DURHAM - On a balmy Friday night in the East End, participants in Mount Gilead Baptist Church's first "Evangelism Explosion" sang, clapped and praised the Lord in the church parking lot. The aroma of fried fish was in the air. The faithful bowed their heads and prayed. There was an urgency to their worship, and a reason for their reaching out to the community. Two blocks away, on Canal Street, a 19-year-old boy had been shot to death. A 15-year-old girl who lived on Canal Street had been killed, too, on nearby Grace Drive. And in May, just days after the Evangelism Explosion, a 22-year-old man would die by gunfire on Canal Street.

Church leaders knew that most of their members had long since fled the troubled neighborhood. They also knew that they needed to do something for the people who were left -- people including the drug dealers and gang members who gravitated to the corner near the Canal Street Grocery. They just weren't sure how to help.

"I want to have a meeting with those guys on the corner," said the Rev. Leroy E. Davis, who has led the Dowd Street congregation for nearly 20 years. " What kinds of programs do they want us to have? We're trying to find a relevant gospel to preach."

Eight months later, they are still trying -- still praying for a way to drive out the drugs and gangs and guns that have ruled Canal Street for decades. Although police cracked down after last spring's shootings and violent crime slowed in the second half of 2001, the drug dealers have returned. They know they can count on the street's reputation to keep customers coming from as far as Greensboro for crack and other drugs. Residents who can't afford to live anywhere else fear for their safety as another spring approaches.

Canal Street is part of a bigger community on the brink of change. The 96 blocks known as North/East Central Durham are arguably the city's most devastated. A $35 million federal grant will soon help remake the area by replacing a public housing complex with homes and apartments, a project called Hope VI. The city has also hired Charlotte-based consultants to help North/East residents determine how best to improve their own community.

But if problems persist on Canal Street's four notorious blocks, they will likely affect the entire area.

Other communities around the country have reclaimed their streets from drug dealers. Even neighborhoods in Durham have done it -- offering hope to residents of Canal Street. Experts say the key ingredient is a nucleus of people who decide, once and for all, that they're not going to take it anymore.

Taking back the street

Across town from Canal Street, families in Durham's West End started a grass-roots effort in the early 1990s to clean up drug-infested areas. It worked.

The West End, near Duke University, has much in common with North/East Central Durham. It was once a group of working-class neighborhoods, but as manufacturing jobs left the city, poverty rose, property values slid and renters displaced homeowners.

Juanita McNeil, now in her 50s, watched as drug dealers gradually took over the corners. Then, about 10 years ago, she saw something else: An elderly man walked up to the dealers on Glendale Avenue and told them to get out. That gave her the push she needed to confront them herself.

"I was angry," she said. "You come home from work and you got a crowd of people standing on the corner. When you get up in the morning, they're there. During the night, you can't sleep. It's traffic. It's shooting."

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