He bought dozens of them from stores in East Durham, then destroyed them.

A love rose is a glass tube containing a miniature paper rose. It looks like a romantic gift -- and a few might actually be used that way. But in neighborhoods plagued by drugs, where love roses are common, most buyers discard the rose and use the tube as a crack cocaine pipe.

Whitley, 59, is consumed with hope. Hope for a better East Durham. Hope for improved neighbor relations. Hope for less crime, especially among young people.

"You can give him a thought, and, if it has enough sense, he's in front of the City Council," says Samuel Jenkins, Whitley's friend and barber. "He takes a community problem and tries to change the hope."

For years, Whitley has championed the causes of the unfortunate in Richmond, Va., Southeast Raleigh and now East Durham.

Lately, he's been pressing his case for a crackdown on sales of bullets and love roses before neighborhood groups, city councils and other public officials. He wants community support to get both causes turned into state law.

The bullet crackdown would require a permit to purchase ammunition. As for the love roses, he persuaded the Durham City Council to pass an ordinance in November 2006 to fine stores $500 for selling them.

He also wants a state law that would require photo identification to buy a glass pen and set up a registry where a buyer's name would stay for two years. Glass pens are also associated with drug use.

But behind the scenes, beyond the many meetings that fill up Whitley's week, is a desire to help the homeless and recovering drug addicts. It is his passion because at one point, he was just like them.

'A flu of hate'

"I came back from Vietnam in 1969 in a flu of hate," he recalls. "I hated everything. And I hated me. I didn't understand why God could let people die on a daily basis. I didn't understand why I had to kill people."

Whitley had left his theology studies at Shaw University to sign up for the Marine Reserve. In boot camp, he enlisted for two years of active duty.

"I thought I was ready for everything," he says. "And when it came down to it, the first time I had to kill someone, I threw up. And I cried. It became a daily experience."

To cope with the stress, he turned to marijuana and heroin. Once he returned home, he became addicted to heroin. He hated himself so much that he tried to kill himself nine times.

In a Raleigh homeless shelter in the early 1970s, Whitley met Milton Jordan. Jordan, who changed his life after a background of trouble, told Whitley he needed to change just one thing about himself -- everything.

"Ultimately you have to give up everything that is a part of your past and plot for yourself a brand new future," says Jordan, now a minister at St. Joseph's AME Church in Durham. "It's critical that people who want to do better must aspire to complete transformation, not just reformation."

Whitley got help for his anger and depression. He moved to Richmond in 1974 to get a fresh start. There, a nun persuaded him to try community organizing. His first effort was a petition drive to make a shopping center accessible to the handicapped. It worked. He was hooked.

He returned to Raleigh in 1982 to continue his community work. He led an effort in 1983 to keep Dorothea Dix Hospital open. He took up a variety of Southeast Raleigh issues, including drug dealers, police protection, slumlords and the naming of a new high school.

Boosting East Durham

Not long after he moved to Durham in 1998 -- in part because of Jordan -- he met Samuel Jenkins at a drug recovery meeting and struck up a friendship.

Jenkins owns Samuel & Sons Barber Shop on Angier Avenue. The two men's conversations centered mostly on improving life in East Durham.

"Melvin always presents himself as 'I'm a man, just like you,' " Jenkins says. "He's one of those guys where if he gives you his word, then he has your back."

Whitley is admittedly stubborn about what he believes in, a trait he got from his deacon father while watching him advocate for paved roads in Southeast Raleigh. His knack for negotiating came from his mother, who used Sunday dinner as a time to debate the week's news.

What inspires Whitley's efforts is empowering residents to improve their neighborhoods. If you teach someone to do for himself, he says, that person will teach others to do the same.

"Once you give them hope, they begin to figure out what else they can work on," he says.

Whitley doesn't hold a regular job -- he collects a disability benefit -- but he keeps a full schedule of meetings and events. At a recent meeting of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, he continued pushing for support of his bullet issue.

But his real work, he says, is working with the homeless and recovering drug addicts.

"I get more enjoyment and most of my energy out of that," he said. "It relates to my ministry. I like to think of myself as doing all the things a preacher ought to do past Sunday morning."

Where God wants him

Marcia Owen, outreach coordinator for the religious coalition, says Whitley understands the community and realizes the role of public policy in ministry.

"He really lives his life according to the Gospel," she says. "He turns to his neighbors and is unafraid of their sufferings and wants peace and justice."

Whitley became a preacher in 2003. Last Sunday he was ordained a minister at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Durham.

"My life has been this steady progression where I'm finally getting back to the place God intended me to be from the start," he says -- in the ministry and helping the unfortunate.

"He's not afraid of speaking his mind, which I think is good," Durham Mayor Bill Bell says. "He says things we don't want to hear but we need to hear."