Joliet, Illinois, a neighbor of Chicago, is known to the outside world for two things: The Blues Brothers and a rather large prison.
The prison is now closed, but it wasn’t when D’Wayne Edwards was born in Joliet in 1969. The sixth of six children to a single mom, Edwards doesn’t remember much of the city, just that he was packed up and moved to someplace worse: Inglewood, California. At the time, Inglewood was known as the murder capital of the United States.
The new neighborhood was rough. Poor African American kids like the Edwardses passed time playing street ball and endured the dispiriting Inglewood public school system. Ms. Edwards worked as a nurse’s assistant, but was injured on the job when Edwards was still young. The seven ...
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