E-mail a friendCurtis Watkins
airdate June 30, 2008
Curtis Watkins is founder and executive director of LifeSTARTS, a Washington, DC-based organization that represents community interests. He's often a featured speaker on issues related to youth development, violence prevention and community development before congressional committees, city agencies and think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution. Watkins was previously president and founder of the East Capitol Center for Change and purchasing manager for the National Association of Realtors.
LifeSTARTS founder describes how he lost his son to gun violence in 2006 while in the midst of his life's work with at-risk youth. (2:33)
Full Interview. (9:00)
Curtis Watkins
Tavis: Over 10 years ago, Curtis Watkins and members from his church formed a group aimed at helping at-risk children and their families in one of Washington's toughest neighborhoods. The group is called LifeSTARTS and among its many goals is trying to reduce gun violence in the nation's capital. Curtis Watkins, however, lost his own son in a shooting back in 2006. He joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Watkins, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Curtis Watkins: Thank you, Tavis, for inviting me to the program.
Tavis: I'm honored to have you. Let me start by asking what is foremost in my mind, at least, about your son. Take me back to 2006 and tell me about Curtis Jr.
Watkins: Well, my son was killed in southeast Washington and it was due to gun violence. And that was the most turning points in my life that I looked at and I asked God, I said, "Why would this happen to me, because after 10 to 12 years of working in the community to prevent things like this it happened directly for me.
And at that time, I thought I knew what people were going through, but it gave me a whole new foundation about what is the experience of gun violence and losing a loved one due to someone murdering them?
Tavis: LifeSTARTS was an organization that you had already started or started after his shooting?
Watkins: I had started LifeSTARTS in 1998, officially, but had come back in the community in 1996, the very community that I grew up in, which was East Capitol Dwellings. It was right after the Million Man March, matter of fact, to help the community do what they needed to do for themselves.
Tavis: So how, then, does a father first of all just navigate the journey of living beyond your son, number one, but to your earlier point, you'd already started doing this work. So here you are in the streets doing this work, and you lose your own son. You thought what when that happened?
Watkins: I thought that I needed to give it up, because this wasn't supposed to happen to me. And I felt like God had turned his back on me, but the reality, he was giving me another message, and the message was that there are a lot of other young people out in the community that have actually stopped dreaming, and that we need to facilitate and expose them to different things in order for them to grow.
And the interesting thing, Tavis, that within a six-month period we were asked to go into a school that was five blocks from where my son was killed, and believe me, I had a trying time with that situation. I was, like, okay, should I move in that direction? But I knew that was God giving me a signal that I needed to go into a community that needed some young people to see beyond their neighborhoods, beyond the beefing, beyond the gun violence, that they needed to be exposed to something different - the people who care. We look at kids as not at risk, we look at them as a promise, young people.
Tavis: D.C. has the, as we all know by now, the strictest gun control laws in the country, before this Supreme Court ruling, of course, the strictest gun control laws in the country, in part because crime in D.C. has been out of control for some time.
Is it your sense that there's something specific, something unique, something different about the nation's capital that causes this crime to be out of control where young folk are concerned, or is it your sense that this is true with young people, unfortunately, all across the nation?
Watkins: I think it's across the nation that young people are looking for something other than what they see in their neighborhoods and their environments, but there's not a lot of adults who are depositing the time in order for them to see a vision beyond the neighborhood.
And so we and other organizations such as us have said, "Okay, we have to restore our community, and the only way we restore our community is that we have to be in these young people's lives consistently." They have to feel your heart and they have to feel where you're coming from in order for you to touch them, but you can't just drop in one day and drop out the next day.
Tavis: I know what you do every day is to love and serve people so that politics is not your bailiwick, but I wanted to talk to you tonight against the backdrop of this Supreme Court decision. So I can assume - I think I know how you feel about this decision, but tell me what you make of what the Supreme Court had to say days ago.
Watkins: Well, I feel like this is going to create an increase in violence in the community, such as people having assaults with deadly weapons, robberies, breaking and entering. There's an element in the community that will look at this as an opportunity to make money.
Let's be real about it - when you look at an individual saying, "Okay, I can legally purchase a gun and then I can sell that gun for double the money on the community market, I'm going to do that because it's economically a good decision to make." And then, if you really look at it, a person might buy the gun legally and then say someone stole it out their house.
Tavis: What does an organization like yours do to combat this? I've seen your mayor, Adrian Fenty, and others talking about this issue, of course, in the nation's capital. Everybody's talking about it because we wanted to know where Obama and McCain stood on this particular issue. But what's your sense now of what your organization and other organizations like you are going to do to combat this decision, this ruling in the nation's capital until Congress or somebody else - Congress specifically - steps up and says something about this?
Watkins: Well, I feel our organization, along with a lot of organizations in D.C., need to realize that there's going to be some - I'm going to call it percentage of young people who are going to gravitate to some negative behavior because their guns will be more plentiful in the community.
But we need to focus on how do we engage them and take up as much time in positive activity that would allow them to understand that there is life. Beefing is not the answer, but being productive and being a citizen who's going to do the right thing that would create a better community is the way to go. But it's going to take, as they say, a village to change this around.
Tavis: You talked earlier, Curtis, about the persons in the community, and you are right about that, who will see this as an opportunity to make money. There's always enterprise when you get a decision like this that brothers want to get in on - some of them, at least. But I'm concerned about something a little different, which is whether or not you think - and I could be totally off-base on this - but whether or not you think that as one particular part of the community arms itself - let's call that the negative part of the community.
As they arm themselves, the bad people, I wonder whether or not the good people in Washington will feel the need to arm themselves since it is law now and they can have a gun. I wonder whether or not they'll feel the need to arm themselves to protect themselves from the bad guys, so that everybody in D.C. ends up with a gun and it's like the Wild, Wild West.
Watkins: Exactly, and the people in the community, the ones who are doing the wrong thing, they're smart enough to know that if the greater community is arming themselves, they need to arm themselves even more. So as you just said, the Wild, Wild West.
Tavis: So you got an arms race in the nation's capital.
Watkins: Exactly, and I'm praying and hoping that it doesn't come to that, but let's be real about it. The people in the community know if I go up in someone's house and they're armed, I need to be just as well armed.
Tavis: Silly question here - I assume you think about Curtis Jr. every day, and when you do, it does what? I know you never close on the death of a loved one like you close on a house, but as the years pass by, I know you don't stop thinking about him less, but the impact of it on your work is what as time moves on?
Watkins: Well, it impacts me in a way that Curtis had - I have two grandsons, and my life is dedicated to them and my family in a way that I can live a legacy and do something that's going to be beyond just helping a group of people, but helping our entire community. So I'm in tune to, at this point, that it's not about me, but it's about what my son would want me to do and what our community really needs, and I'm committed. It's almost like I have a life sentence to commit myself to the community.
Tavis: And so the organization is called LifeSTARTS Youth and Family Services. His name, Curtis Watkins. He lost his son Curtis Jr. back in 2006 to gun violence in the nation's capital. So we'll keep our eye on what Congress will do now that the Supreme Court has interpreted this law as they have.
Curtis Watkins, stay strong on your work and witness, and I'm honored to have you on the program.
Watkins: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: All the best to you.
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