Jerjuan Howard was 14 when he decided he wanted to change the world.
Howard was first spurred to activism after hearing about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. a Black unarmed 17-year-old in Florida who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in 2012. The next year, Zimmerman was acquitted.
“I wanted to become a lawyer,” said Howard. “I wanted to change the system.”
But, after serving in the National Guard to put himself through college, Howard realized the best place to start might be his own backyard.
The west side Detroit native came home to Puritan Avenue, and started giving back, with the goal of building a model of community engagement other neighborhoods could replicate.
Since then, Howard has helped organize a community garden, is opening a bookstore on April 25 to give students a place to go after school, and founded a local business association.
His marquee initiative may be the nonprofit Umoja Debate League, which has attracted hundreds of students.
“This will produce greater results for our community than me being an individual lawyer,” Howard and about Umoja. “It’ll produce maybe hundreds of lawyers, thousands if we do this the right way.”
Five years after returning home, Howard, now 28, is taking his talents to city hall. He has been appointed the Detroit’s first director of youth affairs, as part of Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield’s administration to support opportunities for young people in the city. As he steps into this new role, he’s handing the reins to all of these initiatives to colleagues and family.
“I don’t want people to leave this city because they feel like the city wasn’t ready for their dreams and their ambitions,” said Howard. “I want to make sure we, as a city, have done our job to make this a place where young people can grow.”
‘Disguised learning’
Howard first had the idea to form a debate league during his senior year at Western Michigan University, while preparing to enroll in law school.
He had been elected president of the Black Student Union at the same time that Sam Robinson, a journalist and founder of the news site Detroit One Million, was the editor in chief of Western’s school newspaper.
Robinson said Howard’s leadership skills were incomparable.
At a school where Black students are a minority, Howard focused on connecting people and was “very intentional about being inclusive of personalities or identities” that were not his own, said Robinson.
Then, COVID-19 shut down the world. In the isolation of the pandemic, Howard said he began to rethink his aspirations. Time and time again, he came back to his experience as a high school debater at Detroit Renaissance.
“I was like, this helped me a lot — what if this helped out a bunch of other kids in Detroit? What if this became a thing that produces lawyers? You know, produces what people view me as,” said Howard. At the same time, he looked to Malcolm X as a model and found debate there, too.
“Malcolm X once called debate his ‘baptism into public speaking,’ ” said Howard. “When I learned that, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, if Malcolm X is this dynamic speaker, then these kids really need this.’ ”
In his spare time after graduating, Howard started the first Umoja Debate Team in February 2022. It began as an after-school program with just five students at his alma mater, John R. King Middle School, located on the corner of Puritan Avenue and Strathmoor Street. He organized Umoja’s first summer camp later that year.
In two years, the Umoja Debate Team evolved into the Umoja Debate League, expanding to include 10 Detroit middle schools and 10 Detroit high schools, and a debate camp that boasts close to 50 students each summer.
Michael Burley, a debater and intern for Umoja last summer, was 10 years old when he attended the first Umoja summer debate camp with six other debaters.
“(Howard’s) seen me grow up and I’ve also seen him grow up,” said Burley, now 14. “When we first started, it was his first time doing anything. It’s just been very cool seeing him be able to grow as far as his program and his impact in the community.”
Howard calls the program “disguised learning.” He uses debate to instill confidence in students, encouraging them to start each session by analyzing an African proverb and repeating a daily affirmation. Debate topics include Black history and city policy.
Students have debated contemporary issues including whether a portion of the Renaissance Center should be demolished and whether residents should be allowed to raise chickens on their property. Umoja also often invites local legal professionals and members of Detroit’s City Council to judge.
“I think that a lot of individuals, especially young individuals, have some type of pessimism or fatalistic ideals about the way in which policy can formulate change in their communities,” said Darcel Brown Jr., Umoja’s operations manager. But by giving kids the opportunity to engage directly with policymakers in their community, said Brown, Umoja aims to show students that they can “impact that legislation and create change.”
Burley said Umoja gave him confidence in his voice. He’s more comfortable writing, asking for help, and speaking in front of a crowd. He said Umoja has helped him become a leader on his travel basketball team and has helped him understand himself better.
“I didn’t really know very much about my history or culture before. It helps me to understand where I come from, my background, my people, my history and my identity. I feel like it helps me feel stronger about who I am,” he said.
On one warm July day, Howard sat in the back of a lecture hall in the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, where Umoja hosts its summer debate program. He sorted through emails and grant applications without looking up as the debaters settled down around him.
Head debate coach Deon Davidson quieted the group and called on Burley to lead the daily affirmation.
