What the Watchman Saw

Corey Brooks

In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.

Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.

On Nov. 22, 2011, Pastor Corey Brooks climbed onto a rented construction lift and took it to the roof of a vacant two-story motel across the street from his New Beginnings Church in the 6600 block of South Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Then he set up a tent, climbed inside, and began a vigil against gun violence.

No one paid much attention to Brooks at first, but as he continued to camp out during a Chicago winter, his rooftop vigil became national news. By the time he came down 94 days later—on Feb. 24, 2012—he had raised $450,000 to purchase and demolish the dilapidated motel, a longtime haven for drugs and prostitution. The last $100,000 of that money came from movie mogul Tyler Perry, who heard about Brooks on a radio program and wrote a check the very same day.

We visited Brooks twice in his tent, a cozy space into which he had packed an impressive array of furniture, space heaters, computer equipment and books. A steady stream of advisors and well-wishers kept stopping by to see the 42- year-old pastor, who greeted them in a track suit and work boots, his hair and beard growing a little nappy but his energy and spirits undiminished by the long odyssey.

We spoke with him a final time after he had left the roof and begun work on his next project: finding funds to build a community center where the motel once stood.

This started with a shooting. Actually, it started with ten shootings.

In 2011, I did ten funerals of young black men between the ages of 13 and 25 and none of those young men were covered in the press or anything like that. And then the 11th funeral was a young man by the name of Carlton Archer, 17 years old. And right before the service began, some of the children coming into our neighborhood for the funeral, they started being shot at by another group of kids.

I was upstairs, getting prepared, so I just ran downstairs and I saw all these kids running into the church. I saw kids underneath cars. I saw adults under cars. Everybody was trying to hide. And it was just, it was chaotic—it was, it was really scary. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life.

Something drastic needed to be done. Something radical.

I used to be pastor of the West Point Missionary Baptist Church in Bronzeville, on 35th and Cottage Grove. It was real traditional, real conservative, with an upwardly mobile-type congregation. So it wasn’t a good fit, because I was young and progressive and wanted to do radical stuff. And so the more radical stuff I would do, the angrier the leadership would get—even though a lot of the church members loved it, because their sons and daughters were coming back to the church. But a lot of ex-cons, a lot of gangbangers, a lot of people who hadn’t been in church before started coming, too.

The leadership didn’t like that, and so I decided that instead of trying to fight them for their church, I’d just start what I felt led to create. And so that’s how New Beginnings was birthed. We call it New Beginnings because it was a new beginning—I wanted to do something fresh and creative and contemporary. We started the church in November 2000, and we’ve been in this neighborhood for the last six years.

The church building used to be a nationally famous nightclub. In the 1950s and early 1960s, jazz entertainers from all over would come to the city and perform at a place called the Roberts Show Lounge. All the great entertainers played there—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan. Muhammad Ali used to frequent the club. Everybody who was somebody, they came to this location.

The club was owned by a man named Herman Roberts, an entrepreneur way before his time. He was one of the first black hotel owners in the Midwest, and he decided to build this motel across the street from the Roberts Show Lounge, because, back in the early 1960s, blacks did not feel comfortable going downtown to stay. So he built this motel and a few others in predominately black areas and became a very successful businessman.

See, back when everything was segregated, people had no choices but to live in this area, take care of this area. You had upper income, middle income, lower income living together, and as a consequence those at lower income had people who they could look to and say, “That’s Doctor Johnson or that’s Attorney So-and-So, or that’s Mr. So-And-So who owns the store.” They had living examples that education works and hard work pays off and determination goes a long way. But as integration came, black people who had middle income and upper income started moving out and going on with their lives. And so what we’re left with is a neighborhood where people have been far removed from the American Dream.

Over time, Mr. Roberts started losing business, so he sold the motel. And from that point on, it started going down and down and down. If you wanted a prostitute you could get one here any time of the night. If you wanted any drugs—heroin, crack, weed, whatever—you could easily get that at this motel. That’s the type of people that this motel did business with: bottom-feeders who prey on people in poverty. And that’s what we experience all over America in inner cities. There it goes. The cookie starts to crumble.

And so, as I was coming out the door of that funeral—the one with all the gunfire—I was thinking I had to do something. And I looked at the motel, and instantly the thought came to my mind: “We need to get that motel. We need to get it now. And we need to turn it into a community development center.”

And then right after that thought was: “How?”

Then right after that thought was: “I’m gonna put a tent on the roof of the motel. I’m gonna hold a vigil up there. I’m gonna raise the money and bring attention to the gun violence and to the deaths.”

And I laughed, you know, and said, “I’d never do that.”

And the next day, that thought would not leave me.

What does it feel like to be called by God? Wow. I think if I had to describe it, I’d say it’s a prompting, an urge to do something that does not go away. And you can try to get rid of that urge, but it just maddens you. It haunts you.

