Rockford Man up! March and Rally a challenge to community to unite, stop violence

ROCKFORD — Bullets fired from passing vehicles don’t stop in mid-flight because it is bitterly cold outside, and neither did Saturday’s anti-violence march.

More than 100 people braved single-digit and sub-zero wind chills to participate in the Man Up! March and Rally. The event started at the Fairgrounds Valley housing complex at Underwood and West Jefferson streets and ended a mile away with a rally at Lewis Lemon  Elementary School, 1993 Mulberry St.

Familiar chants of “Down with dope. Up with hope,” “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” and “All lives matter! Black lives matter!” were repeated by marchers, but Saturday’s event had a different theme and tone.

“This is not a march to blame anyone, but to look introspectively about what we need to do,” co-organizer William Muhammad said.

Ashley Burks, 24, of Rockford and a candidate for Rock Valley College Board of Trustees, said she hopes the event moves people to action.

“I believe in community members getting together to solve their own problems,” she said. “I hope to see a renewed faith in our ability to solve our problems. When you have events like this we have a chance to say who we are and what we stand for.”

After ending 2014 with a quadruple homicide that took the lives of two young adults, Demontae Rhodes and Martia Flint, both 24, and Flint’s two young sons, Tyrone Smith III, 6, and Tobias K. Smith, 4, many in Rockford couldn’t wait to usher in 2015.

Instead, the bloodshed continued with six homicides in less than two months and numerous other shootings and acts of violence in which the victims survived. Among those killed was 15-year-old Auburn High School freshman Jazznique Fort. She was shot in the head in the early morning hours of Jan. 2 in the 800 block of Lee Street, across the street from the Fairgrounds housing complex.

Jazznique’s mother, Lanetka Ingram, marched and attended the rally. She chastised all who may be withholding information about her daughter’s slaying and lashed out at the killer who has forever altered her life.

“You don’t know what you took from me,” she said. “I hurt every day. I’m so tired of crying. Everywhere I look is a memory of me and her and what we did together. I want you to know you took my everything.”

Deryk Hayes, Rockford Housing Authority community development manager, reminded the crowd they didn’t just march for those who lost their lives.

He said, “We marched for the young men and women still trying to live their lives.”

Hayes also told the marchers — who walked from Fairgrounds in the middle of the street, thanks to police who blocked off traffic, to Lewis Lemon where hot cups of chocolate awaited them — that children in the housing complex and surrounding homes make that same trek Monday through Friday without the presence of police and on snow and ice-covered sidewalks.

The children, he said, walk past abandoned buildings, drug houses, and make-shift memorials signifying where a young adult or teen, someone the children possibly knew, lost their life to an act of violence.

“They do this everyday before the 8 o’clock bell rings,” Hayes said. “My challenge to you is, what are we going to do about it?”

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