As the students began, Howard looked up from his screen for the first time, leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and took it all in.
In unison, a chorus of adolescent voices filled the giant room.
“I am important to my community. My community is important to me.”
Howard smiled softly, and got back to work.
‘One nice thing’
Howard said he grew up surrounded by disinvestment. Each day, he passed abandoned buildings with boarded-up windows on his walk to school. One building, on the corner of Puritan and Lesure Street had been vacant and in disrepair for 25 years. It was easy, he said, to think the city didn’t care about you.
“I believe that once one nice thing comes from a neighborhood, it becomes kind of contagious,” said Howard as he stood in front of that same building. He owns it now, and has turned it into a bookstore, slated to open April 25.
Howard said he hopes the Howard Family Bookstore will be a gathering space for literacy programs, guest speakers and other community events.
“Within a mile and a half radius of my bookstore, there are seven schools. That means children are interacting with these blighted and abandoned buildings every day,” Howard said.
The once-dreary building is now covered by a brightly colored mural, depicting books, bedtime stories and the Howard family sitting around a table, more books in hand.
Howard views all of his projects and initiatives as intertwined. In 2025, he began the Puritan Avenue Business Association, which works to connect businesses on Puritan with one another.
The summer before being offered a new job at city hall, he purchased two more empty lots across the street from the bookstore. Before making plans, he surveyed residents to understand what they felt they needed next in their community, and they said, a health clinic.
Howard’s sister, Zaniah Cummings, said that watching her older brother transform the neighborhood they grew up in has opened her mind to possibilities for her own future.
The 20-year-old is a sophomore at Norfolk State University in Virginia and hopes to become an oral surgeon. Her brother, she said, inspired her to consider someday opening her own practice on Puritan.
“I feel like Juan is walking so our family can run.”
Umoja Village
The backdoor of the Howard Family Bookstore opens onto an alley lined with murals painted by community members. The alley leads to Umoja Village, three once-vacant lots that the Umoja Debate League bought and began revitalizing in 2023.
Across the street, on the corner of Puritan and Stansbury avenues, Darnell Vance’s view has changed dramatically over the last 29 years.
At one point, an abandoned house crumbled in the lots. When it was eventually demolished, the area was overcome by weeds and littered with trash. For years, Vance’s wife, Kim, joined him on the porch and, Vance said, she would always shake her head and say, “Honey, we need to try to get that lot and try to do something with it.”
Through the Umoja Debate League, Howard bought it, and today, the space is a community garden. Late last summer, the bounty included orange flowers of a pumpkin plant blooming next to heavy purple eggplants and ripe zucchini. Tomatoes blushed nearby. Brightly colored murals painted by children in the neighborhood line the back wall year-round, and a wooden stage built to host community meetings and children’s debates stands perpendicular to the black, red, and green painted sidewalk. A matching Pan-African flag flies high above the scene.
A wooden sign in front of the garden reads: “Welcome to Umoja Village.”
“I wish my wife could have lived to see what Jerjuan’s done here,” said Vance, 69, looking out and smiling. “She would’ve loved it.”
‘Take it even further’
From his bookstore and business association to the community garden and art alley, Howard sees his work as replicable across the city.
“The narrative around Puritan is oftentimes negative, historically, in the city,” Howard said. “This is an example of what can be done along other neighborhoods in Detroit. Because the same conditions that make Puritan Ave., Puritan Ave., exist in pretty much every other neighborhood in Detroit.”
Howard’s community work started small, even smaller than a garden and bookstore, building little libraries. He worked as an academic interventionist at Detroit Public Schools Community District as he started Umoja Debate League. Detroit City Council member James Tate noticed Howard’s efforts and was so impressed by the then 23-year-old’s work, he offered Howard a job. In the spring of 2022, Howard began working for Tate on the Black Male Engagement Taskforce, and spearheaded a gun violence prevention initiative.
Howard left a year later.
“You know how when you talk to someone, there’s a certain glimmer in their eyes that is just brighter and shinier than anything else?” asked Tate. “That was Umoja.”
“It was very clear that that’s where his heart was,” Tate added.
It was Umoja that drew Sheffield’s attention, too. Before she was elected mayor, Sheffield had attended several debates.
Last year, she called Howard to offer him a job that seemed like it was designed for him.
“I don’t want my story to be an anomaly,” Howard said about his hopes for his new role in city government. “I want it to be a norm. I want youth to have access to that process to be able to replicate it. And not even to replicate it, but to take it even further.”
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: This Detroiter is improving his neighborhood, and city hall noticed
Reporting by Aurora Sousanis, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
