It is difficult to grasp Aqeela Sherrills' turbulent life. It is flat-out astonishing to consider what he has done with it.

Sherrills, now 36, grew up in Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. In that combative world he was a Crip, wearing blue. On the other side of the tracks were the red-clad Bloods. In one year alone, 1989, Sherrills lost thirteen friends to the gang war.

He tried to escape. He was the only one of his circle who went to college instead of jail. He reshaped his rage and displacement into an ethic of responsibility, first for his own life, and then for his community. At 19 he began working with football star Jim Brown to heal gang violence around the country. In 1992 he brought his message home to Watts itself, gangland's ultimate battleground. With his brother Daude, he was able to forge a historic truce between the Crips and the Bloods.

A truce is not peace. When the ceasefire began to fray, the Sherrills brothers created the Community Self-Determination Institute in 1999 to tackle the overwhelming personal and social issues that underlie crime, drugs, and violence. Sherrills spent an exhausting decade building and running CSDI while taking his message of forgiveness and healing around the country.

When his wife died of breast cancer two years ago, that should have been the bottom. It wasn't. On January 10, 2004, Sherrills' 18-year-old son, Terrell, home from studying theater arts in college, was shot in the back at close range. A Crip may have mistaken Terrell for a Blood because, of all things, he had a red Mickey Mouse sweater slung over his shoulder. Terrell died within the hour.

When Sherrills responded by saying of the killer, "We're going to forgive that kid, you know? Because we're going to hold space for the highest possibility of good to show up in him," he became even more of a mythic figure in America's troubled urban neighborhoods.

He understands gangs as "a surrogate family when the nuclear family has been broken."

"We'll never get rid of gangs," he observes, "but we can instill morals and values in that structure and shift their purpose."

Sherrills came to Baltimore last year to be part of "Breaking the Cycle," a forum held by Centerstage and Urbanite.

Today, Sherrills is still evolving. He is leaving the operational tasks of CSDI to others, and he is focusing on creating a "reverence for human life movement." Urbanite interviewed Sherrills in August after he returned from a four-month sabbatical traveling the world.


A healthy city requires that its citizens be healthy. Gang violence, drug abuse, high school dropouts-all of these things are symptoms of the deeper problem that's rooted in the lack of self-esteem and the spiritual disconnectedness that has taken place with the human being.

How do you begin to address this spiritual disconnect in the individual?

It starts with dialogue. Very rarely do people get together and actually talk about truth.

How do you foster this kind of dialogue?

You don't judge. You don't define people based on the experiences that they have had in their lives, but you hold space for the possibility [that] positive things [can] manifest in life. You create a sanctuary in the life of the human being and allow them to expose the gifts as well as the wounds that are in their heart.

How have you facilitated these types of conversations in the communities you've worked with?

In most cases it's a one-on-one situation. If something happens in the neighborhood, between a couple of brothers, we'll go negotiate the peace between the warring factions. When we sit down with each individual, it's never about the act that actually happened; it's always about what triggered it. There are all these unwritten rules in the neighborhood. Folks feel like they need to do something so they can maintain this way of life. If you kill somebody then somebody else's life has to be taken. So I find out: "Wow, all of this is going on in this human being's life and that's why he reacted in this way."

After years of work at the community level, you are now creating what you call a reverence movement. What does that mean?

I want to be really focused in how I choose to serve in this particular portion of my life. This reverence movement is one of the things I'm really looking at instituting now.

I'm inviting folks over every Thursday night for dinner to have conversations about what it is that we love, what it is that we dislike, the things that make us happy, the things that make us sad. It's creating that sanctuary so folks feel safe enough to expose their wounds. And I'll be the first one to expose myself because when we make ourselves vulnerable and we expose our own taboos, it gives others the permission to do the same. I've seen it happen over and over again. It really boils down to the small intimate conversations that have no real agenda, but are just conversations about matters of the heart.

Do we fear this honesty?

Absolutely. And, you know, it's killing us. Everyday. Because we're in denial about what is really true-where to find the essence of life or even to imagine ourselves living a good quality of life in the future. We have to ignite this dialogue that gets us back into our heart and it's a scary thing.

Why is it scary?

This work entails a lot of everyday betrayal. You have to learn how to be with betrayal and not necessarily judge it. You have to shift your perception of it and see it as a necessary betrayal. Because betrayal is an initiation, you know? It opens the door to forgiveness. And forgiveness leads to compassion. And these are the things that we have forgotten about in our culture. We see vulnerability and humility as weaknesses as opposed to strengths. And we don't understand compassion; we really don't. I mean, we understand revenge. Because there is a disconnect. We somehow believe that other human beings are not us.

What do you mean by that?

We're all the same. If you stand by and watch someone get killed, abused, taken advantage of, and you don't speak up about it, then you are also killing, abusing, and taking advantage of that human being as well. No longer can we stand back and watch these things happen and then think that it doesn't affect us, because every time someone is killed it kills us as well. It desensitizes us to the violence, and we begin to block our own hearts and veil our own eyes.

Where do we go from here? How do we begin to take the matter of our own health into our own hands?

We have to do something that we have feared all our lives and that is to talk to each other. And to expose each other, and to argue. To scream at the top of our lungs. To be passionate about what we believe in. And not necessarily put our hands on each other.

Everybody has been abused in a certain sense but nobody ever really speaks about it. When we dig deep into those things, it creates more space in our lives to be able to imagine ourselves in the future. Culturally, most people in America live life out of the past. Most of us never overcome the mental, physical, or psychological abuse that we experience as young people in our own households and in many cases it's difficult for us to see life through. Until you truly have a profound love for yourself, you can't love anything or anyone else.

Elizabeth A. Evitts, Tracy Durkin, and William J. Evitts contributed to this article.