The Other Side of the River

The tweet said the protestors were headed to Greater St. Mark Family Church, blocks from the Ferguson, Mo., border.

The GPS indicated a five-minute trip and for the first four minutes and 30 seconds, the scene resembled could have been in almost any town in America on a still summer evening. Then, in the distance, the faint sound of honking horns that continued long past the cutoff for simple road rage pointed out the destination.

Within seconds, more car horns drowned out the car radio. On the evening of Tuesday, August 18, nine days after 20-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead in the street by a police officer in the middle of a summer afternoon in Ferguson, every motorist turning down Chambers Road suddenly became a witness to the "Hands up, don't shoot," protests in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown.

As the cars slowly passed, the streets were lined with enough people for a championship parade. One young man in the middle of traffic — one of the most spirited demonstrators — was still aware enough and concerned enough to let those whose rental cars didn't have automatic lights know that dusk had settled and it was time to turn on the headlights.

Finding a place to park on a side street took less than a minute. Judging by the energy from the crowd, the looting and police dogs of a few nights before were no more an obstacle to the protests than a thigh-high fence. For the next hour, between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., there was no letup in the cries for justice. The beauty of this exercise is that, while unified, these human beings, all with very different ideas on how to protect those in Michael Brown's demographic, would be safe and not have to fear a similar tragedy. Such is the power of unity and peaceful protest.

Everyone had ideas. One man suggested change would be hard to come by unless money is eliminated. Another man pleaded for a police force that looks more like the community it is charged to protect. A woman called for a mass boycott of local business, while her friend said guns and drugs need to be removed from the black community. One quiet but observant man standing outside a nearby apartment complex said the local police have been bullying people in Ferguson and the nearby communities of Beverly Hills and Bell Fallon for far too long. He also expressed a desire for economic change. "I'd say more jobs out here," Wil said. "Opportunity even for felons. Give a second chance to 'em."

On Wednesday morning, across the Mississippi River inside a small brick bungalow in East St. Louis, Ill., opposite the high school, Brian Woodward and Shane Fast, a former college football player and now ninth-grade defensive back and strength and conditioning coach for the storied football program at East St. Louis Senior High School, sat and discussed the events in Ferguson, only 12 miles away. The ministry they have built and operate, Rebirth: East St. Louis has been in the community for five years, serving the students at the high school, with the express goal of empowering youth to change East St. Louis. Each year more than a hundred of the nearly 1,500 students at the school come in contact with the program, which in addition to Bible study offers mentoring, ACT and academic prep classes, help with reading and comprehension, academic monitoring and enrichment.

But those goals, while important, are not all Rebirth aspires to be. What Fast and his staff really offer, beyond time and attention, is something more. In a city that is virtually all black, in the shadow of Ferguson, where the shooting of Michael Brown exposed an enormous racial divide in this country, they offer something needed, something apparently missing in Ferguson; the possibility of racial reconciliation. And that may be one reason — a small reason but a reason nevertheless — that the students in the Rebirth program look at the events in Ferguson, which they sometimes call "the other side of the river," and are in some ways perplexed.

On their side of the river, at least in that small house across from the high school, there is no conflict. Fast and the other staff members are all white; the students all black. They have come here, and have been here, for one reason: to work together to bridge the racial divide, to build trust, and to show that it is possible to live in harmony.

The students have experienced a small glimpse of what might be possible when the dream becomes tangible.

Prior to August 11, East. St. Louis would appear to be the city ready to explode. It has struggled with violence and corruption for more than a century, including a race riot in 1917 that left at least 39 black Americans dead. Once a destination for immigrants and others to find work, like many Midwestern cities, over the past 50 or 60 years, as factories have closed the economy has rapidly declined and the population dwindled from 80,000 to fewer than 27,000.

When the jobs left, white residents fled, and the racial makeup of East. St. Louis changed. In 1940, while East St. Louis wasn't as white as the suburbs on the other side of the Mississippi in St. Louis County, it was still only 22 percent black. By 1980 it was 94 percent black and currently stands at around 98 percent black.

