Each day, we open the paper and examine horrible murders that occur right here and throughout our nation. These tragedies can look like an all-too-common prevalence, but on the identical time one thing so distant and summary that it barely registers to the common reader.
However every identify is an individual who was senselessly killed. Every particular person is a lot greater than a headline: They have been moms, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, mates. Every had his or her personal distinctive desires, ambitions, loves, hopes, fears, worries, joys, and disappointments, however all had this in frequent: every had a lot life but to stay when violence took them.
These victims lived in neighborhoods. That they had households and mates. They didn’t stay in a vacuum however existed as a part of the broader cloth of a neighborhood, a fragile cloth that frays extra with every tragic dying. With every new fraying comes a tidal wave of ache, struggling, and trauma for the numerous individuals who knew and beloved the sufferer.
That’s the reason I’m so proud to work with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute based by Clementina Chery. It’s an unimaginable second in life to fulfill a person whose humanity transcends the tragic occasions she has suffered.
Once you first meet Clementina, her heat smile and interesting eyes embrace you however what you sense beneath is a steely willpower. It’s, at first, arduous to think about the deep tragedy in her life and the way it has formed her work.
Clementina is that uncommon particular person whose life’s work serves as an inspiration to the remainder of us. Her 15-year-old son Louis was fatally struck by gunfire not removed from his Dorchester house in December 1993, an harmless bystander caught between two teams of younger males concerned in a capturing.
On the time of his dying Louis, who was involved about avenue violence amongst members of his era, was strolling to a gathering of a bunch known as Teenagers In opposition to Gang Violence. He was a younger man who was desirous about engineering, who favored to learn, and whose desires included turning into the primary Black president of the US.
Clementina didn’t permit Louis’ hopes for his neighborhood and his friends to die with him. Amid the big ache and penalties to her household life ensuing from her son’s homicide, she determined that the influence of Louis’ life would proceed via a mission to assist the numerous households who suffered related experiences search therapeutic. Thus was born the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute.
The Peace Institute connects grieving households and supplies assets that assist survivors of murder victims deal with the rapid unhappy duties – for example, they supply a burial information – and the long-term help essential to proceed their lives as they arrive to phrases with ache that may by no means go away them. Through the years, Clementina’s crew has expanded their mission to incorporate advocating for survivors of violent crimes earlier than legislators and coverage makers, and creating greatest practices for police departments and different organizations to speak with households.
However Clementina and her Peace Institute colleagues have gone even additional nonetheless. They’ve embraced the perpetrators of those heart-wrenching crimes as they’re launched from jail. A part of their mission is to offer everybody the chance for redemption.
In his e-book “Simply Mercy,” Bryan Stephenson, the founding father of the Equal Justice Initiative, writes that “every of us is best than the worst factor we’ve completed.”
Clementina Chery lives this imaginative and prescient of humanity.
Amid the widespread violence and hateful rhetoric that pervades our society, has there ever been a extra necessary time to heed the message of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute?
We in Boston have been lucky that our cops and neighborhood teams, working along with political leaders, have stored our charges of homicides and different violent crimes decrease than these in lots of main US cities.
However these are statistics. They don’t console households who’re victims of this mindless violence.
The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute is a beacon of hope for our communities, one which factors towards therapeutic and a path ahead for victims’ households, for neighborhoods impacted by violence, and for perpetrators who deserve the possibility for redemption in the event that they need to do the arduous work wanted to earn it. It deserves our help.
Alan M. Leventhal is the chairman of Beacon Capital Properties and served as US ambassador to Denmark from July 2022 to January 2025.
