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GREENSBORO — Keith L. Brown called a number of young men from the audience at Youth First Teen Summit at the Greensboro Coliseum on Tuesday. Each filed past the motivational speaker to stand before the crowd of more than 200 Guilford County middle and high school students.

Brown smiled as one of them passed, taking the teen by the shoulder and turning him around to face the audience.

"Smile!" Brown said in a booming voice. "Stop trying to look so hard!"

It may seem like a simple message — tough doesn't equal cool or successful. But it's a message young people aren't hearing enough, Brown said. And that's because they choose the wrong role models — often rappers or gang members — and fail to see where fantasy ends and reality begins, he said.

"In reality, when Lil Wayne comes off the stage he is an honor roll student at the University of Houston, studying psychology," Brown told the students. "Ice Cube had a college degree at the age of 21. And Fantasia , your own home girl, after making millions of dollars, she went back and got her GED."

Brown's message — knowledge and education trump greed and ignorance — was at the heart of the summit, which offered sessions on decision-making, peer pressure, sex, drugs and gang affiliation.

Councilwoman T. Dianne Bellamy-Small encouraged the students to take an interest in their community — and to make their parents pay attention as well.

"If your parents aren't going to vote, you need to tell them to go and be your voice until you can vote," Bellamy-Small said. "And come down to the council meetings and tell us what you need, what your interests are."

Youth First coordinator Darryl Kosciak said the participants attend Guilford schools and were registered by their parents or through school counselors.

"We have some great speakers, some great programs and it's a chance to get these kids together and get them thinking about their lives," Kosciak said.

The students attending the summit said it did just that.

"They're talking to us on our level, the way we would talk to our friends," said Daija Ervin , a 15-year-old student from Southern Guilford High School. "Some of the stuff they talk about, it really does make you think. Like the thing he said about Lil Wayne — I wouldn't expect him to go to college, the way he acts on stage. But that's not real."

Montez Kimber , an 11-year-old student at the Academy at Lincoln , said she was inspired by Bellamy-Small.

"I felt like she was a good example, coming out here and caring about what we think and what we say," Kimber said. "The other council members didn't do that, but she made us feel special. And she made me want to organize people at my school to go to council meetings, to let them know what we need too."

Among Kimber's main concerns: drugs and gang affiliation among her peers, even as early as middle school.

"I've seen kids showing gang signs, drug dealing, people getting into fights and claiming they bring weapons to school," Kimber said. "That's not what we should be doing. We need to have our minds on getting an education."

Wes Daily , one of the day's guest speakers, spent his career targeting gangs as a New York police detective. Now, as executive director emeritus of the East Coast Gang Investigators Association , he trains police departments on spotting and fighting gang activity — and brings an intense, combative style to educating kids on the topic.

"There is federal gang legislation coming down," Daily told the assembled students. "And it's going to affect 80 percent of the African American children in this room."

Daily, 60, said he was once a gang member himself, before serving three tours in Vietnam and joining the police. Since then, he said he's studied gangs from the coast of Africa to China and has found the problem to be persistent and worldwide.

"In Africa, where people are starving to death, they have Crips and Bloods," Daily said. "They listen to American rap music and live the gangster lifestyle."

But that lifestyle is for cowards who don't have real friends or strong family ties, Daily said.

"When I had these guys, these big grizzly bears out there on the streets handcuffed to my desk, the first thing they would do is ask for their mommies," Daily said.

Daily's gruff style made some of the adults in attendance uncomfortable and several chose to leave during his speech — but many students said he reached them.

"Our ethnicity is one of the lowest producing in America," said Jesse Rainey, 16, of Southeast High School . "What I took from today is that if one person falls, we all fall. We have to bring each other up, and we have to help bring up society."

Contact Joe Killian at 883-4422, Ext. 228, or jkillian@news-record.com