“He’s made a tremendous change,” said Pastor Lawrence Matthews of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Frayser. So everyday, I’m becoming, I’m improving, I’m becoming better.” “You see, the world look at like how we is, but God look at us, what we can become. ”I feel like God specializes in changing lives,” he said. It took years, but Jermar finally decided he’d no longer worship at the feet of the Vice Lords. If you don’t change your life and get around people that’s encouraging you, that’s prospering you and pushing you forward and making you become greater and germinating you, that you need to remove yourself from that crowd.” One is destruction, the next one is death. What does he tell others living his old lifestyle now? “But it feels good to be the man that I am today. You know what I’m saying, that God turned my mess into a message.” “You know what I’m saying, a lot of worshiping, a lot of praising, a lot of studying and reading. “It took a lot of work for me to get where I am today,” Wilkins said. “You know old patriarch saints used to say it this way: ‘The things that I used to do, I don’t do them anymore,” he said.Ī foot soldier for the Vice Lords had become a soldier for Christ. He went into drug treatment and rediscovered his mother’s church. His hallelujah moment was the beginning of a transformation. It was an awakening, the dawn of a new day. “Before I wake up another day on drugs, I would rather just die.” ”He called me and said, ‘Tiffany, I don’t want to live anymore,” recalled his cousin Tiffany Williams. Then, one day five years ago, he called his cousin… and said he was finished. He’d left home, started running with the gang, was in and out of jail. ”I found my first dead body behind this woman’s house,” his brother, Zendrick Little remembered.īy the age of 15, Jermar was lost. There was no sugar coating this walk down memory lane. Robbery, aggravated assault, drug crimes. This is where Jermar and his older brother Zendrick grew up, where they joined the Vice Lords, smoked dope, and would steal anything they could get their hands on.
MEMPHIS VICE LORD FULL
“All the people have gone on but, but this basically was full of nothing but crime and violence, and gang members and all that.”
“Man, it’s changed,” he said, walking around the new houses that replaced the housing project.
We met there to revisit the scars of the past. In 36 years, he’s been on a jaw-dropping journey, and no one thought this would be his final destination - at a home Bible study.īack in the old neighborhood where he grew up, the former Hurt Village housing project in Uptown, many wondered if Jermar would have a future. When he’s not moving pallets, he’s busy moving mountains of rage and regret, darkness and destruction, doubt and fear. The city of Memphis has one of the highest crime rates in the country, but out on its streets, there is a man who thinks he’s found a solution - and it’s not just more police and stiffer sentences. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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