Pastor Corey Brooks of Project H.O.O.D. says the story Chicago’s South Side kids need to hear isn’t about systemic racism — it’s the story of Mr. T.
Writing in a Fox News opinion piece, Brooks describes watching a new Netflix documentary on the actor and calling it disappointing — “thin and rushed,” he says, failing to capture Mr. T’s faith, service and the hardships he overcame. But the film reminded Brooks why he holds Mr. T up as a role model for the kids at Project H.O.O.D.
Laurence Tureaud was born May 21, 1952, the second-youngest of 12 children on Chicago’s South Side. His father, a minister, left when Laurence was five. His mother, Willie, cleaned houses in Chicago’s Lake Forest area, supplementing her income with an $87 monthly welfare check. Brooks writes that the family was poor but not poor in spirit — they went to church, loved their mother, and stayed away from the gangs.
One of Brooks’s favorite Mr. T quotes: “I was born and raised in the ghetto, but the ghetto was not born and raised in me.”
“I was born and raised in the ghetto, but the ghetto was not born and raised in me.”
Brooks recounts how Mr. T witnessed racism firsthand — white men calling his father “boy,” and his brother, a Marine who fought in Vietnam, coming home only to be called “boy” as well. At 18, Laurence vowed no one would ever call him that again. He changed his name to Mr. T, he says, so that the first word out of anyone’s mouth would be “Mister.”
At Dunbar Vocational High School, Mr. T became a football star and city wrestling champion, building muscle not in a gym but doing push-ups and chin-ups on tree branches around the projects. He won a scholarship to Prairie View A&M that didn’t pan out, then moved to Chicago’s Loop, working three jobs at once, including as a bouncer.
It was there he learned his mother had been robbed in the projects’ elevator, threatened with having her throat cut if she didn’t hand over her welfare money. Mr. T grabbed his shotgun, went into the projects and confronted the gang members responsible. He then became a bodyguard — protecting others, Brooks writes, the way he felt he’d failed to protect his mother.
Brooks also recalls a story of Mr. T at around nine years old telling his mother, “One of these days I’m going to be big and strong. I’m going to be a football player and a boxer. I’m going to buy you a beautiful house and pretty dresses.” She didn’t laugh or doubt him — she told him to work hard, save his money, and get after it.
Before stardom, Mr. T worked as a janitor, gym teacher and doorman, and served his country. He never took shortcuts, Brooks writes, and never went to jail because he could not bear to break his mother’s heart.
Brooks argues that too much time is spent telling South Side kids that the system is out to get them — conversations, he says, that go nowhere and offer no hope. He’d rather point them to Mr. T.
“Your circumstances are real and they may be unfair and stacked against you, but they are not your destiny. You are.”
Mr. T eventually bought his mother a mansion, complete with an elevator, in the same Lake Forest neighborhood where she once cleaned houses.