To those not familiar with the ghetto, East St. Louis may look like a scene from a "Feed the Children" PSA. The majority of the buildings, either residential or commercial, are old and worn down, sometimes burned out, and the city feels abandoned. It's the same elsewhere — the West side of Atlanta, parts of Chicago and in many other American cities. But in East St. Louis, the feeling permeates throughout nearly the entire municipality. Unemployment hovers around 15 percent, and in 2013 it had the highest murder rate in the nation, 17 times the national average.

At first glance, Ferguson appears more suburban. In the historic downtown, there's a brewpub — the Ferguson Brewing Company — and the Cork Wine Bar. And when approaching the city from I-270, the George Carlin joke about America becoming a shopping mall comes to mind. Box store developments and highways separate neighborhood developments and make it easy to pass through without stopping. Like other communities in north St. Louis County, Ferguson has been experiencing white flight for decades. As Radley Balko recently pointed out in The Washington Post, a loophole in Missouri law allowed a single subdivision to separate from the rest of a municipality. The result is that much of North St. Louis County is virtually segregated community by community, and Ferguson is in transition. Since 1990, the percentage of black residents in the aging suburb has more than doubled, to about 65 percent. The social problems that seem so pronounced in East St. Louis were, until recently, less visible in Ferguson. They are precisely the reason Shane Fast came to East St. Louis five years ago and why he has been there ever since.

Shane Fast never viewed life through the same lens as many people. He grew up in Union, S.C., a racially diverse town where he played baseball and football with teammates from both cultures and never thought much about it. Even as highly charged racial situations were taking place, from the O.J. Simpson case to that of Susan Smith, the young mother who drowned her children in Union and then tried to blame the crime on a black man, Fast was not completely aware of the deepening racial divide in America.

He describes himself as "not the guy who was born running a 4.5 4.6," Fast said. "I was born running a 5.2, had to learn to run that fast."

That strong work ethic was wired in his DNA from an early age. He cut grass from childhood all the way through high school and would do landscaping in between his own two-a-day workouts. During the football season, the morning after playing 80 plays during a Friday night game for the Union Yellow Jackets, he would dig irrigation ditches for 12 hours.

After beginning as a free safety, he moved to outside linebacker in favor of Parade All-American Rodney Crosby. The Yellow Jackets won the 1999 3A State Championship and Fast had a plan for the future. Academics had always been a strong suit and he applied to the Air Force Academy, where he planned to try out for the football team as a walk-on. He received his congressional recommendation from Congressman Jim DeMint and a response arrived in the mail on December 31, 1999.

Fast was rejected because of asthma. He was crushed.

He had applied nowhere else, and had no backup plan. Fortunately, his mom had saved all of the college information he had received in the mail in a box. They went through it and Fast applied to all of the schools with a free application. This led to an academic scholarship to Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. He successfully walked on with the football team. After redshirting his freshman year, he earned some playing time on special teams and eventually earned an athletic scholarship.

A linebacker at only 180 pounds, Fast tried to persuade his coaches to let him convert back to safety. "They said I was too slow," Fast said. "So I ran track and outran all of the DBs on the team so they said ‘OK, you can play safety.'"

He eventually worked his way up to second-string safety behind D-I AA All-American Matt Nelson. Fast earned academic all-conference and all-district honors, graduated in 2004 with a B.S. in biology and then earned a master's degree the following year in biology from Converse College. His future was unlimited.

It is the second day of practice for the East St. Louis Flyers and after an unusually mild summer in the Midwest, on this afternoon the sun is out and the air is sticky. The familiar chorus of high school football coaches channeling their inner Lombardi can be heard from every corner of the field save for the near sideline by the far end zone. There, Fast is trying to line up a group of freshman defensive backs for footwork drills. After an hour of work, he finally raises his voice above sea level.

