This TED Talk features peacemaker Erica Bridgeford recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic

2017.

There is a pastor in Baltimore.

His name is Michael Phillips.

He is the pastor of Kingdom Life Church.

And he often talks about how problems show up in our lives so arrogantly with so much confidence as if there's just nothing

we can do about them. And the murder rate in Baltimore had been doing that year after year. It just

kept showing up as this big thing that there was nothing any of us could do anything about.

But the thing about Baltimore is that it has never been the one to just be defeated.

So the story about the Baltimore ceasefire is that Baltimore looked the murder rate in the eye

and said, what you're not going to do is snatch our greatness. So two years ago, a matter of 300

March meeting at the time I was a leader in that

movement. And this guy named Ogun, he's like a godfather of hip-hop in Baltimore. He came over to me

and he said, yo, I have this idea about calling the ceasefire in Baltimore. And I feel like you are

somebody I should talk to about that. And I was like, I'm absolutely somebody you

should talk to about that because that's something we should do. And so we play phone tag and meeting

tag and two years went by and we never really sat down and talked about it. So now we're in May

of 2017. My son Paul, he's 19 years old. He's driving me home from work one day, and he says,

Ma, did you know that the murder rate in Baltimore is higher than it's ever been?

And I said, what you mean is higher than it's ever been?

How is that possible?

Like, I mean, what about these people who say they have connections to the streets?

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