Inside an auditorium at Phelps ACE High School in D.C., more than 200 freshmen and sophomores took in a request that speaks to their ability to focus in class.
“Raise your hand if you or anyone you know has been affected by gun violence in this city,” Rodney Wilson, a special education English teacher, said at the top of the meeting.
More than a dozen hands shot up.
Three students recently died from gun violence, with the most recent occurring last week, said Cara Fuller, principal of the school in Northeast Washington.
Last May, three men dressed in hoodies and face coverings hopped out of a blue SUV and began spraying bullets outside the school entrance, the gunfire whizzing past three students and a security guard who had been chatting in the vestibule next to a metal detector.
The students in the auditorium last week were there to learn about Hugs Not Slugs, a nonprofit that seeks to help teenagers overcome the impacts of growing up in communities where gun violence is frequent and, potentially, end it.
“We have to show these kids that that’s not cool to see somebody dead, to see a friend dead, a sibling dead,” said Anwan Glover, a go-go artist and actor who founded the nonprofit in 2023.
Glover, who played the character Slim Charles on the HBO series “The Wire,” knows all to well what it’s like to grow up with gun violence. He was shot 13 times at 12 years old while growing up in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, he said. One day, as he left his family’s apartment building for school, he said, he saw a body by a trash can.
Those experiences leave an impact on teens’ mental health and how they move through the world, said Glover, also known as “Big G,” which motivated him to start the nonprofit.
Through music, skits featuring local actors and testimonies from returning citizens, entrepreneurs and police, Hugs Not Slugs teaches young people about empowerment, conflict resolution and life skills such as financial literacy and how to safely interact with law enforcement.
Young people in the District are under heightened scrutiny. “Teen takeovers” — where hundreds of juveniles gather in local hot spots like Navy Yard and the U Street corridor — have sometimes ended in violence and with the arrests of minors. While some teens say the gatherings give them fun ways to socialize, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and the D.C. Council have butted heads over how best to keep them under control.
At the assembly, D.C. police officer David Wilkerson stepped from behind a large screen onstage. He said he wanted to teach the students how to get home safe if they’re ever pulled over by police. He asked for two volunteers, who sat in chairs in the middle of room, simulating the front seats of a vehicle.
Then, he gave the teenage boys and girls in the predominantly African American school of 350 students a version of “the Talk.”
The first thing to do, Wilkerson said, is “calm down.”
Driver, put your hands on the steering wheel, he instructed. Passenger, keep them on the dashboard. Next, when the officer approaches, Wilkerson said, roll the windows down and always be clear about any movement.
“The crazy thing about it is that me as a Black man, I just had the same conversation with my own children,” he said. “It’s sad, but it’s true.”
After each presentation — including a routine by the school’s cheerleading team and advice on entrepreneurship — hip-hop blared from the speakers, and students were quizzed on what they had just heard.
Then a trio of local actors stepped onto the floor, demonstrating scenarios students sometimes find themselves in.
In one scene, Rajanee Tabbs, who writes and casts the skits, plays a young woman who is ready to fight a group of girls on the first day of school while her two male friends attempt to talk her down.
“So you telling me you got your nails done, your hair done, and you about to go out here and break all that … and waste money,” said Keith Gaffney, one of the actors playing her friends. “Think about it. There’s other ways to solve it, man.”
After a few minutes, she grows more calm and decides to reconcile with the girls, without throwing hands.
“And we’ll go with you. Just to make sure everything’s all right,” Gaffney’s character said.
Fuller, the school’s principal, was sitting in the audience with her students throughout the assembly. “We feel seen,” she recalled some of them telling her.
That the students there were either freshmen or sophomores was intentional.
At Phelps, Fuller said, school data shows ninth-graders struggle the most with feeling safe and 10th-graders have the highest dropout rate at the school.
“They’re our youngest students, and they need multiple messages from multiple people in multiple ways reinforcing that they’re on the right track and reinforcing their greatness,” Fuller said. “There’s not a lot of people reminding us that our kids are great.”
In addition to bringing organizations like Hugs Not Slugs to Phelps, the school has wellness and restorative justice teams to support students in need of those services.
Lovlanda Pinkston, vice president of the Phelps ACE High School parent-teacher organization, drove the effort to bring Glover’s program to the school. She had seen videos of assemblies the group hosted at other D.C. schools, she said. Since last May, when the shooting occurred, the students have been through a lot and “with everything going on in the city with policing,” she said, they should hear directly from a police officer.
But it was the testimony of Michael Taylor, a returned citizen there with a friend who had not initially planned to speak, that Pinkerton hoped the students listened to the most, she said.
Taylor was 10 when he started gambling. Then, the D.C. native said, his “bad habits” got worse. He stole cars and drugs, leading to several stints at the Oak Hill Youth Center, a now-closed D.C. juvenile detention facility known for being overcrowded.
At 16, he shot into a crowd after getting sprayed with mace for something he said he wasn’t involved in. At the time, Taylor later said in an interview, he believed he was doing what he was taught growing up in Congress Heights, a neighborhood in Southeast Washington: If “somebody do something to you, you do it back.”
One of the bullets hit a woman in the back, and he was charged as an adult and later convicted of attempted murder, among other counts. Taylor spent about two years in the D.C. jail’s juvenile block until “the day I turned 18, they put me in the big boy jail,” he said.
Overall, Taylor spent almost 17 years incarcerated at nine prisons across the country. For much of that time, he was a self-described “hothead,” until a knife fight at 25 forced him to reevaluate his life.
“I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this dumb stuff,’” he said. “And that was when I started wanting more out of life.”
He read self-help books, earned his GED and converted to Islam. After getting his case reviewed through the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, he was released early in June.
In the dark gymnasium, Taylor, now 33, had only a few minutes to tell his story. The students had been testing that day and were restless. His voice, quiet and mumbling, echoed softly throughout the room as he talked, unsure whether he was getting through to the teens before him.
If he connected with just one student, Taylor later said, that was enough.
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