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."

Others joined in, telling the dealers that they couldn't sell drugs in the neighborhood. The residents would call 911, even when they doubted police would ever show up.

McNeil worked on prevention, too. In 1991, she turned her six-room house into a temporary community center for an afterschool program. Today, thanks largely to help from Duke, she works out of the new Juanita McNeil and Joseph Alston West End Teen Center on Kent Street.

The university and the Duke Endowment, a Charlotte charitable trust, have provided millions of dollars, volunteers and leadership for projects in the West End, through an effort known as the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Initiative. Promoting home ownership, affordable housing, safe neighborhoods, good schools and access to health care were among its goals. Community centers have cropped up in the neighborhoods surrounding the university, with Duke's help.

But McNeil said that a community center is not the answer to Canal Street's problems.

"People in the neighborhood is the answer," she said. "You need to tell people to get out" and attend meetings of the City Council, neighborhood watch, or Partners Against Crime to find solutions.

Open-air drug markets still remain in the West End, but police and residents agree that drug activity is much less. Now there are also enrichment programs for students, GED and computer courses for adults.

If Canal Street residents ever get the drug dealers out of their neighborhood, "people are going to be really happy," McNeil said. "When your streets are took over, it's like you lost something. When I come home, is the TV still going to be there? Is my food still going to be in the fridge?"

Building momentum

Frank Hartmann, a criminal justice expert at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has written about neighborhoods that have pushed out drug dealers. His 1994 U.S. Department of Justice study concluded that neighborhoods succeed most often when residents take the lead.

In the Fairlawn neighborhood of Washington, D.C., residents worked closely with police and organized themselves into nightly patrols, taking video cameras with them to deter drug dealing. In Philadelphia, neighborhood activists held vigils outside crack houses. And in Manhattan, groups of 10 to 15 people simply stood next to drug dealers, forcing them to move on.

But neighborhoods should start small, Hartmann said.

"Invariably, there has to be somebody who has a stake in Canal Street -- a resident, a property owner, a store owner -- who finally says, 'This is terrible,' " he said. "You don't need more than a handful to start basically saying, 'We'd like this to be better.' "

The people who want change team up with a public agency -- usually the police or housing department -- to work on problems such as graffiti, noise or rubbish on the street. In the process, they build a solid relationship with that agency and gain the confidence that they can make a difference. Then, they generate momentum to tackle bigger issues.

"The first couple of projects don't have to be about the drug dealers," Hartmann said. "When the residents walk out the door, what affronts them? What would you look to change?"

Efforts to stop Canal Street's decline date to the mid-1960s, when officials made repeated attempts to revitalize housing. In 1993, the city launched a similar effort in the bigger North/East Central Durham area. Police trained block captains, started a community watch program and persuaded property owners to refurbish their houses. But then, as now, obstacles to change included a transient population, persistent poverty, poor housing and lack of transportation. That problems persist was evident last week when the city recorded the year's first homicide on Liberty Street.

Former City Manager Lamont Ewell estimated in a 2000 memo that close to $13 million in city, federal and borrowed money had been spent between 1995 and 2000 to improve North/East Central, including support for police, education and home ownership programs.

Jackie Wagstaff, a former city council member and North/East Central Durham activist, has questioned the estimate -- and the city's commitment to the area.

"You're telling me $13 million, but I can't see $300,000 being spent in North/East," she said, adding that spending wasn't targeted to a particular problem. "You have to have concentrated efforts to make something really work. It was spread around, and nothing was really done."

The council, Wagstaff said, had other priorities, such as providing economic incentives for development and industry elsewhere in the city.

"We can fix up all the housing in the world, but nothing changes," she said. "Until the city really focuses on having some incentives for businesses to come in this area, it doesn't matter. Economics dictates how the neighborhood is."

Nick Tennyson, mayor from 1997 to 2001, said efforts fail because the people who could make the neighborhood better tend to move away. "Anyone who can has a tremendous motivation to flee," he said. "That compounds the stability problem."

The money spent on North/East Central Durham might not have had much of a visible effect, he said, but it did make a difference.

"I'm not saying that all the money spent there has been well spent or spent appropriately," he said. "But it also is true to me that a lot of the spending that went on had to be done to avoid even more damage."

Durham police say that law enforcement alone is not the answer, either. Lt. Col. Kent Fletcher, who retired as the department's No. 2 administrator last year, said that a police crackdown can shut down a drug market for a while but that the problem usually just moves to another street. Then, the police target resources there. Eventually, the drug dealers return to the first street. The only way to break that cycle, Fletcher said, is for the rest of the community to sow the seeds for social change as soon as police clean up an area.

"We've weeded out," he said, but the seeding hasn't been effective.

What doesn't work, according to Hartmann, the Harvard researcher, is for outside agencies to try to impose change without stakeholders who care about the neighborhood.

"Nothing else is going to work without that basic ingredient being present, because there's not enough money," he said. "There's not enough police presence."

Still, when a neighborhood doesn't have that core of concerned residents, city agencies and nonprofit groups must lay the groundwork for change, said William Rohe, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. That means residents need access to prevention programs, such as drug treatment, job training or recreation for children. Agencies should coordinate efforts, he said, and those efforts should be continuous and sustained.

"Getting the residents involved is a very difficult thing to do," Rohe said. "In some instances, you're not going to get them involved until there is some reduction in crime. You need enforcement and control to make it safe enough for people to say, 'Now I'm willing to come out, because I see the authorities here are serious.' "

An uphill battle

It isn't easy trying to make a difference. Individuals on Canal Street have tried to organize, but most are afraid to join a neighborhood watch, fearing drug dealers might retaliate against them.

The few volunteers in the area face incredible odds, too.

Bill Lucas was a mentor to Omontay Toomer, who was killed on Canal Street on April 4. Lucas would take Toomer and other boys to the pond at his house to cook out, to go fishing or to pitch horseshoes. But he couldn't keep Toomer from following the path of the older guys he hung around. Toomer dropped out of school and spent most of his time on the street, racking up multiple theft, drug possession and drug trafficking charges. He was shot the first time on Canal Street in 1998, when he was 16. The second time, he wasn't so lucky: He died at age 19. Police think the shooting was gang-related.

"I remember telling all of them they didn't have to be in a gang to be a friend to somebody," Lucas recalled. "There are people that care about them and are willing to help them, and I was one of those persons."

At Mount Gilead Baptist Church, there have been obstacles, too. Eight months after the Evangelism Explosion, Pastor Davis said the programs to reach out to drug dealers and gang members haven't materialized.

"We were thinking about creating an organization in the church that was something like 'God's Christian Gang,' and trying to buy some T-shirts or something like that," Davis said. "I think the congregation became afraid. They were not interested in that."

But some members are still trying. Velita Boyd, a youth adviser at the church, organized a community day on Canal Street, and many residents came out for hot dogs and sandwiches. The church bought a basketball goal and hopes to start tournaments for the kids. And Boyd said there is talk of starting a resource center at the church, to help refer residents to appropriate agencies, if they need help.

She has faith that Canal Street will change for the better.

"I just rely on the strength of the Lord," Boyd said. "Let him be my protection, and just go on down there and do what we need to do."

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