"Why would you do that?" Fast asks a player who jumped in between two others, not acknowledging that Fast instructed them to line up shoulder-width apart 13 seconds ago. "You've just gotta think, man."

There is little visible talent in the group beyond an earnest spirit. For many this is their first experience ever playing organized football and Fast uses all the patience and millennial sensitivity he can muster while starting with the basics. The fundamental session includes one-man sled tackling, ball skills and backpedaling. This includes a drill in which the DBs start backpedaling late to learn how to recognize when a receiver gets too close and eats up the cushion.

Still athletic, wiry and intense, there are countless times Fast drops into a stance faster than those 16 years younger to illustrate proper technique. One phrase he repeats throughout the day, "Stance, alignment, keys." Get in a proper stance, align properly against the receiver and read the key offensive movements once the play begins. When the defense goes up against the offense toward the end practice, the result is not yet pretty, but they hold strong and show something to build upon tomorrow.

That's the goal. That's always the goal.

Shane Fast coaches proper technique. (Dave Preston)

Apart from its reputation for crime and despair, to outsiders East St. Louis is known for producing exceptional athletes. The school's football program is the most successful in Illinois, winning more than a half dozen state titles and a national championship. High school alumni include Pro Football Hall of Famer Kellen Winslow Sr., Olympians Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Dawn Harper, Darius Miles of the NBA player and many, many more. According to Pro-Football-Reference.com, the school has sent 16 players into professional football, including stars like Bryan Cox and Kerry Glenn. In fact, the city's two identifying characteristics, its racial makeup and its storied football team, are two factors that called Shane Fast to the city, and it is no accident that Fast has chosen to begin his work here, with the players on the football team.

"At the end of the day if everybody is wearing the same shoulder pads, helmet, jersey and pants, it doesn't matter — rich, poor, white, black, in between, we're all on the same team," Fast said. "If you want to be successful, you have to work together. For some people their first experience with other races is in a sports setting. It might begin breaking down perceptions or stereotypes, biases, whether it's a player or a coach."

He first came to realize this while at Wofford as he blossomed into a man, finding his place academically, athletically and even socially. Yet his life, nevertheless, felt empty. He had never dealt with his issues of not getting into the Air Force Academy, with the death of his dream. "A lot of guys would get kicked out of the Air Force once they got there for asthma," Fast said. Former Air Force Academy head coach Fisher DeBerry had a connection at Wofford and it was common for those rejected by the Academy to show up at Wofford. "Every time one of those guys would come in, you'd be reminded of it."

Medication he took for ADD only seemed to make his depression grow and he wondered if his life had a purpose. He would look outside, at the railroad track, and think about what it would be like to lay down upon it.

The summer before his junior year things came to a head when his parents split. Another kick in the teeth came during football season. Fast worked his way up from fifth string to second, behind Nelson. "I'm making a bunch of plays he (the injured former second stringer) comes back," Fast said. "I was playing better than him and ... I wasn't getting any reps. So I went from ‘It's gonna be hard to keep your spot' to ‘I got no reps.'

"That's when I went to my dorm room and there was a Creed CD I had and the song said, ‘Hold me now / I'm six feet from the edge and I'm thinking maybe six feet / Ain't so far down.' I was just playing that and my roommate Tommy Chandler, walked in and was like, ‘What are you doing? Snap out of it.'"

Earlier that year Chandler had become a Christian. Fast had grown up in the church, but when he learned of his roommate's conversion, he thought out loud, "I don't wanna hear this shit." Over time, however, and with his roommate's help, Fast said he "dedicated his life to God" and saw his desires begin to change.

Fast no longer found his self-worth in personal achievements. Instead, he started to notice other things outside himself. In one of his classes, he was assigned the book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" by the psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum, which discusses racial identity. He walked into the school cafeteria, looked around, and realized all the black kids really do sit together, even his teammates from football, something he had never really noticed before.

