news-record.com

Following a call for peace on June 28 by a local leader of the Latin Kings, one TV reporter was so moved that she hugged the gang's flinty-eyed state potentate, Jorge Cornell.

I didn't hug Cornell, whose official title is "Inca" of the Latin Kings in North Carolina.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful that he is sincere in his call for area gangs to put down their arms and put aside their violence toward one another.

But I still worry about the rest of us.

Cornell is a big man with a beard and mustache so delicately thin that they appear to be drawn by pencil. A pair of tatooed tears weep permanently from the corner of his left eye, in a tribute, he says, to his late mother.

His two young daughters, pretty and smooth-faced, were there with him, smiling at all the people and the cameras.

"My goal is to bring peace to the streets," Cornell said. "(For) black and brown to come together as one."

Who could argue with that sentiment?

Then again, Cornell stopped short of renouncing all criminal activity by gangs. And even though he is a man of few words, some of those words seemed contradictory.

I asked about his earlier statements that gang violence here is exaggerated ("The newspaper hypes it up. The police hype it up.").

If that's so, I said, why was there a need to call a truce in the first place?

A woman sitting behind me suggested that the police were behind all the alleged gang violence. (There's a conspiracy theory at every turn in this town.)

Others associate anything connected with the Rev. Nelson Johnson as tainted.

"Why would anyone give this 'thug' a platform to further his own cause and try to raise his stature in the community?" a blog commenter wrote. "I'm not at all surprised the so-called 'REV' Johnson is involved in this latest scam on the people of Greensboro."

I believe Johnson's intentions are more honorable than that. And I still want to believe Cornell.

The safety this could bring and the racial bridges it could build could be significant. I don't fault the Revs. Nelson Johnson and Gregory Headen of Genesis Baptist Church for reaching out to Cornell. Isn't that what men of faith are supposed to do?

Yet, this doesn't feel totally right. Am I being merely a cynic, as a friend said the other day?

So, I sought further insight from an interview with Cornell in a recent edition of the Spanish-language paper, Que Pasa.

Among the things he said in that interview in Spanish, translated here in English, was that "the peace treaty would be necessary to eliminate carrying the fights away from the table. We would have to avoid retaliation and killings in honor of a better future for all."

Under the "peace treaty" he proposes, problems would be resolved by gang leaders disciplining their members, to prevent them from taking justice into their own hands. He also envisions a "Supreme Council" to organize street marches, mobilize against federal and state immigration and anti-gang laws that he considers unfair to Latinos.

"They want to eliminate us completely," he said. "We have to detain racism."

The more I think about it, the "Supreme Council" does sound a lot like Prop Joe's confab of gang lords in the TV series "The Wire," in which those crime leaders negotiated over territory and resolved disputes around conference tables in a hotel meeting room. It was efficient but ruthless. They even had an agenda and refreshments.

That said, Lord knows relations between African Americans and the growing Latino community, in particular, are not what they ought to be. It's a sad, ironic state of affairs. They remind me of similar rifts between the black and white poor, who have had so much in common but historically have had so much pointless and destructive enmity toward one another.

Coincidentally, Genesis Baptist Church plans to host a "black-brown conference" on Oct. 3 and 4. Headen, the pastor at Genesis, says the event was planned before Cornell's call for a truce. "It seems like several things are coming together," Headen says.

As for visions of gang lords bearing olive branches, Headen says, "Some people hope it will happen, but they're not building up any high hopes."

Personally, he adds, "I'm such a hoper I can't bear not to hope."

So, what if those gang leaders aren't sincere?

Headen says he doesn't expect all of them to come forward. "Even if some do," he says, "that can be the beginning of a way out."

And, in the end, something is better than nothing. Talking is better than not talking.

And trying is better than just standing there and saying this won't work.