I imagine for some people it may be different. Maybe they have a Moses- type of encounter where God speaks in the burning bush and all of a sudden they get this revelatory thought. But for me it has always been more like an ongoing, haunting thing that was prompting me to do better, to excel and not settle for less. It just kept pulling on me.

I was born in Union City, Tennessee, and I lived in a little town called Kenton, population of about 2,000. I stayed there until I was 8 with my grandmother and my grandfather. My mother left me with them so she could go off to pursue a job in Muncie, Indiana. And later on I found out the real reason she left was because she had a boyfriend and she was gonna get married and they wanted to go and get things set up before I came. But I didn’t find that out for a long time. Being left behind, that hurt. Me and my mom were really tight; we still are to this day. So being left with my grandparents—even though they were wonderful—was traumatic.

And when I moved to Muncie, it was a very violent household. My stepfather was abusive. He was crazy. He’s cool now, but he was crazy then. And when I was about 12 or 13, he got addicted to drugs. And that even made it worse.

I used to get in trouble at school all the time. It wasn’t that I fought every day, but I had a reputation of: “Don’t, don’t mess with him.” I’ve always had that attitude: “If you hit me, I’m gonna hit you. Don’t go to sleep around me, ‘cause if you hit me, somehow, some way, there will be payback.”

I was just a real bad kid. But in fifth grade, I got a new teacher. His name was Joe Stokes. He was white, by the way. Red hair. Very white. And he just stayed on me. Every day. I mean every day. And if that had not happened, who knows? I probably would be doing something illegal. But Joe Stokes, he made me believe in myself.

I stayed in Muncie until I was 18. I played basketball at Muncie Central High School and ended up getting the basketball scholarship to Armstrong State, in Savannah, Georgia. I stayed there for a year, and then I quit playing basketball and moved back to Muncie to go to Ball State. And in around the time I moved back, I had a call to ministry—to want to preach.

It was a gut feeling. I’m just now, in my latter years, understanding it, and learning how to listen to it. So when I had this idea about doing a vigil on the roof, I kind of pitched it to God that if I found one person who agreed with me that it was a good plan, I would do it. But everybody thought it was stupid. My staff members all laughed and joked and begged me not to do it. Then I told my wife, and she begged me not to do it. But there was one last staff member I hadn’t told about it—and he’s not a “yes” guy. When I mentioned it in the staff meeting the next day, he said without hesitation: “Pastor, I think that’s the best idea in the world.”

So that very moment, I stopped the meeting and said: “I’m going to get a tent.”

The first night it was raining. The second night the wind was just blowing so hard, and the third night I think it was raining again. So the first three nights were kinda like: “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” And for the first three weeks I was upset, because I felt like: Man, people ought to get this, you know? Young kids are dying and no one is doing nothing.

But then I came to recognize that you can’t get mad at everyone because they don’t see what you see. I take inspiration from the Book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. The prophet goes up on the watchtower to hear from God. And God speaks to him and gives him a vision and tells him to write it, to make it plain, so the people can run and see it. So I just kind of feel like that’s my job. For whatever reason, I’m the watchman.

Being on this roof has brought me isolation, but it’s also given me perception. The number-one thing I hear are the sirens. Until I came up here, I never realized how many sirens actually go off on a consistent basis and you pay no attention to them. But now I can even distinguish the different types of sirens. Is that an ambulance? A fire truck siren? A police siren? Because if it’s the ambulance and the fire truck siren you know: “Wow, somebody probably got shot.”

I hear gunshots all the time. Even the gunshots that happen ten blocks away sound like they’re next door. I don’t know why, but it’s like sounds are magnified. And unfortunately, I have learned to tell the different types of guns apart from each other. A .25, that sounds more like a large firecracker. A .45 has a ferocious volume to it. Semi-automatics are repetitive: pow-powpow- pow-pow.

New Year’s Eve—that was frightening. In this community, it’s a ritual to shoot off guns on that holiday. So what happened was around 11 p.m., I began to hear sporadic gunfire, gun here, gun there. But at 12 o’clock, there was nothing but guns—small guns, large guns, automatic guns, shotguns. And it can be horrific if you’re in a close proximity of where these guns are being shot. Because at any time a stray bullet could come from anywhere and take you out.

So what I did was, I pulled the futon over me, ‘cause I figured if a bullet came through it wouldn’t hit me because the futon is so padded. I just stayed underneath the futon and slept as best I could. And it really, really sounded like a war zone. There’s no way that a person could have heard all this gunfire and not start to think differently about guns.

In January of 2012, I came down to do two funerals. One was the young man that was killed in Church’s Chicken and another was a young man that was killed at Marquette Park.

