DANVILLE – Danville residents gathered Thursday evening to discuss gun violence in their community and initiatives to reduce it.
The “Voices for Change: Youth Action Expo” featured presentations from students in middle school, high school and college, as well as recent high school graduates. Project Success, an organization in Vermillion County that provides services for children and families, hosted the event at the Laura Lee Fellowship House.
The event advocated for Danville officials and the community to implement gun violence prevention programs, said Curtis Beasley IV, a 20-year-old Danville resident and journalism student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“It seems like the frequency at which [gun violence] happens is just a part of Danville’s nature,” Beasley said. “It seems as if we have been desensitized to it as a city.”
While people mourn the death of a person to gun violence, they start to advocate against it and come together to talk about change, he said. But oftentimes, people then disperse and go back to their normal lives and “no actual change is being made.”
That’s why students and other young adults from Danville started this town hall, he said. They do not think city officials and community leaders give gun violence the attention it deserves.
“We would like to urge our city leaders to show a true concern for the volume of gun violence that occurs in Danville, and for them to show that they want to be involved with the community’s effort to stop gun violence in its tracks and keep it from ever happening again,” Beasley said.
Youth propose initiatives to make Danville safer
During the event, students and young adults in the Danville community presented ideas to prevent gun violence and improve the city’s response plan for deaths from gun violence.
TyZah Howard, a seventh grader at Danville’s North Ridge Middle School, gave a presentation on youth basketball nights. Hosted by community members, these nighttime activities would give youth a chance to have fun in safe, well-lit areas.
Maia Roberson, a senior at Danville High School, said she’d like to see more community block parties that would give kids a place to go while also helping keep the community positive.
Shia Johnson, a recent graduate from Danville High School, joined Roberson in her presentation.
“It’s something we should be able to do to reclaim our spaces in the community,” Johnson said. “It shows youth that the community cares about them, connects people to resources and builds relationships between families.”
Young people in the community see Danville and its gun violence for what it is now, Johnson said. And she feels the older generation still views Danville as how it was in the past, and they feel less need for change as a result.
“We’re not just trying to do this for us, we’re doing this for the next generation, the older folk and the adults that are just now becoming adults. Everybody,” Johnson said. “Because we’re all affected by this.”
Another pair of students presented their idea for a gun violence task force, in which community leaders or city officials would go out in the streets and prevent violence before it occurs.
Task force members would identify at-risk youth and give them the resources to prevent them from staying in areas with high gun violence or becoming the perpetrators of gun violence, said Chase Clark, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The task force would also aim to help youth find support in their communities or through therapy, he said.
He’s concerned about the normalization of gun violence in Danville.
“It’s hard to actualize it in your mind that someone just died, and I feel like that’s something that our community shouldn’t be used to,” Clark said. “This is not normal. It shouldn’t be something that happens every couple months.”
The history behind the “Voices for Change” series
This event was the second youth-led town hall in Danville. The first occurred last July.
“This whole thing started last year, June 21st, when Aniyah Davis … was killed at Winter Park,” Clark said.
Aniyah Davis grew up in Danville. She was shot at the park that night, which led to her death, and two others were injured, according to reporting from The News-Gazette. She was 18. No one has been arrested or charged in the case.
Clark was Davis’ classmate, he said.
“I think everyone in Danville knows someone impacted by gun violence, either directly or indirectly,” Clark said.
Austina Cotten, a junior at Danville High School, said she first heard about the shooting on Facebook. Then, someone posted on Instagram about the incident with a picture of Davis’ face.
“I was like, that’s Aniyah, and I cried a lot,” she said. “I feel like I went into a really sad spell for a while, and then I only started to come out of it after I started talking about my feelings.”
Cotten created a poster board on a city response plan to help inform families about their loved ones’ deaths, without them relying on social media for updates, she said.
Phillip and Yolanda Davis, two of the three parents of Aniyah Davis, also attended the event.
“Her murder put a spark to all this,” Phillip Davis said. “So, ever since then, we’ve been trying to support Project Success.”
He said in the past, he has had meetings with several adults with no ideas and no answers for Aniyah’s death.
“You know when you’re on TV, the police come to your house and they tell you that they’re going to come, and they’re going to do their job and this and that. That’s not reality,” Phillip Davis said. “The reality is you aren’t going to hear anything.”
There seems to be a large disconnect between the community and city officials, he said.
“It’s a job to them. There’s no personal connection,” Phillip Davis said. “I did have an officer hug me, but I didn’t even know my daughter was shot at the time.”
Yolanda Davis said they didn’t know what happened to their daughter until they were able to find a police officer to explain what happened.
She said she still grieves her daughter’s death, usually in silence. However, working with Project Success and the youth in the program has given her and her husband a way to work through their grief.
“These kids, they don’t know how much they’re helping us,” she said. “We smile with them, we laugh with them. We’re at every program with them.”
But it can be challenging to make change.
“Just getting people to genuinely care about something, outside of themselves nowadays, it seems like it’s becoming an impossible task,” Phillip Davis said.
Danville officials participate in town hall
Several Danville officials attended the event, including Danville Alderwoman Tricia Teague (Ward 4).
“In this generation, my niece included, all say the same thing: They don’t feel safe,” she said during her speech. “They don’t feel safe doing normal, young adult activities, things that we took for granted when we were their age.”
Whether in the park, at a party or in a barbershop, young people don’t feel safe anymore, Teague said, because they worry that if an argument breaks out “somebody might start shooting.”
Teague wants people to do whatever they can to make change happen, rather than just talk about it, she said.
“We owe it to [our youth] to do something, anything, everything possible to make our community safer for them to exist in it. To simply exist as young adults,” Teague said.
The event also had time allotted for community members to reflect on their experience with gun violence and how they hope the community changes.
At this time, Danville Mayor Rickey Williams Jr. shared a story about a teen he encountered who was hopeless and didn’t care for his life or anyone else’s, and that worried him. He also took the opportunity to respond to critical statements made about city officials at the event.
“I think there are some assumptions on both sides. There are assumptions about me and the city or Chief Yates and the police,” he said. “But guess what? Nobody’s come to talk to us, and that makes me frustrated.
“But as I was sitting there frustrated, especially since some of these folks are my good friends, I realized, I also haven’t invited them. I haven’t sat and listened to what they had to say either.”
When people realize they have done something wrong, they can create change by doing better, Williams said.
“I appreciate the positivity and energy that you guys shared, and we will be talking soon,” he said.