against all odds, Sherrills' appeals worked and in 1992, a day before the Rodney King verdict, the Bloods and Crips entered into a historic peace treaty. Years later, when the treaty showed severe signs of strain, Sherrills continued to work tirelessly for peace, cofounding the influential Watts-based Community Self-Determination Institute (CSDI). When he was again confronted with personal tragedy -- his 18-year-old son, Terrell, was murdered in 2004 -- Sherrills responded by publicly forgiving his son's killer, a story that led to his involvement with The Forgiveness Project.

Sherrills sat down with me to discuss his personal path to peace, how his work as a youth activist has carried through into adulthood, and why he had to face very personal demons before he could become a leader in his community.

Wiretap: What was your personal experience with gangs? Why did you ultimately choose to remove yourself from participating in gang life?

Aqeela Sherrills: In junior high school, I was sucked into [gang culture]. Out of loyalty and commitment to your boys, it's almost expected. At the time, I wasn't an independent thinker. I hadn't had enough life experience to break away from that kind of thinking. When my [best friend] was murdered at school, it fucked me up. So we started fucking up everybody on campus, especially all the kids from the Nickerson [Gardens housing project]. Every opportunity we got we had big fights, brought weapons to school and shit. I've never shot anybody, but I've taken a weapon to school and fired it in the air and all that kind of stuff. I ended up getting kicked out of school in ninth grade because of a fight I had with some Bloods on campus. And we preyed on innocent folks as well, man. It was a reaction to the pain we were experiencing in our lives. Coming up in the neighborhood where you feel like you ain't got nothing and everything is taken from you -- to lose a good friend who wasn't deeply involved in gangs, to me, it was like we were justified to do the things we were doing.

How did you make the transition from that state of mind to getting involved in the peace movement?

AS : I went to college. My sister was the first person in our family to graduate from a four-year university; she graduated in '87. Through her prodding and pushing and agitating, I filled out applications. I wanted to go to the Marine Corps, but I got accepted to two universities. I went to Cal State Northridge, where I met a professor [Johnie Scott] who grew up in Watts -- Jordan Downs housing project -- and was the first African American in our neighborhood, in '63, to go to an Ivy League university. He went to Harvard, then Stanford, and ended up teaching at Northridge. When I got there, me and one of my partners were the first students to come out of Watts in eleven years. So he came over and talked to us, and we formed a relationship and got into his class.

What happened to spark the idea of a gang truce?

Three major incidents that happened in my life: I got kicked out of [the] university on academic probation because I was fucking up in school and getting drunk and high every day and not doing my work; I found out that I had my fourth child on the way -- 18 years old and I didn't have any way of taking care of them; and then this girl that I was in love with, this girl who was so good to me... I was out cheating on her and I got burnt. I decided to do the first noble thing in my life: I took my girlfriend to lunch and told her the truth. She asked me why and I was like, "Maybe it has something to do with what happened to me as a kid." She was the first person I ever told that I was sexually abused as a kid by one of the older siblings.

That was a turning point in my life. I had to place the anger and rage that came up as a result of sharing that. And after reading [James Baldwin's] The Evidence of Things Not Seen, I placed it squarely on the government -- and white folks. I became a hardcore racist black nationalist revolutionary -- in a period of months. I wondered, "What else don't I know?" I read the biography of Malcolm X, and that kicked it off to a whole another level. [I read] Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, [Booker T. Washington's] Up From Slavery and Frederick Douglass. I was on fire. I started questioning every damn thing. I started questioning the violence in the neighborhood. My friends and family were losing their damn lives. I was like, "We've got to do something about this!"

That summer, we decided that we had to start a movement in the neighborhood to stop the killing. The following year, I dropped out of school and just started hardcore organizing. We started a little group called ABC, African Brothers Collective, and we used to get together every Wednesday night and talk about black men and the culture and what we were going through. We decided to start marching in all the housing projects, to speak directly to the brothers who were out there doing it. Government can't solve that.

Years later when you were in a position of brokering peace and being a middleman, did the past come back to haunt you? Did it make it harder to work both sides of the aisle?

AS: Actually, I had credibility as a result of that. See, in the underworld, man, we used to fantasize as kids about going to prison as a rite of passage. Some of the homeys, their goal was to touch every main yard. Those battles in junior high school gave me a reputation and credibility. So when we started having conversations with cats and negotiating a peace treaty, I was terrified. The first group of dudes we ran into [included] this guy named Droopy that me and my boy had jumped and whupped in junior high school. I hadn't seen Droopy since then. So I started quick -- "Man, we've been fighting each other for years and everybody is dying and shit -- nobody is winning this battle that we're engaged in, so what we're trying to do is organize and create some type of peace treaty between all the neighborhoods. Imagine the power that we would have! We could go back and forth like it used to be when our moms were kids." I told him about the vision, and he was inspired by it. We went on and hooked up with two of the G's in the neighborhood, and that really kicked off the conversation.

Many youth advocacy groups are working for a reduction in youth incarceration, but the public perception might be that we're releasing criminals into the street. How can you convince the skeptics?

AS : I think that one of the things we have to do is launch a major campaign around shifting public perception of individuals who commit crimes. After the individual who commits the crime goes to jail and pays their debt to society and comes out, that's it. You paid your debt to society. Why are we holding these people as criminals for the rest of their lives? We're defining people by their experience.

And put out the proper statistics. Less than three to five percent of gang members are committing violent crimes and murder. The vast majority of people who are in prison -- especially black and brown youth -- are in there for nonviolent crimes. If the public is thinking that they're putting criminals out on the street, it's like, well, let's look at the records of these individuals and judge them by their deeds -- individually, not collectively. It's a way of scapegoating a whole cross-section of the culture and marginalizing them. It makes them inhuman.

How much do you think that national politics have an effect on the street level?

AS: Maybe for the first time in many, many years, I think that national politics and this [presidential] race will have an effect on grassroots communities. [And] local politics are important. When we're organized and engage the system, we can shift things on a local level. But, man, overall... I think there has to be a movement in this country, and it's a movement that has to come from the people. We have to take America back. In order to make all the beautiful ideas of the Constitution real, people have to take responsibility and make sure that our government is responsible to us.

For more on groups working to end gang violence visit:

Campaign For Youth Justice

Advancement Project

Amer-I-Can

Gangland: Solutions

Homies Unidos

Adam McKibbin is the editor of VideoJug and runs the music-and-politics webzine TheRedAlert.com. His writing regularly appears in Metromix and ARTISTdirect.