Aqeela Sherrills and the 1992 Bloods-Crips truce of Watts, CA
The Reverence Project has a mission to provide innovative community-centric services to survivors of crime through healing centered engagement, shared safety advocacy, and community leadership training. TRP’s vision is to shift the current social philosophical culture of shame, guilt, fear and violence to a loving culture that embraces healing through truth, compassion, forgiveness and a deeply internalized reverence for the spirit of humanity.
Website: www.trproject.org
TEDx Talk
BIO
Aqeela grew up the youngest of ten children, in the Jordan-Downs Housing Projects in the Watts community of Los Angeles, California. At the age of 19, he began working with football star Jim Brown and co-founded the Amer-I-Can Program, Inc. to heal gang violence around the country by negotiating peace treaties in various cities. In 1992, Aqeela and his brother Daude Sherrills, along with several others, forged the historic peace treaty between the Bloods and Crips in Watts. In 1999, in order to address the overwhelming personal and social issues and trauma experienced by members of the community, Aqeela and Daude created the Community Self-Determination Institute. On January 10, 2004, Aqeela’s 18 year old son Terrell, home from studying theater arts in college, was shot and killed. Determined that Terrell’s death not be in vain, Aqeela launched The Reverence Project to develop comprehensive wellness centers in urban war zones in order to introduce those who suffer from high levels of trauma to alternative healing technologies to support individuals on their healing journeys. The Reverence Project was incorporated as 501(c)3 public charity in 2014.
PROFILE
Aqeela Sherrills grew up in the crime-infested Jordan Down housing project of Watts, California and was soon drawn into the South Central Los Angeles gang world, identifying with the Grape Street Crips (Stoltze 2012). In 1988 he escaped the violence for college at Cal State Northridge where he had a transformative experience one night reflecting on his own actions of infidelity that infected a girlfriend with an STD. He decided that he was meant for more and chose to come clean about his actions and his childhood of violence and sexual abuse (Sherrills 2016). He realized for the first time in sharing his story, that he had never questioned the violence around him growing up because it would have meant he would have to question the pain of his own childhood. Instead he directed his outrage outward. He realized gangs were “a surrogate family when the nuclear family has been broken.” (Healing Works 2016) This epiphany compelled him into a deep inquiry about justice, racial discrimination and his own experience, and when he returned to Watts, he was instrumental in bringing about a 12-year ceasefire between rival gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. Working with his brother Daude, former football player Jim Brown, and rival gang members willing to talk, they gradually transformed gang member perspectives from one of retribution to forgiveness and reconciliation. “We’ll never get rid of gangs, but we can instill morals and values in that structure and shift their purpose.” (Healing Works 2016)
The historic ceasefire was formalized in a written peace treaty in 1994, based on the 1949 ceasefire agreement between Israel and Egypt as a template (Stoltze 2012). But that was not all. In 1999, Sherrills and his brother formed the Community Self-Determination Institute (CSDI) which provided counseling, emergency violence intervention, and education programs. He was committed to working to alleviate the underlying societal and individual challenges that fueled violence, addiction, and crime. Prior to the ceasefire, the LA murder rate was exceeding 1000 deaths per year. In the years following the peace treaty, gang violence and murder rates declined significantly, and now LA has the lowest homicide rate in nearly 40 years (Transform 2010). Sherrills has been asked to consult on peace-making in Belfast, Ireland, the Balkans, Russia, and Holland, and is now actively working in the Newark, NJ and New York City area.
Sherrills has since built a movement around his success called the Reverence Project. Founded in 2007, the Reverence Project integrates intentional dialogue, restorative justice, art, music, dance, and wellness to transform cultures of violence and fear into those of compassion and forgiveness.
That ability to forgive oneself is what I understand as Reverence. To forgive doesn’t mean to condone, nor does it mean to forget. It’s a creative exploration and analysis of the circumstances that happen…Reverence is not what we see or experience, but how we choose to see the experience. I call this type of seeing “beholding”. Beholding is the capacity to hold space for the highest possibility and probabilities of good to emerge from the experience because we are not our experiences. (Sherrills 2016)