The realization gave his life purpose. Success did not mean making the first string or graduating from the Air Force Academy. It meant extending himself, reaching out and connecting with others. He decided to invest more time into relationships with his black teammates and classmates, not just exchanging high-fives and pleasantries, but actually talking. As someone with a more mixed upbringing than the average person, he realized he could use this to make a difference but had not been doing it.

A few weeks after coming to faith, Fast heard a former college football player at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga named Mo Leverett, who developed a passion for urban ministry, speak. In 1990, he moved across the street from one of the most notorious public housing facilities in America, New Orleans' Desire Projects. He began the Desire Street Ministries as a volunteer coach on the Carver High School football staff, enticing players with offers of free pizza to attend Bible studies and academic enrichment services.

By 2005, his Desire Street program grew to include a 36,000-square foot community center, its own private high school (Desire Street Academy), a medical facility and a 60-person outreach staff that included many of the young men that came through the program themselves.

"Katrina brought out the worst in all of us," Leverett said of the storm's effect on the program. The neighborhood was devastated and the program struggled. He was eventually replaced as executive director in 2008 by former Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel and the organization soon relocated to Decatur, Ga. Leverett left New Orleans in 2008 and began Rebirth International with the goal of replicating what he did with Desire in other parts of America, including in smaller, troubled communities, the kind people say to be out of before the streetlights come on.

While taking a five-day seminary class from Leverett in Orlando, Fla., in 2008, Fast had dinner with him. Leverett mentioned that he hoped to set up a program in East St. Louis, which Fast had to be informed was not in Missouri. "He came back the next day," Leverett said, and asked, "‘Would you be willing to take East St. Louis off of the list?'"

Leverett presented Fast with a loose framework of how to begin and they traveled together to East St. Louis. Fast immediately began raising funds and filling out the necessary paperwork to establish Rebirth: East St. Louis. With his new bride Kristin and their dog, they moved on Feb. 3, 2009. He asked to volunteer at the high school and was soon cleared to work out with the team. It was time to act on his beliefs.

It's reasonable not to expect a parade walking into the weight room as a new volunteer for the 2008 Illinois High School Association 7A state champions. Fast would have settled for a simple "Hey, this dude is gonna help us out." But he didn't even get that. He had to introduce himself to the team, the only white face in the locker room. He was not embraced.

East St. Louis legend and former assistant coach Marion Stallings describes the early days with Fast the best. "First you gotta be a little cautious," Stallings said. "'What's your angle?' Around here, you're always wary of outsiders."

East St. Louis is one of those "everybody knows your name" places, but it is also sensitive toward its national image. When outsiders say your home is the worst place in the world without ever visiting, especially when the majority of residents work hard to do the right thing, they don't have a great deal of credibility. Besides, well, white people don't typically hang around East St. Louis. Some students and parents even wondered if Fast was an undercover police officer.

This did not bother him. He doesn't consider himself special. He understood he was coming to work, to get something done, and that he would have to prove himself by his actions. "If you come in from the outside and you don't bring resources," Fast said, "it is very arrogant to believe your presence alone will help."

His first act to ingratiate himself with the team took place when head coach Darren Sunkett had to leave for a week in the spring. Fast took the opportunity to lead the offseason conditioning program. When Sunkett came back, he was so impressed it led to him putting Fast in charge of strength and conditioning, a post he's held ever since.

Fast looked around and was surprised that such a dominant program had such a poor weight room. There were only two squat racks, one bench press and the dumbbells didn't exceed 35 pounds. Fast, his wife and some of the players contributed manual labor and built Olympic platforms. He was then able to persuade a health club to donate $20,000 of in-kind equipment.

He next negotiated a buyout of old weight room equipment from Wofford College and he and his wife rented a truck and drove the equipment up from South Carolina. In total, he pulled off a $100,000 weight room renovation for around $6,000. "It was just kind of exciting to be in on that and to see what an impact it made as far as the faculty or the coaching staff taking notice," Kristin Fast said. "Like ‘Oh you're serious, you really care about this place.' It had a more positive impact then we had even expected."

