Street roots., May 27, 2016, Page 4, Image 4

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Page 4
Street Roots • May 27-June 2, 2016
UNIFY PORTLAND
Unify Portland is made up of a group of volunteer members, including (top, from left) Demarcus Preston, or “Chicken”; Jermon Walker; (front, from left)
Nathaniel Williams, Keesha Dumas, Gary Wiggins and Larry Summerfield.
Nathaniel Williams unites former Bloods and Crips
in an effort to rebuild Portland's black community
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
r I 'Ihe prevalence of gangs in Portland is a
symptom of a community tom apart,
X said Nathaniel Williams - and it’s only
part of the problem.
“The black community is broken. Its
people are broken,” he said.
But those who want to end the violence
vastly outnumber the gang members, he said.
“It’s about bringing all those people
together.”
That’s why in August, Williams and his
friends created an organization and gave it a
name that’s synonymous with their mission:
Unify Portland.
“First, I want to unify our generation,”
Williams said.
He and his friends have set out to serve as
positive role models and as an example to
youths that it’s possible for opposing gang
members to overcome their differences -
after all, most of Unify Portland’s members
are former Bloods and Crips, now in their
mid-40s, who came together to save their
community.
Williams said he wants Portland’s younger
generations to experience the same sense of
unity he witnessed in the black community
when he was growing up.
“That nostalgia and that essence is gone,”
he said, “and I really want to get that back.”
As a kid, he remembers looking up to the
older men in his neighborhood. The adults
seemed to be united, and friends and
neighbors looked out for one another’s kids.
When Williams started coaching his son’s
football team at Roosevelt High School years
later, he said, that element had vanished.
“I saw a lot of young men that didn’t have
positive male role models in their life,” he
said, adding that years of mass incarceration
has stripped the black community of its
fathers. He has since decided to fill that role
where he can.
These days, when he’s not working on
projects with Unify Portland, he’s attending
class as a 42-year-old graduate student at
Concordia University. When he’s done, what
he really wants to do is teach kindergarten,
he said.
But Williams said when it comes to talking
to kids about gangs, he isn’t the best person
to do it
“I believe the best outreach workers are
those with lived experience,” he said, and he
had never joined a gang himself. But his
friends had.
“It started with them, trying to create a
platform for them to get out and share their
lived experience with gangs, and try to be
effective in the streets, in the community,”
Williams said.
One of his friends, and a core member of
Unify Portland, is Larry Summerfield. He was
one of Portland’s founding Crips.
“Nobody in my family was a gang member
until I brought gangs into our family,” he said.
Summerfield went to prison when he was
18, and while he was locked up, his little
See UNIFY, page 5