A Vital Mission on Chicago's South Side

with Pastor Corey Brooks

In many ways, the South Side of Chicago made me who I am. Growing up there, I was surrounded by black men and women who worked hard, who provided for their families, and who took pride in knowing that everything they had they earned by their own sweat and smarts. It wasn’t easy, and, no, we weren’t all angels all the time. But there was a pervasive attitude among my family and friends that no one was going to hand you anything on a platter. And if you messed up, you better be prepared to take responsibility.

That’s one reason why Pastor Corey Brooks’s mission to revitalize his Woodlawn community means so much to me. I see in his New Beginnings Church, and in his Project HOOD initiative, a belief in the potential of black people on Chicago's South Side to make better lives for themselves and their children. I have sometimes feared that this belief was lost—crime and dysfunction to be sure, but also to the poisonous condescension of a diversity, equity and inclusion mentality that sees poor black people as wards of the state. But, as Pastor Brooks rightly points out and despite all of the hype, DEI has done little for those black families most in need. And yet, by ministering to his community—guiding young men and women toward domestic and financial stability, teaching them the value of honest work and spiritual discipline—Pastor Brooks is actually laying a foundation on which the South Side can rebuild itself

In this clip from this week’s episode, I ask Pastor Brooks about what he thinks it takes to revitalize his South Side community. He talks of teaching young people about the importance of work and how to find it. He talks of training them in the basics of financial literacy and in trades that will allow them gain legitimate employment. We can criticize DEI all we want, but without the kind of practical alternatives he’s building, none of it will mean much. It’s not glamorous work, but Pastor Brooks brings joy to it.

---

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

GLENN LOURY: They call you the rooftop pastor. Tell my audience what that's about. I love the story.

COREY BROOKS: So they called me the rooftop pastor because there was a motel across the street from our church that was drug-infested. Prostitution, a lot of stuff was going on that we needed to get rid of. And they wouldn't sell it to us. We tried everything. So finally I felt led to go on top of the roof and refused to come down until I had enough money to buy it and tear it down so we could start building a community center. So in 2011 going into 2012, I was on the roof of that motel for 94 days, and we finally raised enough money to purchase it and tear it down.

Then, ten years later, we had the property. The building was gone, and we had this idea and this vision about building a fantastic economic and leadership center where we could help transform lives by teaching trades, teaching financial literacy, giving all the things that our community needs to transform it. But we didn't have any money to build it. So we put eight train containers together and I decided to do it again ten years later. On the ten-year anniversary, I went up on the roof again, and I ended up staying, instead of 94 days, I ended up staying for 343 days.

But it was a blessing. We raised over $25 million and, again, like I said, we got over 20,000 new donors. Fox gave me an opportunity to do a spot called “Rooftop Revelations,” and it was a tremendous blessing.

I was stunned by that piece that you had in Tablet magazine, “America works. DEI Doesn't.” Dedicated leader of community transformation, Pastor Cory Brooks, holds forth. “DEI advocates are exploiting the pain of my community to gaslight their opponents, and this troubled me the most because it hurts and hinders our efforts to truly make lasting progress."

That is a quote from your piece. You published a piece in the aftermath of the controversy, brouhaha over President Claudine Gay of Harvard University being forced out. And I'm just wondering what induced you to want to weigh in on that one at that particular moment?

It was not only that issue, which had been brought to the forefront and it was on everybody's mind, everybody was discussing it. It was also some Twitter things going back and forth between Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. So after reading Mark Cuban's views on his affirmative belief in DEI, I decided I wanted to chime in. And after chiming in, I decided to also talk about the situation at Harvard as well.

Because it all related, it all tied together for me. The fact that you keep having these individuals who believe that black folk need their help in order to advance in society. And they keep having these liberal views and they keep putting these ideas and concepts together that, I believe, are detrimental to everything that we're trying to do as a society and as a culture, specifically those individuals who find themselves at the lower end of the spectrum in society, in our community. DEI doesn't help them at all. But it does help those individuals who keep putting forth these beliefs and empowering themselves and enriching themselves to promote these type of beliefs.

But at the end of the day, it does not help, especially, the type of young men that we're trying to help on the South Side of Chicago.

You talk about one of them in the article. I believe his name is Jonathan Watkins. The story is very powerful. He lost his baby girl in what I gathered was a drive-by shooting. He was tempted to cope, get revenge and whatnot. He disappeared on you for a while and came back home. You talk very powerfully about what really matters to his life and what doesn't.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, I think that somehow people believe that individuals who find themselves on the fringes of society, trying to get out of gang life, that somehow American values will not help them or that they believe that these individuals don't believe in American values, when they do. Lots of times, individuals like Jonathan, they understand that the only way they're going to get out of their situation is not by continuing to blame someone for their situation, but they got to take responsibility and become accountable.

When they start to focus on work, when they start to focus on themselves and dealing with their inner problems and issues and start to really focus on becoming better family men, things start to change for them, and they see this.

