A Rexdale church that was the site of a gang killing at a funeral five years ago is marching against violence Saturday, Aug. 14.
"It's an annual event to show our presence to the community as being against the use of violence to solve challenges," Pastor Allan Chichester of the 1,200-member Toronto West Seventh-day Adventist Church said Thursday.The anti-violence and anti-drug parade and rally leaves the Martin Grove-Albion roads church at 5 p.m. The parade travels east on Albion, south on Kipling Avenue to John Garland Boulevard, through Jamestown, north on Martin Grove to Finch Avenue West and east on Finch to Albion returning to the church.It ends with an outdoor gospel concert in the church parking lot.In November 2005, Amon Beckles, 18, was gunned down outside the church while attending the funeral of his best friend, Jamal Hemmings, 17, murdered nine days earlier. Sources said Beckles was killed because he witnessed his best friend's murder.More than 1,000 people packed the church's pews two months later to hear a direct, impassioned, at times irreverent Rev. Eugene Rivers speak about saving Toronto youth from violence.The American Pentecostal pastor, one of the architects of the so-called Boston Miracle, said Toronto's black community must take responsibility for its children, with fathers - or other black men in the absence of fathers - mentoring young men.In the early 1990s, Rivers and other pastors hit the streets in the Dorchester district of Boston where they worked as street ministers to drug dealers and fatherless young men at risk of joining gangs.Homicides plummeted - from 150 in 1990 to 31 in 1999."The ultimate crisis in the black community is the absence of black fathers. It is the root of the political crisis - politically, culturally and institutionally," Rivers said during his call to action in early 2006 at the Rexdale church.Chichester reported many of the church youth, and others from the neighbourhood, walk annually in the march.