Audio File
Transcript
My name is Jordan Franklin. I am 11 years old.
My name is Lydell Price. I am 15 years old.
My name is Ramir Johnson. I am 13 years old.
We interviewed Coach Garth Taylor on June 23rd, 2016.
I was born August 12th, 1969. The first part of my childhood I would say was regular. I loved it. My mother died when I was 10, a month before my 11th birthday, from breast cancer. Took her in 18 months, and then it pretty much went downhill after that. Overcoming the death of my mother was huge. At that point in time, I didn’t understand what I was doing or understand why I was doing it. I was lost for 10 years, from the time I was 10 years old to the time I was 20, because the person that guided me through my life, the person that I trusted, was gone. So even though I was going to Christian groups every Wednesday night, I didn’t believe in God. Cause I just felt like, who would take the only person in his life that he ever knew, even raised him and ever trusted and put him in a situation where he just had no one, and I just didn’t believe God could do that to a person. So I didn’t believe God was there. So the hardest obstacle I ever overcame in my progress to adulthood, and the parenthood, and the manhood was probably getting my sense of spirituality back. Starting back to believe in God, and faith, and hope, and all of those things because for a long period of time, I didn’t have it.
I moved here from New York City. When I first moved here, things were night and day from New York City. You didn’t have to worry about your bike getting stolen or people dying around you, you know, dodging bullets and those kinds of things. Growing up here, man, you kind of can let your guard down. When I started working in pools and at day camps in the summer in the 90’s, things started to get dangerous. People started to die, there was gangs, violence, there was, you know, drugs. More people, including myself, were choosing to do negative things than positive things. There was nobody directing us, and that kind of made me want to keep working with children, keep trying to provide the best circumstances I could for children, making them aware of different things, helping their parents to be aware of different things.
In every phase of your life, you’re going to have hard obstacles. They never stop coming, especially as black men. I took a vow to hate being broke, and I forgot all of the experiences that my father put my mother through. They let my father out of a place because my mother was dying and he went right back to selling drugs, and ran it in and out of my mother’s house as she was dying and we lived in a nice place. So I really disliked the whole drug culture, cause he used drugs too, and I really disliked him. I ended up selling drugs because man, being broke is a disease don’t nobody want. And I was flat broke. I had $2.50 to my name and a bus pass. I grew up in Almeda Park, which is in East Liberty, and at that time it was the hot spot for drugs. So it was like 4 in the morning. One of my buddies, he was hustling in my grandmother’s parking lot. In that 20 minute time period, he made about $400.00. That did it for me. I may have been 19 years old when I started. And I ended up being able to pay my way through a year and a half of college doing just that, with a son. I had a son in 12th grade.
I went and graduated from Waynesboro College. To be honest with you, man, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. My friends went there and I just knew I had to do something other than just to exist after you got out of high school. Initially, I studied elementary education, but I had to change my major so I could graduate before I ran out of aid. And I switched it to criminal justice with a minor in political science. I remember the last full time job I applied for is down at Life’s Work. I was becoming a vocational counselor. I had not gotten any job before that and I was a convicted felon cause I got caught my senior year. After I interviewed for that job, I said “If I don’t get this job, that’s it. I’m on the road with my thing,” and that was my mindset and I ended up getting that job. That was the summer or fall of 1993.
When I became a young adult, things started to change. I kind of got back on my feet mentally and spiritually. So from that time forward we have been working to make sure that a lot of young people don’t grow up without the guidance that a lot of us didn’t grow up with. I instruct my sons to have a better understanding of things and, you know, make better choices so that you end up in places that you choose to be in. I would like to see our young black males step up, be leaders and take control of their communities, their families, and some of the outcomes that we have, and turn some of them from negative to positive. We’re different and we have to learn how to work through our differences. We stop plotting on each other, stop scheming on each other and thinking that only one can survive. There’s room for all of us at the top, in our own way.