It was bittersweet to be back on the ground. I was glad to be down off the roof and to be able to walk around and socialize with people. But the bitter part was to come down for funerals and to see so many young people who looked so hopeless. I think that a lot of kids in this neighborhood feel like they don’t have anything to live for. They don’t have any education, they don’t have any jobs, they don’t have any family, so what’s the point? They’re just like: “whatever.” Whatever happens today, it happens. Whatever. And when you start having that approach toward your own life, you begin to have it toward other people’s lives, as well. And I think that’s where a lot of kids are. Life means nothing. Life has been devalued.

Being up on this roof has made me more compassionate, because it’s made me more keenly aware of things that are going on around me. Every day I ask God to forgive me for not paying attention to people who were hurting. Especially when gun violence is involved. Because I think for a long time I just really did not think about the fact that so many young black men were dying. And it almost seems as if these kids don’t understand the magnitude of what’s going on. For them, it’s almost as if this is normal.

When you turn the light off at nighttime, this tent is really dark. There’s that eerie feeling, that sense of nothingness. And I know this is going to sound strange, but sometimes when it’s dark like that, I think about people who don’t have electricity, and I think about when I grew up, how my mom couldn’t afford things. So that’s what I think about at night: “Man, this is lonely; it is cold; it’s dark. How many people have to live this way?”

If you look north from here at night, you see the lights of the Loop. And there’s been nights that I’ve been on the roof and all the street lights on King Drive have been turned off. And you think, here you have the bright lights downtown, with all the resources and all the things that make it beautiful and you’re in the same city and it’s almost, kinda like, in a different world— the haves and the have-nots.

I mean, everything in Chicago is divided. The educational resources are divided; that’s the reason why you see the schools in one area better than the schools in another area. The police resources are divided; that’s why you see higher crime in one area than you do in other areas. The economic resources are divided; that’s the reason why you have an unemployment rate double in one area what it is in another area. Obviously, there is still systemic racism. I don’t think we can argue against it.

But before I came up here, I used to be really dogmatic about how government ought to do something. You know? Government, government, government. I still think government ought to do its part. But after getting away and thinking and reading, I realize that government can change laws, but they can’t change hearts. It’s always easier to change a law, but as we see even when they change the laws, nothing really changes around here. So changing hearts takes longer; it’s harder work; it’s a tougher task; it’s more daunting. But when you change a heart, it lasts for eternity. So my thing now is to help change people’s hearts.

There have been times when I get depressed, and I feel like it’s taking too long to raise the money. I don’t know if I blame it on God or on people or on circumstances. This is probably the first time I’ve ever said how I feel about it, but I sometimes think that if I were on the North Side and if I weren’t black, I would have been on this roof a night at the most before somebody would have rushed to my aid.

But if I didn’t have hope, I would not still be on this roof, that’s for sure. Not after 87 days up here. If I didn’t believe that things could get better, and if I didn’t believe that I could help them to be better, I would definitely be on a beach in Miami or Jamaica or somewhere, enjoying myself. I hope and pray that I never get to a point to where I have a sense of hopelessness— because I think when you reach a sense of hopelessness, the next step is destruction, is doom.

A lot of times, people say they’re gonna do things to make our community better, and they never end up doing it. And as a consequence, people lose a lot of hope. They get frustrated and disappointed and have broken dreams. That’s why I want this place to be the Taj Mahal of community centers. I dream about it all the time. I dream about what I want it to look like. I dream about the programs we’ll have there. I dream about the people that are gonna be there.

I see a facility that is cutting-edge, that is state-of-the-art and that is the prettiest building on the South Side of Chicago. I see a community and economic development center with entrepreneurial spaces for businesses to help create jobs so that people can sustain their families and take care of their children. I see a full recreation facility, a full theatrical facility and a full technology center. I see facilities where people can get counseling, do conflict resolution, develop life skills.

This motel—it was all about taking people’s lives and destroying them. But the building that we’re going to construct in its place is all about giving people life.

There’s certain laws in the universe that apply to everybody: When you try to do good, you get good back. And in the end, I think that’s what really happened, you know? I spent 94 days on the roof, and I then one morning I got a $100,000 gift from Tyler Perry. I came off the roof that same day. It just happened so quick. There were so many emotions going on, it’s hard to describe.

When I came off the roof that night, it was just people everywhere. Cameras, people, screaming, hollering. It was amazing. It was almost like a ghetto-MTV-type thing. I don’t know what you call it. It was like an awards show, only we weren’t in L.A. We weren’t in Beverly Hills. We were on the South Side; we were in the ’hood. To be a part of something that had so much energy and excitement, and to see all the people in the streets, all different races, was amazing.

And when I got on the lift, I turned around and said, “Goodbye, tent.”

And then we started going down.

It was a celebrative moment, but it was also a preparation moment, a check for myself to let me know: This is awesome, but this is not it; this is not the end.

It’s not over.

Epilogue: After buying and tearing down the old motel, Pastor Brooks still needed another $15 million to build the community center. So in the summer of 2012, he walked all the way across the U.S. from New York to Los Angeles. He raised almost $500,000 on the trip, but as he puts it, “We still have a long way to go.”