Change They Want to Believe In

Foster's office walls display too many awards and certificates to count: from the U.S. probation office, the United Black Fund, the D.C. Council. For three decades, as leader of Concerned Citizens on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, he has been working to keep people from the bottle, off dope, out of prison. He rescued Jackson-El, an ex-con and former cokehead, 20-some years ago.

Today Jackson-El is a counselor here in the clinic's humble headquarters on Martin Luther King Avenue SE.

"You've got to see your weakness and face it," he says. "It takes the mind. That's what changed me."

"Ain't nobody going to give you something on a silver platter," Foster says, folding his fingers across his chest. "Support yourself. Build something."

But look around, Jackson-El says later, smoking a Newport, walking the avenue. "You see what's out here. A whole lot of nothing."

The jobless and homeless gather in a park, panhandling and clutching flimsy black plastic sacks fresh from the nearby liquor store. "That's the liquor store that feeds the disease," he says.

At one corner, Barack Obama and MLK are painted larger than life on a mural that proclaims "Yes We Can and We Did." The swale is littered with empty half-pint bottles.

"No hoods, no masks," warns a sign on the front door of the only nearby store that sells hot coffee.

With the inauguration but weeks away, "I'm trying to figure out what's so spectacular to celebrate," says Jackson-El, whose name reflects his membership in the Moorish Science Temple religion. "This man Obama, he's talking about jobs, but those jobs are for educated people. What about uneducated people?"

He himself is a seventh-grade dropout. "All I'm worried about is what is he going to do for the inner city, not Capitol Hill."

Development in the form of baseball stadiums or new condos won't solve the underlying problems here, Foster says: "These people are just surviving. Why do you want to build something on top of a keg of termites? Because eventually they are going to eat right through it."

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