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Rochester: The Dark Side was initiated at Monroe County Jail by Dale Davis with Juliana Muniz, a visual artist intern from Visual Studies Workshop as a means for the incarcerated youth to reflect, reach out, and share their insights and observations on their neighborhoods with their community. It grew from a Pilot, Rochester: A City of Neighborhoods, with a small number of students at Monroe County Jail. In the Pilot, the incarcerated youth were asked what in Rochester was important to them. They were asked to write and reflect upon why what they selected was important to them.
The street corner of Ontario and Union is where my cousin was gunned down and killed. I remember the day like it was yesterday. He had just turned twenty-eight. I was at my aunt's house on the dead end of Davis Street. When we got the news, we all ran the two streets over. We couldn't believe it. We didn't want to believe it. It had to be a mistake. When we finally arrived there, my cousin was lying on the ground. Police restrained my family from touching the body.
This was the first dead body I ever saw. I was only eleven. My cousin was a person who loved the hood, had trust in it. He thought family was the most important thing. Scio City was his family and everyone inside there was trust. After my cousin's death not one person could tell us what happened or who did it. It has been seven years, and no one arrested has been arrested.
Until this day I miss my cousin. Scio is still my hood. The love is there, but it is different.
O.R.
Poverty... the word hurts as if I am being stabbed and a sword is impaling my heart. This society leaves us broke as a joke, but that doesn't mean it's something to laugh at.
Poverty is one of the reasons why ninety percent of young black men's paths end up in the cemetery or the cellblock.
Not many black kids choose the classroom. I was one of those kids. I didn't choose the classroom because of what was going on around me. It started in 7th grade. It started as stress from poverty. I started smoking weed. I never had any of my own money, so I wanted to make my own money. Every other kid my age was making money. Society made us that way. Society puts us down, it discriminates, and the judges refuse to understand what we deal with on a daily basis as if we deserve to be treated like wild animals.
I wish I had hit the books like my mother wanted me to. When I was growing up, I used to blame her for the way I was, like it was her fault when it wasn't. She tried her best to raise me; she wanted the best for me. I grew up without a father. He was incarcerated since I was seven years old. My father is out now, but it's too late because I'm seventeen years old and damn near grown.
I wish I knew the way this country worked before I was twelve years old. We don't learn until it's too late. How are we the menaces to society when poverty causes us to do the things that we do? Why are we cursed? Do you really want to know the answer to my question? Poverty.
R. B.
The youth questioned dangerous neighborhoods, abandoned houses, drugs, why no one pays attention to the neighborhoods and the murders, and why things don't change. They worked together to name the project: Rochester: The Dark Side. The internet was used to publish and produce interactively what they wanted to share with an audience beyond the classroom to try and effect change. As a result of the Pilot, the students wanted to learn more about their neighborhoods, were they always like this, how did this happen. Their ideas generated in the Pilot are the foundation for Rochester: The Dark Side which was expanded upon and deepened with more time, more students, and a local history component that included working with the Rochester City Historian's Office and the Albert R. Stone Negative Collection at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and interviewing two community members.
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