The poet Maya Angelou said, "Your eyes should light up when your child enters the room,"
and when Fast sees the Rebirth students one late-August afternoon streaming into the house, his eyes show the grin his mouth suppresses. They barge in like any group of teenagers, boisterous and LOUD. Fast and Woodward immediately give some of them a hard time about missing an activity the previous day. One quiet student follows the rules and asks for a bottle of water, to which Woodward replies, "There's always a bottle of water for you."

School schedules have come in. The students share that information and begin to complain about the length of football practice. Slowly, the conversation steers toward Ferguson. None of them quite knows what to think about it. As only a high school student can, one of them glibly suggests that if looters were going to take anything from the stores, they should've taken "dishwashing soap." They also talk about how the store owners that suffered from looting will be fine if they have insurance, which prompts Fast to give them all a quick lesson on how insurance works.

The conversation turns more serious when a student who has a parent living in Ferguson speaks. "It's crazy over there right now. My parents won't let me be over there until things cool down," he said.

There is nothing remarkable about the conversation except for the fact that it is taking place at all between a group of black students and several white Rebirth staff members, the kind of conversation that has become so commonplace in the program that no one really notices anymore. Yet it is precisely the kind of conversation that needed to take place more often not only in Ferguson, but in white communities.

There are programs in Ferguson, too, and now, in the wake of the Brown shooting, there will certainly be more, for as Rev. Al Sharpton admonished ministers in his eulogy for Brown there were "more folks more worried about getting on the program than developing a program." In East St. Louis, at least in this one program, in this one small house, they have a jump-start. And a tangible impact. In only one example, last year the students enrolled in the ACT Prep class averaged a one-point increase; one went from a 12 to a 19.

But the real fruit of Rebirth can be seen and heard in the jokes and the easy banter back and forth between staff and students. Growing up in East St. Louis, the kids have had little to no contact with white people, just as many whites, have little interaction with blacks. Yet in a very short while, the students in the Rebirth program have grown to where they stop by just to say hello to Fast and the others on the way to summer football practice. And in the process, Fast has found himself a new place to call home.

He is disappointed he still has yet to buy a house in East St. Louis, one of his goals since he first arrived. After several attempts fell through, "We felt like maybe it was a sign saying be patient," Fast said. "Wait till you actually know people in the community so you're not just plopping in. Wait till you get relationships down a whole street or whole block." He realized just how much he was going to be gone during the day and even though he was establishing relationships with the kids, doing so in the community was a different story.

He now lives in O'Fallon, Ill., about 12 miles away from the school, but at first he rented a home in nearby Fairview Heights, where students were free to study or even spend the night if they wanted to. One year he coached the varsity defensive backs, and he would pile them all in his car on Monday nights and grab some pizzas. They would all sit and eat in his living room for a while and play with his young daughter, Halle, and then break down film with them before driving everyone home. "I think you've got a group of guys like that that see I'm committed to them in a holistic way," Fast said. "Not just doing Bible studies, but I actually want you to know what you're getting into on Friday nights. I want you to be excellent in football just as much as I'm gonna ask you about your grades."

"It's just a consistency thing. Guys seeing that generally they're not just a means to an end for you, but you genuinely care about their future."

That kind of care comes through in surprising ways, and each time it does, it builds a bond. In 2010, the East St. Louis Flyers football team was one of the top-20 teams in the country and in headed toward the state playoffs when it was learned one of the Flyers didn't live in East St. Louis.

The team was angry and upset. So was Fast. They knew that players all over the state sometimes lived outside their respective districts and that officials often looked the other way. They felt singled out, not just because they were a threat, but because they were from East St. Louis. Here, once again, were people in power keeping them down, taking away something they felt they had earned.

