Audio File
Transcript
My name is Zach. I am 16 years old.
My name is Rae Zellous and I’m 13 years old.
We interviewed Derrick Clark on June 13th, 2018.
My birthday is October 12, 1977. I’m from Pittsburgh, PA, born and raised here pretty much all my life. My connection to Hazelwood is an interesting one. I grew up outside of Hazelwood. I grew up in a town where we wouldn’t even come to Hazelwood. You know, it just was not safe. About six years ago, my best friend ended up moving to Hazelwood, so I used to come over his house all the time, and I started to see the change in Hazelwood. It didn’t look like the Hazelwood that I knew from 15 years prior. People seemed kind of happy, you know, you could walk around, didn’t seem like there was a threat of violence. So I started to hang out and blend in with the community, so about two years ago, I joined this group called The Mission Continues, and we had a service project here in Hazelwood where we built the KaBOOM! Park. It’s right beneath the train tracks. So about a year later, I got an opportunity to join The Hazelwood Initiative to do a fellowship there. I jumped on it. I knew some of the people here, and I started to do a lot of community outreach, started meeting people, and started to meet business owners, youth, adults, senior citizens, and they starteded to paint this picture of what’s going on in Hazelwood. They started sharing their fears and their excitements. I just became very, very engaged with the community. I almost felt like I’m a part of the community because I heard their stories. I see their smiles every day. Don’t see too many frowns. You can tell that there’s a lot of love in this community.
Being a young black male, one of the problems that I faced was just being a young black male in a community where young black males did not have a lot of role models, period. Peer pressure was one of the biggest challenges I probably faced growing up. A lot of the guys in my community did not have their father figures, so they all turned to each other for guidance and some of the guidance was not the best guidance. There’s a lot of things that, you know, I wouldn’t do today that I was surrounded by and was doing back then when I was in the streets. When we were younger and we had what we call OG ‘s. Just an older guy that really cared about the youth, and they would pay us to wash their cars or run to the store. But you always got a lesson from them guys. No matter what you did. If you’re doing wrong, they gonna tell you “Hey, get outta here. You’re doing wrong. I’ll tell your mom.” There was a lot of guidance from some of these older guys that used to be in the communities when we were children. And I don’t see that much either. So I’d like to see more people out there get engaged with the youth in the community and just being like a big brother, big sister to them.
I Wws one of the kids whose father went away a long, long time, so I pretty much was raised by my mother and my grandmother. I really didn’t know how to be a man. I didn’t know what it took to be a man because I didn’t see it. You didn’t see it outside, you didn’t see my friends with their father and everything, so I think by being a part of East Liberty and the Homewood community and growing up to some of the things that I went through in the community and some of their friends and family that we had kind of showed me how to be a man and help me become a man. Using that, I will always would go back and just try to always do something positive so that young people in that community could see someone doing something positive and look up to them, opposed to everything else that was going on around that community at that time.
My mom was very strong, very resilient. She was always there. She had her ups and downs, but she was always focused on one: the Lord. She’s just a big Christian, her family was, and also her children, and taught us a lot of love. So I always looked up to my mom because no matter what they put in front of her, it just seemed like she was able to come out on top. So that was my biggest role model.
So one of the things that was big in my family was education. My mother was big, big, big on education because she didn’t go past, I think, the 8th grade? Now, all her kids graduate and all of us have some kind of postgraduate degree. But growing up, I went to Catholic school, which was weird because we weren’t Catholic. But Saint Benedict the Moor in Hill, I went there. But that shows you that my mom, she just wanted something better for us. Then I went to Westinghouse. I did three years there. And then I got an opportunity to go to this all boys’ school because at that time, there was a lot of things going on in Pittsburgh where people were afraid that young men wouldn’t make it to 21. So I was able to go to Kiski Prep, and I did two years there, postgraduate year and a regular year, and I graduated from Kiski, came back home, had a son. Figured I wanted more for my son, so I ended up enrolling in Duquesne University because they had already got, like, scholarships for football and some acceptances from other colleges. But Duquesne was in Pittsburgh and I went to Duquesne University, and that’s where I graduated from.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do growing up. I didn’t know where I wanted to be. Now I have more of a sense of purpose. I did the school thing, I did the military thing, and I traveled the world. I’ve been to, you know, 9 countries and 40 states. You know, I’ve had children. I’ve, I’ve done a lot, you know, in my time just by trying to continue to try something different. You have all these small successes, little ones. You get amazed. You get to look back at those successes and say, thank God, I’m appreciative of the life that have led up to this point. It hasn’t all been great. I wasn’t at peace 10 years ago when I was fighting over in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wasn’t at peace 20 years ago when I was walking through the streets of Homewood or East Liberty or the Hill, wondering if I was going to go to jail or get shot or get beat up or… where I am in my life right now, I could say I’m at peace.
Pick up a book. There’s a lot of interesting things inside of a hardback book. My favorite book is called the Prince by Machiavelli and he teaches you pretty much how to run your kingdom. But he tells you to find three people that are experts in their field. Another one is called “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”, and the reason I tell you read this is because I used to be a hot head, and then I read that book called “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” when it teaches you that you don’t have to pop off on everything because, in the end, it’s all small stuff. So pick up a book, man, and read it front to back. Read the foreword, learn a little bit about the author. Don’t just skim through, read it and try to find something in that book that you enjoy.
There’s a lot of people that didn’t give up on me. So don’t give up on the youth. I mean, we were all there at one point in time, you know, just be there, be available. If you can’t help them today, give them your e-mail or telephone number. Take a child to lunch, have a meeting at a restaurant and talk to that young man or woman. Do something different to show them that we care.