Drive-by shootings haunted my youth like a paralysis dream I couldn’t wake up from. It was 1993, and my mother shopped for gang-neutral colors, no red and no blue, and dressed me in them like my life depended on it … because it just might.
I was no thug, but the bad actors in the community may not know this, and worse yet, may not care. Shots rang out in Denver’s Black neighborhoods almost as loud as the newly mainstream “gangsta rap” that blasted through car speakers and Park Hill house parties.
In 1993, the Mile High City coined the term “The Summer of Violence” for all the gang-related homicides that happened in Denver and surrounding areas. Numerically speaking, 1992 was worse, with 93 murders in Denver to 76 in 1993. In 1994, there were 84, and in 1995 the city reported 86 murders.
What the statistics miss are all the victims who were shot and survived. During my freshman year at George Washington High School, I remember my friends pulling up sleeves, shirts and pants showing bullet wounds from near-fatal gun incidents.
Exit wounds seemed as common back then as tattoos are today. Everyone knew one of the fallen, or was proximal to a shooter. The danger of being gunned down shifted culture, hardened demeanor and altered life-paths in a way that makes it hard to articulate to someone who didn’t live within that zeitgeist.
Anti-gang marches and “Heal The ’Hood” rallies sprang up as communities fought desperately to address the scourge of violence with indigenously-grown, grass-roots solutions. These efforts were matched by more intense policing activity, which coincided with the omnibus crime bill of 1994, increasing mandatory minimums for drug and gun possession.
Now, it appears that I, this child of the ’90’s violence era, has lived long enough for the cycle to come back around again. Early April in Denver saw a marked uptick in violence. A whopping six homicides in 10 days is adding up for 2026 to be a significantly more violent year than the one before.
If these patterns persist, and retaliatory violence follows these shootings, it’s not crazy to wonder if this summer could echo the 90’s.
The shooting death last month of Mikail Nasir Khalid Payne at the Montbello Recreation Center rocked my immediate community. A rec center where my nonprofit has thrown Unity Rallies and community events. I’ve walked those grounds, and played in its spaces.
Mikail, who went by “Nasir,” was the nephew, cousin or friend to several people close to me. One of those people is activist Shareef Aleem, who has been a family friend for over two decades.
After contributing to Nasir’s Go Fund Me campaign, I thought to myself, “I’ve heard these cries for peace before.”
They’ve been echoing through my mind since I was younger than Nasir. Chants of “Stop The Violence” are now rising again in the community that I call home.
So, what will it take to stop the violence? One thing is federal funding for community-led violence intervention programs, or CVIs. These programs have a proven track record of reducing community crime dating back to the ’80s and ’90s. After Denver’s “Summer of Violence,” I remember these CVIs being present and active in the Mile High City, doing great work and saving lives.
So, the fact that the Trump administration cut funding to these programs as one of its first orders of business puts blood directly on their hands, in my estimation.
There’s a popular myth in conservative circles that the Black community only protests and speaks up when a Black person is killed by a police officer, and not when the victim dies by so-called, “Black-on-Black crime.”
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This myth is so putridly offensive and false that it only bears mentioning because it is so dangerously dismissive of Black humanity, and enabling of stereotypes.
Just think about it: What kind of subhuman would ignore a dead body lying in the street just because the killer racially resembled the one that was killed?
The Black community has rallied to save its youth before, and it will do so again. The question is, will the country rally around us? If not, Denver and cities like it may be in for more summers of violence, and we only pray that we can wake up enough people in time for it to matter.
Theo E.J. Wilson of Denver is a poet, speaker, author and activist.
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