Yet in the end Fast asked them a simple question: Did they break a rule? Everyone had to concede it was true and learn to swallow a very bitter pill.

For all his commitment, there was one thing for which Fast was not prepared. He himself had to talk to a counselor to figure out exactly how to deal with murder.

Take a drive down by the school on State Street and it is reasonable to ask, at first, where East St. Louis' notorious reputation comes from. This is considered one of the safer parts of town and while the homes don't have a white picket fence with 1.5 kids and a dog behind them, nothing overtly screams danger. Then after a few turns behind the football stadium, a telephone pole demands attention. Adorned with a cross and two teddy bears, it is a sign that a life at that spot was taken far too soon.

Murder has come closer to some of these kids' doors than it ever should. It has touched virtually everyone and although Fast won't discuss the particulars due to privacy concerns over his students, he has had to learn how to deal with young men losing teammates, friends and family. The counselor taught him not to make them relive those traumatic situations too often, but not to ignore them either. There has to be a balance, recognition that something is broken. One has to learn how to accept the pain and move forward, how to be thankful to still be alive.

Thursday morning is staff prayer time for Rebirth. Each of the four full-time staff members, Fast, Woodward, Rachel Kirchoff and Mollie Rogers, takes time to give thanks out loud and ask for God's help in their community.

About 30 minutes into the day, it is finally time to address the elephant in the room, the previous night in Ferguson. On Wednesday, Aug. 19, police told protestors to be off of the streets by dark. In the early evening, they started arresting people, including journalists finding shelter in a fast food restaurant. The evening deteriorated into a scene reminiscent of the racial and political riots in late-‘60s as protestors and news staff alike ran for cover from rubber bullets and tear gas canisters wielded by overzealous police officers. Twitter was on fire as reporters and citizens posted updates.

Woodward stood at the dry erase board and began talking about something Shane Fast had written a few days earlier on Rebirth's blog, his take on what was happening in Ferguson. Usually, the blog gets only a few hundred readers a week, but this post drew more than a hundred in less than a day, leading Fast to post it on CNN's citizen journalism page, iReport.

As they talked, Kirchoff and Rogers revealed they were not comfortable commenting on Ferguson on social media because they feared a racially charged reaction. One noted that when they mention to people they work in East St. Louis a common response is, "Aren't you afraid you're going to get shot?"

Woodward then told a story about a conversation he had just had with a man while standing in line at a nearby restaurant. Woodward revealed that he worked in East St. Louis, and the man mentioned he was a former police officer. The conversation quickly turned to Ferguson, and the ex-officer explained the proper protocol for the use of deadly force. He then paused and said some version of "excuse my terminology." Woodward knew something unpleasant was about to come out of his mouth. The man then said, "I know some niggers (a word Woodward would not say) but I also know a lot of black people just as white as you and I."

Something he noticed immediately, besides the obvious racist terminology, was the man's perspective: "He just made it sound like black people are OK in his book if they're like white people," Woodward said. "I felt like it exposed some of what I see on a regular basis unless you are interacting in different communities, different racial communities, [and] have friends of different race. In other words he's saying ‘I don't understand why more black people can't be like white people.'"

In his CNN post, entitled "A White Man's Response to Ferguson," Fast shared part of his own perspective on racism with another story:

Although I grew up visiting the Atlantic Ocean, I recently traveled to the Gulf of Mexico with my family and recognized an interesting illustration of our society's view of racism. There is a striking difference between these two bodies of water: clarity. The Atlantic is darker and you can't see your feet once you're 12 inches in the water. The Gulf, however, is clear and provides a great view of the ocean floor, even at depth.

While there we heard a common phrase: "I see a stingray! Be careful, move toward the beach!" My wife and I had different reactions to this. I laughed. She, as a loving mother should, took it more seriously. I explained my reaction: "Kristin, there are also many stingrays in the Atlantic. In fact, we've caught them surf fishing, near the shore. It's a reality that they're present, but you can't see them, so you don't think about them."

