Peace Warrior

The last 10 miles of the Imperial Highway lead west from the blighted thirst of the Watts neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles to the glistening sea at El Segundo, where they are crisscrossed by the shadow of planes leaving LAX. For the 35,000 residents of Watts, that stretch of road might as well be a 14,000-foot pass through the Himalayas, so remote are the pleasures of travel and plush beaches from that hope-starved patch of ground.

Aqeela Sherrills has seen the worst Watts has to offer and made the best of it. His work to end gang violence started in 1989, when at 19 he joined former football and movie star Jim Brown on the road for three years, forging truces between gangs in cities across the country. In 1992, he returned home to Watts to help broker, with his brother Daude, a peace treaty between the Crips and the Bloods.

After a few years, the treaty began to fray. In response, in 1999 Aqeela and Daude started the Community Self-Determination Institute (CSDI) for gang prevention and conflict mediation. CSDI won street credibility as well as the confidence of city officials and became a city-wide program. With that came the challenges of running a non-profit: cajoling donors, securing city grants, paying the bills, hiring people. Siblings, cousins, friends, casual acquaintances all wanted jobs. There was trouble with the IRS. The work itself was hard enough, but managing the work was exhausting. Then, two years ago, his wife died of breast cancer. And the worst was yet to come.

It arrived just before midnight on Jan. 10, 2004, with a ring of Sherrills' cell phone. His son Terrell, 18 and home on break after his first semester studying theater arts at Humboldt State University, was being rushed to UCLA Medical Center bleeding profusely from a close-range gunshot wound to the back. A 16-year-old Crips member had mistaken the red Mickey Mouse sweater slung over Terrell's shoulders (in self-deprecating homage to his big ears) for a sign of membership in the Bloods, who wear red. Forty-five minutes later, Terrell was dead.

The cry for retribution went up immediately.

"The neighborhood mounted up, they were ready to roll, and I went and talked to folks and told folks, 'That's not what we're gonna do, and that's not Terrell's legacy,'" Sherrills recalls 14 months later, sitting in a room at CSDI painted sky blue and redolent of incense from a shrine in the corner. "'That's exactly the reaction that society wants from us. And what we're gonna do is this right here: We're gonna forgive that kid, you know? Because we're gonna hold space for the highest possibility of good to show up in him.'"

Sherrills was already something of a community hero. He was an inspiration to thousands of people who had heard him speak about personal and cultural healing and peacemaking. This act of forgiveness launched him to near-guru status. The organizer on the ground in Watts was becoming a man of the spirit: The activist was turning into a mystic.

Sherrills began to step back from the running of CSDI. He started turning over administrative responsibilities to other people and assuming an advisory role, formulating the vision and raising money. He wasn't interested in addressing the symptoms anymore. He wanted to tackle the root of the problem, the broken spirits around him.

As passionately as he speaks about his continuing work, for the last year and a half he has yearned to break free of its physical confines. On March 15, he took a definitive step in that direction when he boarded a plane to Mexico to begin a four-month tour of the world's sacred sites. After Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu and the rest, he plans to come back, but not to stay.

Within three years he hopes to move to Ghana. He says he is drawn to its ease of life, burgeoning African-American community and rich spiritual culture. There, away from frenetic America, he says he hopes to find the peace to live the ideas he has been mulling, ideas about how to shift ways of thinking and cherish human life and start a global outbreak of peace--the linchpins of what he calls "the reverence for human life movement."