Motorcycle Ride Raises Funds
for Urban Peace Institute

 
Jacqueline Gethers and Isaura Mendes studied the ''button board" honoring their sons and scores of other homicide victims with tears in their eyes. Row upon row of buttons commemorating young Boston men who have fallen victim to street violence decorated a white banner, which hung yesterday from a chain-link fence in the parking lot of the Grace of All Nations church in Dorchester.

The air in the parking lot of the Codman Square church was thick with the smell of exhaust generated by dozens of motorcyles, whose owners gathered for a benefit peace ride. Boston's Tuskegee Airmen Motorcycle Club organized the fund-raiser for the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, which is a training and resource center for the survivors of homicide victims. ''Terrell Gethers: Peace and Prayer," read one button on the banner, above the picture of a smiling, green-eyed 23-year-old man who died in 2001 after being shot as he walked down Blue Hill Avenue on a Saturday afternoon.

Images of the faces of several other dead youths flapped in the wind as the banner rippled softly in the breeze. Ninety-two motorcycles then roared to life and rolled out of the parking lot for a 15-mile ride designed to help the institute, but also serve as a call for peace in the city's streets, members of the motorcycle club said. More than half the club's members are Boston Police Department officers, said Kenny Israel, who works in the department's gang unit. Because of the department's work with the peace institute, Israel said, the ride was an obvious way for the club, named after the famous World War II unit of African-American combat pilots, to address the violence that has been plaguing the city.

There have been 55 homicides in Boston so far this year. In all of 2003, 41 people were slain in the city. The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute honors a 15-year-old who was slain near Fields Corner in 1993. Brown, a 10th-grader at West Roxbury High School, died after being struck by two stray bullets as he walked to a church youth group Christmas party. Brown's parents, Clementina and Joseph Chery, started the institute in their son's memory. More than a decade later, they remembered him along with several other slain children at the peace ride, which raised almost $1,000.

After the dozens of brightly colored motorcycles roared into the streets, their chrome pipes gleaming under the noon sun, just the families of the victims remained, grilling the hamburgers the bikers would eat upon their return. The group of mourning parents gathered by the button board and reminisced. ''It's hard work to do," Isaura Mendes said of her work with the peace institute. ''You're constantly reminded." Mendes is saddened, she added, by the continuing street violence. ''I don't know why these things happen," Mendes said ''We're trying to bring peace to Dorchester." She fingered the button that she has made for her own dead child. ''You will always be special," it read. Bobby Mendes is pictured on it, smiling broadly, above the bookends of his short life span: ''7/10/72-10/10/95."

Suzanne Smalley / Boston Globe / October 17th, 2004