Larry Fleming lost his son to the violence in Richmond. Now he’s helping ex-convicts find honest work to avoid a return to a life of crime.
They call it the Iron Triangle. It’s an impoverished south Richmond neighborhood, wedged between the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Interstate 580, that the rest of the city sometimes would rather forget. The streets are threadbare and abandoned; weeds burst through cracks in the sidewalks. The homes here have high fences around their yards and iron bars on their windows. Just walking down the street can be deadly. Gangs work the streets here and many young, jobless men spend their days selling drugs from doorsteps. Many of them have been to jail; many of them expect to go back.
Out of a small terra-cotta building on Barrett Avenue, Larry Fleming is fighting for the future. His building doesn’t look like much from the outside, but it’s a safe haven in a sea of violence and base for the Richmond Improvement Association’s San Quentin Re-Entry Project, a one-man operation determined to keep ex-convicts from going back to jail—by giving them a chance for honest work.
Fleming, who wears his graying hair tied up in a tight tail behind his head, has been head of the San Quentin Re-Entry Project since March—as well as its sole employee. Wearing a brightly-colored aloha shirt, he looks like he might be on his way to a party, but there’s nothing frivolous about his attitude. He is involved in a lonely struggle to clean up the streets, and this long-time Richmond resident has no illusions about what he’s up against.
“We have a lot of disadvantaged, troubled youth here in Richmond,” says Fleming. “We’re an employment agency for people of color, underprivileged people, people with felony convictions. Our idea is, if you get these people jobs, they’ll be off the streets. When we find them jobs, they don’t come back here.”
Fleming sees a steady stream of ex-convicts come through his office doors. Most of the men come from broken homes; they’ve spent years on the street, in and out of jail, often for drugs, sometimes for worse offenses.
“It’s always a challenge to figure out what you have to [do to] help someone,” he says. “There’s no cookie-cutter method. Men in incarceration have a whole different mind-set [but] you have to find common ground: they all have family, they all have trauma in their past, and most of all they all don’t want to go back.”
The walls of the Re-entry Program are covered in motivational posters. Fleming bustles around the office, shuffling papers and preparing for the morning deluge. He sets up a clipboard on a small table in the entryway, so that incoming clients can sign in; on most days, the papers fill up fast.
Fleming himself grew up in New Orleans, but knew that he wanted to leave. He journeyed to Richmond in the early 1970s, because he had relatives in the area. But the Richmond that he knew back then is different from the one he sees today.
“Then, there wasn’t so much reactive violence,” he says. “It gravitated here and the perpetrators just got younger and younger.”
Like most people in this neighborhood, Fleming is no stranger to death. He’s buried relatives, nephews and cousins.
Ten years ago, he had to bury his own son. The boy was gunned down in a random act of violence as he left his apartment. The perpetrator was never found.
“It made me realize that I had to give something back to the community,” says Fleming, “This isn’t something that can keep going on like this.”
Most of the young offenders on the street end up in San Quentin prison across the Bay. When they get out, there’s little to look forward to except more of the same—a life of crime and violence.
For a decade, Fleming ran a construction training program in Visitation Valley in collaboration with trade unions. When the Richmond Improvement Association, a faith-based grassroots effort started by Rev. Andre Shumake, invited him to run the Re-entry Project, he said it made sense to come back to work in the East Bay.
“I finally got tired of stepping over bodies in the street here to go step over bodies in the street there,” says Fleming.
The project is part of the Richmond Improvement Association’s Zero Homicide Campaign, a set of six programs designed to reduce violence and improve the quality of life in this disadvantaged area. These include offering transitional housing to recent parolees, training community members in non-violent conflict resolution and counseling ex-offenders to change the thought processes that led them to crime in the first place.
For Fleming’s part, his methods seem deceptively simple.
“I go around the city and talk to employers,” he says. “I try to find out which one off-the-bat will hire ex-felons. That saves a lot of time later on.”
That’s only part of his job, though. The Re-entry Project does whatever it can to match up former felons with gainful employment, to break them out of the life of crime that’s plagued so much of this area for so many years.
“I do whatever I can to reach them,” says Fleming. “I talk to relatives, find out who’s inside. I go inside San Quentin and spend time with the inmates, preferably those that have less than a year, just trying to get through to them and let them know we’re here before they’re back on the streets. Each one of these suckers out here on the streets pulling triggers looks up to someone on the inside. That way, by the time they get out we already have a relationship. Nine times out of ten, that’s the most important thing to getting them on the road to reintegration.”
Fleming isn’t interested in people who don’t want to change. The front of his program’s brochure sports the motto: “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
The first client today is Jeremiah, recently released from San Quentin after a 29-month sentence. Today is a big day because he’s going to the Department of Motor Vehicles for his driver’s license exam. He sits down at a long table covered in pamphlets and papers and pores over DMV hand-outs.
“I just got out,” he says. “Now I’m trying to use the resources here so that I don’t go back.”
Fleming sits across the table from him and explains how the exam works and what papers Jeremiah will need to show when he arrives at the DMV. Even something as seemingly mundane as a driver’s license is a big deal for many ex-felons who have been used to living outside the law. Fleming explains it as one way to show potential employers that they’re serious about taking the time to go legitimate. This is only the first step for Jeremiah. After this, he wants to get his GED.
“You’re on the right track,” says Fleming. He fixes him with a serious look and continues, half-joking: “As long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
One of Fleming’s clients was a bank robber with a drug habit who didn’t even bother carrying a gun. He simply walked into banks and demanded cash. He was caught and sent to San Quentin. He later told Fleming he never thought about getting caught; he didn’t care about anything except getting his hands on more money for drugs. It’s an attitude that Fleming sees a lot. It can also be changed with meaningful work.
“One guy we had in here, he goes out for drugs whenever he’s got nothing to do,” recalls Fleming. “What do I do? I make him a truck driver. He’s always moving, always trucking, driving. And this is a job where he’s got to get tested for drugs every week. He knows that just one screw-up and he’s out of luck.”
There aren’t many options open to ex-felons. Many are uneducated or even illiterate, and businesses are wary of hiring someone with a record.
Fleming has been advocating for the construction of the resort at Pt. Molate in Richmond, recognizing the potential creation of 1,500 jobs in the building trades. “City Hall has its priorities and it isn’t us,” says Fleming. He leans back in a chair as if to consider what that means. “The only time when people of color make money is when stuff is being built.”
He’s not holding his breath for things to change overnight. He expects to see a lot more bloodshed, but there’s still some hope. He sees it in every ex-felon who comes through the front door in search of a job and a new way of life—and in the fact that they don’t come back once they’ve got a job.
“It used to be that there were only two kinds of people walking the streets here—victims and predators,” he says. “That’s starting to change.”
Every day is a struggle, but Fleming wants to see the old Richmond again, the one he remembers from his early days in the area.
“I don’t know how I do this,” says Fleming, “Maybe I don’t stand still long enough for it to have an impact on me. But you can’t pick someone else to do it. I know that I can help. It’s hard not to help when you know you can.”
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Mike Rosen-Molina is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly. His work has appeared in the East Bay Express, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sacramento News and Review.
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