Outside on the street, the message is "Dig A Hole" - a ballad by singer Jay-Z, full of graveyard imagery, blasting from a passing car. Inside a nearby classroom the message is "I Am Somebody."
The students in Faikah Munirah's class at Harvey Rice Elementary School are dressed in Dashikis made in Africa, and chanting an affirmation about self-respect, family and community. In the space between the message inside, and the one outside, you find a portrait of Cleveland's Buckeye neighborhood. The chant of hope in the classroom was designed to counter the chant of despair on the street. It's part of a program devised by Paul Hill, Jr.
Paul Hill: It's like creating an oasis in the community. Creating a caring and safe space.
Since 1981, Paul Hill has supervised a social service agency, called the East End Neighborhood House, that has sat in the middle of this tough turf for a century. The floorboards creak with the weight of history as Hill walks through this old house that has served the needs of a changing community since 1907.
Paul Hill: Usually, when you think of Buckeye, growing up, that was the Hungarian Avenue. Buckeye Avenue was like downtown Budapest.
East End was one of a number of local immigrant settlement houses founded at the turn of the last century. Case Western Reserve's John Grabowski says Hungarians, Slovaks and Italians came here to find work, take English classes, and otherwise learn the ways of their new country.
John Grabowski: Cleveland was not so much a city as a set of villages. And so these social settlements went into these villages and tried to raise the standards of living and eventually were the core of the Americanization movement in the 1910s, as well.
Grabowski notes that the ethnic mix was always shifting, with one group coming in to replace a previous one. In the 1960s, the Buckeye neighborhood started to become a largely black community.
John Grabowski: So, East End Neighborhood House became a primarily an African American settlement. And it was under the leadership of Paul Hill that it pushed a lot of special programs for African Americans.
Paul Hill: There were certain needs, such as food, clothing and shelter that always stayed the same. Some of the different needs, relative to the African American community, had to do with identity.
Especially for young African American men and boys who didn't have strong male role models.
Paul Hill: I wanted to do something specifically for my boys to help them in that journey from boys to becoming men. And then I became very interested in coming-of-age, initiation... rites of passage.
Many cultures have some sort of a "rite of passage" - a ceremony that marks the transition from child to adult. Using a Kellogg fellowship, Hill studied male socialization practices in a number of countries. He created a series of programs aimed at mentoring boys, gradually expanding them to include girls, as well.
Faikah Munirah's classroom is one of many across the U.S. that have adopted Paul Hill's ideas. The effectiveness of Hill's work has been documented by a number of researchers, including Anthony King, at Wayne State University.
Anthony King: He's well known throughout the country, not only for his programs, but for his philosophy and his services using the Rites of Passage program. He's done a large amount of training, nationally.
For all the positive effects of the Rites of Passage programs, Paul Hill says there's a lot of work left to do. He admits to being frustrated by news stories of teenagers packing guns in Cleveland neighborhoods.
Paul Hill: East End Neighborhood House, and a lot of these other settlement houses, what we do is pull the bodies out of the water that end up downstream.
The problem, he says, is that too few people are looking upstream to see where those bodies came from in the first place. David C. Barnett, 90.3.