Street Jummah in Englewood
By Imam Freedom
I was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Before that, I sold drugs on the streets of Englewood. That was my reality for a long time: a young Black man from this neighborhood, caught up in the same cycle that has swallowed so many of us, standing in front of a judge and hearing “life” attached to my name.
Prison did not break me. It rebuilt me. Behind those walls, I found Islam, and I gave myself to studying it seriously. 30 years passed. I studied. I grew. And eventually, through the mercy of Allah and the work of people who believed a life sentence should not be the last word on a man’s life, I was resentenced and given my freedom back.
When I came home, I did not move away from Englewood. I came back to the same streets where I once sold drugs. I stood on the same corners. Except now I was not there to destroy the neighborhood. I was there to pray in it.
That is why I started Street Jummah.
Taking the Prayer to the People
Street Jummah is exactly what it sounds like: Friday prayer, held outside, on the block, in the neighborhoods that most mosques and most institutions have written off. No one has to find a masjid, dress a certain way, or feel like an outsider walking through an unfamiliar door. We bring the khutbah and the salah to where people already are, on the same corners where the streets once took so much from us.
I chose Englewood on purpose. This is where I sold drugs. This is where I contributed to the same pain I now stand against. Starting Street Jummah on this ground is not a symbolic gesture. It is a direct accounting. I am not preaching down to this community from somewhere safe. I am standing in the exact spot where I did harm, and I am trying to do the opposite of harm in that same spot, in front of the same people who knew me before.
A Neighborhood Built on Racism
To understand why Street Jummah had to happen in Englewood, you have to understand what was done to Englewood.
Most people who walk through Englewood today, past the boarded-up buildings and the vacant lots, assume it has always been this way. It has not. Englewood was once predominately white and affluent, and for a stretch of its history it was a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan. As the Great Migration brought African-Americans deeper into Chicago and Black families began moving into the neighborhood, that white community organized against them, and it organized violently.
Neighborhood associations formed with the explicit purpose of keeping Englewood white. Their slogans said the quiet part out loud: “America for whites,” and worse than that, open declarations that Africa was the only place they believed Black people belonged. Residents told reporters plainly, “we don’t want them, we don’t want to live with them,” and called their Black neighbors savages, all while the actual violence being carried out to “defend” the neighborhood, bombings, arson, physical assaults against people simply trying to live their lives, made clear exactly who the savages were.
In November 1949, that hostility exploded into what became known as the Englewood race riot. A rumor spread that a house on Peoria Street was going to be sold to a Black family. Posters went up around the neighborhood reading “NEGROES INVADING.” A white mob gathered, and for days they terrorized the block, throwing rocks, beating people, vandalizing the home, while police stood by and did little to stop it. That house still stands today, swastikas still visible on it, a permanent scar on this neighborhood’s history.
Black families kept coming anyway. And once the bombs and the mobs failed to stop integration, white Englewood chose a different weapon: they left. That “white flight” pulled investment, jobs, and infrastructure out of the neighborhood right along with the white residents, and it left the Black community that remained to inherit the turmoil, chaos, and social decay that followed. That decline was not something Black Englewood did to itself. It was handed to us on the way out the door.
I am not telling this history to dwell in the past. I am telling it because it explains the ground I am standing on. The disinvestment, the over-policing, the lack of opportunity that fed the drug trade I was once part of, none of that came from nowhere. Systemic racism laid the foundation. But I refuse to let that history be the final excuse. It is the explanation, not the permission.
Change What Is in Themselves
Allah tells us in the Quran, “Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves” (13:11). That verse is the whole engine behind Street Jummah.
Why This Matters
Englewood does not need another program that talks about the neighborhood from the outside. It needs people who came from inside it, who know the pull of the streets firsthand, standing up and showing another way is possible. When young brothers see a man who did life-sentence time for murder, who once sold drugs on these same corners, who found Allah in a cell, who came home and studied Islam seriously, and who now leads prayer on the same block where he once did harm, that carries a weight that no outside speaker or program can replicate. It says: your story is not over. Even if the streets already have a hold on you, there is a way back, and it does not require you to leave your own neighborhood behind.
Street Jummah is also about presence. Black neighborhoods like Englewood are flooded with liquor stores, absent institutions, and disinvestment, but rarely flooded with sustained, visible faith. We are changing that, one Friday, one block, at a time.
This work is bigger than one prayer or one preacher. It is about planting Islam back into the streets that raised us, using the very lives that the streets almost destroyed as the proof that transformation is real.
That is why I organized Street Jummah in Englewood, and that is why I will keep standing on that block every Friday I can.