Street Soldier: One Man's Struggle to Save a Generation, One Life at a Time

by Joseph E. Marshall, Lonnie Wheeler

As a public school teacher, Joe Marshall grew sick and tired of watching his most promising students fall prey to the lure of gangs, drugs, and crime, and end up either dead or in prison. Finding that neither the justice nor school system seemed willing even to try to address the underlying problems - to give the kids the kind of information and assistance they really needed - he leapfrogged right over the system and co-founded the Omega Boys Club, based upon the belief that young people of the inner city want a way out of the life they're in, but just don't know how to get out. Since the club's inception in 1987, with a handful of kids in a community center basement, he and his small army of street soldiers have already helped 600 kids out of gang-banging and drug dealing, and pushed, tutored, driven, and even funded 140 inner-city kids into colleges around the country. Four years ago, to direct kids at risk to the Boys Club, he started a weekly radio call-in program called "Street Soldiers" that is now broadcast throughout California to an audience of over 200,000. His callers ask tough questions about gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, and the multiple pressures of life in the inner city today. "Street Soldiers" not only provides callers with a lifeline and listeners with a practical resource for hope, but has repeatedly averted gang warfare and stopped "payback" violence before they occurred.

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000