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| EVENTS |
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| Louis D. Brown's Full Story Louis David Brown dreamed on a wide screen. He was 15 and a tenth grader at West Roxbury High School in the fall of 1993, and he'd already decided he was going places. College was high on his agenda, then graduate school, where he intended to earn a doctoral degree in aerodynamic engineering. But his long term goal, the one he talked about a lot with his family and friends, was to become the first black--and youngest ever--president of the United States. So chances are you might have heard about Louis in the year 2015 or so, when he would have been in his mid-thirties and maybe living in the White House. As a teenager, he was already working towards the goals he set for himself, earning good grades in school and beginning to investigate the problem of crime, violence, and racism that he could see in Dorchester, Massachusetts where he'd lived his whole life. The first step to learning to govern a country, he believed, was to learn about problems in your own community and try to help solve them. But big as his dreams were, and as hard as he pursued them, Louis' dreams were shattered just as he was starting to firm them up. On December 20, 1993, on his way to the Christmas party of the group he'd just joined, Teens Against Gang Violence, Louis was killed. He was an innocent victim, caught in a gun fight on the corner of Geneva Avenue and Tonawanda Street near Fields Corner in Dorchester, just as he was about to enter the subway ramp to catch a train to Mattapan Square. It was the middle of a winter afternoon, five days before Christmas. Louis' parents, Joseph and Clementina (Tina) Chery, tried to protect their son from violence they knew existed in their neighborhood, as it does all over this country. They drove him everywhere, insisted on tight curfews when he was out with friends, and created a strong, supportive home atmosphere for him, along with his five-year-old sister Alexandra and two-year-old brother Allen. But since his death, his parents wonder if there was anything else they could have done. In 1994, Joseph and Tina Chery founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute dedicated to carrying on Louis' legacy of working toward preventing violence in their community. The institute seeks to achieve its mission by developing programs such as, The Louis D. Brown Peace Curriculum that encourages the avoidance of violence by young people, and creating activities that instill values and enrich the lives of the community. |
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