Fast recognized the Brown shooting revealed racial tensions that were there all along, and exposed a community that had done little in advance to help the situation. That was precisely the reason he was in East St. Louis, and precisely the reason Rebirth exists. Instead of simply addressing issues of poverty and education, by building trust Rebirth tries to address the root of the trouble, America's growing racial divide and the denial that racism still exists.

The chairman of Rebirth's board of directors, Curtis Gilbert, is familiar with the racial tensions in metropolitan St. Louis. The lead pastor of the Metro East branch of the St. Louis church, The Journey, and Shane Fast's best friend, Gilbert, who is black, leads a congregation that's 95 percent white. "I am not condoning the riot, but I think Martin Luther King said it best: ‘The riots are the voice of the unheard,'" Gilbert said. "And so when you have years upon years upon years of marginalizing minorities and it's really been there under the surface for all this time.

"In the end, we are desperate for justice for Michael Brown, but if we are honest the conversation is much bigger. The conversation needed to happen before Michael Brown even happened. Even when this is laid down to rest, I can't let us (his church) go back to how it was."

Rebirth tries to have this conversation almost daily. One of the things that impresses Gilbert the most about Fast is how quickly he has been able to gain credibility with the students and their families. A native of the area, Gilbert knows exactly how hard it is for outsiders to earn trust in East St. Louis. "He has a gift to put people at ease," Gilbert said. "A gift to communicate to these young men in a way they feel affirmed and encouraged." The gift to have that conversation before Michael Brown even happened.

The program started with little more than Fast's commitment, and for a time the workload made him feel as if he were burning out and caused him to consider leaving. In 2011, he was able to hire a full-time employee, seminary student Michael Berttucci, who had played tight end for Wheaton (Ill.) College. Although Berttucci has since left, Woodward came to the program from Accenture, in the corporate world, and now works for Rebirth at half his former salary. Rogers graduated from UNC-Wilmington and joined the staff in late 2013. She works as a volunteer coach with the distance runners and is using Fast's example to connect with the girls' track and field team; she held her first study group with three girls on Sept. 8. Kirchoff has been with Rebirth full-time for about a month and another staff member, Chris Novikoff, has just started.

"Let's really jump in with the city and pursue the things that are important to the city." Shane Fast coaches drills. (Dave Preston)

Now, they are all determined to expand the program beyond the school's athletic department. "We're going to pursue a church plant, having a neighborhood community center growing a staff team, housing and economic development," Fast said. "Kind of the whole nine. Let's really jump in with the city and pursue the things that are important to the city. We've got a heart for the city, let's do it with them."

The school agrees it is time for Rebirth to reach more of the student body and expand the program beyond the athletic department. Assistant Principal Destyne Belk would like to see the students to participate in five hours of community service and she feels if he and the athletes are seen working and having fun some of the other students won't be so reluctant to participate. Fast said he has talked with Principal Lelon Seaberry about starting a community garden. After the school was renovated in 2013 he noticed that students stopped leaving their garbage behind in the weight room. Something as simple as an improvement in scenery can begin to work on a person's entire perspective.

The most tangible results of Fast's half-decade in East St. Louis can be seen through two members of Rebirth's inaugural internship program. Fast brought in recent East St. Louis Senior High graduates and paid them to work as a Rebirth staffer while continuing to provide Bible instruction and life-skills training. Some days they worked with their hands and other days they might have lunch while listening to the president of a local bank speak about education and overcoming adversity.

Jeremy Rives is the elder statesman of the Rebirth program, something evident in his tone of voice and confident manner. A standout at linebacker for the Flyers, he graduated in 2012 and is now a junior outside linebacker at D-II Lincoln University in Jefferson City. His first interaction with Fast was in the weight room. The coach impressed him by doing the same workout as his players, setting the pace and even making them start over again in the middle of the workout if they weren't working hard enough.

