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Call Stop the Madness at 423-648-7820 for more information the adult prom and the 25th anniversary celebration or visit the website at www.stmnational.org/events.html
Stop the Madness National wants to deliver a message this school year to encourage youth and mark its own 25th anniversary. And its using nearly 100 teenagers from its summer enrichment camp to create it.
"The message is, 'You are not a gangsta,'" said DeJuan Jordan, president and CEO. "Nobody was born a gangster. God didn't create gangsters. He created people in his image."
The video, recorded at Brainerd High School and released on YouTube this summer, is one of several ways Stop the Madness is celebrating 25 years of working against violence.
The recording features 15-year-old Jeffrey Pinkerton, a Brainerd sophomore, as the lead rapper.
Before the summer project, Jeffrey had never performed a rap. Since the video, rapping has become his third career choice after, No. 1., playing in the NFL and, No. 2, becoming a doctor.
"Stop the Madness helped me to express myself," Jeffrey said in an interview Friday.
The nonprofit's annual prom on Oct. 14 will honor its founder, the Rev. Ternae Jordan Sr. The anniversary observance culminates in February 2017, commemorating the month in 1992 when Jordan held his first Stop the Madness meeting after two teenagers were killed two weeks apart while playing Russian roulette in Fort Wayne, Ind. The shootings were gang initiations.
The organization gained momentum in 1993 when Jordan's 15-year-old son, Ternae Jordan Jr., was shot in the head at the YMCA in Indiana after taking piano lessons.
"I watched him die on the floor," said DeJuan Jordan, who was then 12.
Doctors revived the boy and despite reports that he would be a vegetable, blind and unable to walk, Ternae Jr. is a college graduate who sees, walks and still lives with the bullet lodged between his skull and his brain, said his sister.
It's Ternae Jr.'s company, Miraclechild Media Group, that produced the video this summer. His brother, JaMichael Jordan, brother, is vice president of Miraclechild.
Explaining the video, DeJuan Jordan, a former probation officer, said people in gangs are looking for love. If the right people don't step up, she said, they get connected to the wrong people and on the wrong path.
But Stop the Madness isn't limited to anti-gang efforts and violence prevention, she said. Stop the Madness wants to stop any hindrance that keeps a person back, from lack of education and poor health to other impediments.
More than 50 volunteers help with the program, some serving as mentors in schools during the school year. The organization also partners with Mount Caanan Baptist church on fitness activities throughout the year.
Stop the Madness is celebrating a vision that has allowed it to impact the lives of youth for 25 years, said DeJuan Jordan.
"Without it, who knows how many more lives would be lost?" she said.
Fourteen-year-old Jonathan Talley, who raps the final verse in the Stop the Madness video, said the program helps him.
"Honestly, it kept me out of trouble," he said. "It makes me think different. It keeps me so I won't be at the wrong place at the wrong time."
Contact staff writer Yolanda Putman at yputman@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.