So in Jonathan's case, it was a long process and it still is a process. But the good news is he's come a long way. He did not do that with the help of DEI. He did not do that with the belief of saying white supremacy is my issue and my problem. He did that with an organization that was coming alongside to assist him to understand that, look, you have to be accountable for your actions. You have to start working. You have to start being responsible. You have to learn how to read. You have to take care of your family. And those are the type of things that I believe and that now he believes that helps individuals to get ahead.

---

---

I'm just looking at my notes here, and I have another quote from the piece that I want to share with the audience.

DEI ideology didn't offer Jonathan a better life. It has no ability to help him. It doesn't offer faith. It doesn't offer meaningful work. It doesn't live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It's manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan's tragedy and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him on behalf of professional class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock and trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real world effects are as negative for our community as those of any other drug that is sold here.

Now, I'm not a pastor, but that sounds like a prophetic voice to me. I gotta tell you that, brother.

Yeah, I thank God for the gift. And I thank God for the opportunity to say it in such a way that people can understand it. The fact that we have so many black liberal elites who are using the suffering and pain of their own people to promote their own agendas and to move themselves ahead in society, it is disheartening. But we see it every single day. And it's amazing that these black elites, these liberals, they go to the same people that they claim are hindering us in order to ask them to advance us. And so I wanted to make that known and I wanted to say it in such a way that would be heartfelt and that people would realize that something drastically needs to happen differently than a focus on DEI.

Tell me about Project HOOD: “helping others obtain destiny.” I assume that's an extension of your ministry.

Yes. So we realized that we had all these problems, and we could either say, the white man is causing all of our issues, and white supremacy is the reason why the crime rate is the way it is and people are killing each other and things are bad and people aren't being educated. Or we can say, listen, let's roll up our sleeves, let's put in the work, and let's fix these problems ourselves and stop waiting on Superman to come in to save the day, because he's not coming.

And so we decided to come up with an organization that is an outreach extension of our church called Project HOOD. HOOD stands for "helping others obtain destiny." And we said, what are the five issues that we believe are hindering people from moving out of poverty and keeping families broken? And so we said, we're going to focus on education, making sure that we help people get educated. So we have programs centered around financial literacy. We have programs centered around a trade. We have mentoring and tutoring.

We also said, economics. So we work hard to make sure that we teach entrepreneurship. We have a class getting ready to come up in two weeks for our sixth and eighth graders that is totally focused on entrepreneurship. And we realized that I think it's upward of 95 percent of black companies don't hire anybody in Chicago. So now we're not only teaching entrepreneurship, we're teaching building capacity, because we need to teach them how to build capacity.

And so education, economics, social ills with all the things that we see with the gangs and with the family structures, we work on that. Spiritual ills, we try to make sure that we push people back toward God. And then health and wellness. And so we really try to focus on those five things and give people an opportunity to transform their lives.

So we have classes with construction. We teach the trades. Just recently, we had a cohort where we're signing up people to take carpentry and construction. We only had 30 spots, but we had 350 people—356 people, to be exact—apply for those 30 spots. That's why we're building a center, so we can facilitate having more students to be able to teach.

Those are the type of things that we're really focused on. It's all focused around transformation, and it's all around this idea of turning this block that was called O Block, because it was named after a young man named OD Perry who was shot and killed. The gangs kept the “O” in his name. It's all about transforming that O Block, OD Perry, to Opportunity Block. And that's the reason why we came up with Project HOOD and that's the reason why we're building this center and that's the reason why we're working hard to transform this neighborhood.

Yeah. Speaking of opportunity I just want to quote one last thing from your piece in magazine.

That's why the recent decision of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to eliminate some of Chicago's top schools in the name of equity was so devastating to our communities. What equity means for these DEI folks is achieving parity with blacks on the bottom instead of strengthening our ability to lift ourselves up. The framework of negative achievement that DEI offers is truly insulting. After 60 years of failing to end intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, and intergenerational illiteracy in my community, the DEI folks have decided to lower America down to our level, right at the moment when we're trying to get out of it.

And I have to tell you, when I read that, I almost jumped out of my chair. Because that is ...

I read your articles!

Oh, I can't take credit for that. I cannot.

Now, I'm not privy to what Mayor Johnson was thinking, but I assume it's that it's an exam to get into the school and not enough blacks are passing the exam to get into the school. I grant you that's an issue. That's a problem that should concern us. But the solution to that problem is not to get rid of a school with exams. The solution to that problem is to minister to our people so that they are raised to the level of being able to meet that standard, it seems to me. To not do that is to sell us short. That's what I've been saying for years. But to hear you say it warmed my heart.

I gotta be honest, I learned it from you. So between you and Shelby Steele and Dr. [Robert] Woodson, I've been able to create a philosophy and ideology that I think fits for where I am and what we're trying to do.

But I would be remiss if I didn't let people know that I've learned a great deal from you, and I really appreciate it, and especially as relates to education and things like that. Because I think you and I, we have a lot of the same views, and you're exactly right, that the attempt to keep dumbing down standards because people somehow think that we need them to achieve and to accomplish, I think that is more of a problem than anything else.

I think we got to constantly keep drilling into our young people, this is the standard. We got to get there. We got to give them the tools necessary. We got to give them everything that they need to achieve. But at no time do we need anyone to lower any standards for us so that we can somehow be accepted.

---