Like many others, Rives first came for the pizza, and was wary of the white man who showed up in East St. Louis and tried to talk with kids, as was his mother. Yet Rives soon began to like what he was hearing. Most importantly, he liked that the man in charge was taking a genuine interest in his life.

At the time, Rives relationship with his mother was growing contentious. "We would bump heads," Rives said. "Because I was growing up and she wasn't really realizing it at the time."

Their arguments would get so bad Fast would drive to their house, sit with Rives and talk him down to a place where dialogue could be restored, showing Rives he had a communication problem. "I always kept a lot of things in," Rives said. "Him coming into my life and being so caring and honest helped me to open up and share things I'd never shared before. He never gave me a reason not to trust him."

Eventually, Fast became close to both Rives and his mother. They have both spent time at Fast's house with his family, and gone out to dinner together. Any questions they've had about his motives and aspirations have been answered.

By the summer of 2014 Rives was so committed to Rebirth that he convinced his coaches at Lincoln to let him do his offseason workouts at home so he could be in Rebirth's first class of interns, where he, the one with the problem expressing himself, gave a lecture and took questions from East St. Louis students about life as a college student. At the same time, through the first five games of the seasons, he has managed to lead the Lincoln Blue Tigers with 43 tackles, 19 of then solo.

Cortez Spencer played offensive line for the Flyers. While a small mountain of a man, it is not uncommon to hear him start singing a hymn at any moment. He graduated in 2014 and is now attending Southwestern Illinois College.

While he grew up in a better economic situation than many of his schoolmates, tragedy still managed to find him. The only mother he had ever known passed away when he was 8 years old. Later, he learned she had not been biological mother and that his family included nine other siblings he did not know. His found out his birth mother was addicted to drugs and his biological father and one of his brothers was in jail. The anger he already felt became 10 times worse.

That began to change once he encountered Fast. He felt like he needed to accumulate material things in order to relate to his peers but came to realize the root of that anger was that he felt a lack of acceptance. He sometimes grew so frustrated he would lash out and sometimes even abandon the program. "When I'm like ‘I'm leaving,' they'd say, ‘I still love you, I'll see you tomorrow,'" Spencer said. "That's what kept me coming back." And that's part of what keeps him coming back today.

His mother has been clean for seven years. She recently saw her son preach his first sermon.

The 50th and 60th anniversaries of The March on Washington and the Brown v. Board of Education decision, two landmarks of the civil rights movement, have passed. Some would view these events as something to celebrate, as a time to look back at when America saw something wrong and simply said "no more."

Then there is Ferguson, and so many places like Ferguson, that still say something else. The shooting of Michael Brown exposed the elephant in the room, that black and white people do not live in the same America, and all too often, they do not even share the same conversation. Such unfamiliarity breeds fear and hate. Both can get people shot.

By and large, the television cameras have left Ferguson, but protests have extended to the local symphony and St. Louis Cardinals' playoff games. A grand jury has convened to investigate the death of Michael Brown, but even that is no guarantee of justice. The grand jury itself is now being investigated for possible tampering. And on Oct. 8, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a young man in South St. Louis who, according the officer, fired first, sparking more protests and raising tensions once again.

In nearby East St. Louis, on the football field, in the weight room and in the small house Rebirth where Shane Fast and his staff work and students meet and talk each day, there is a commitment to racial reconciliation. His passion has brought him from a place of suspicion in East St. Louis, to a place where the honking of a horn means not an act of civil disobedience, but that someone is happy to see him.

The poet Langston Hughes wrote, "What happens to a dream deferred?" Does it dry up, fester, stink, crust over, and sag, he wondered? Or, as Hughes asked, "Does it explode?"

This summer, in Ferguson, there was an explosion. But in East St. Louis, there is another kind of dream. A dream that one day we can see there is good everywhere, that sometimes the water is just a little murky. On the other side of the river, there are signs that perhaps this dream will not fester. Maybe, with a little help, it just might grow.