Can former felons’ car businesses put youths on the right road?
Marvin Coleman’s story, like the story of the Hyde Park community in North Memphis where he was raised, is one of trauma and triumph.
In 1983, Coleman, who owns Chelsea Automart Inc., a used car business there, saw a Memphis police SWAT team raid a house in what would be known as the Shannon Street Massacre.
Officers had attempted to negotiate with Lindbergh Sanders, who was part of a religious group that had taken a police officer hostage. The officer was ultimately killed. The SWAT team exchanged fire with the group and wound up killing all seven of them inside. Coleman was 13 at the time.
“For a while, I was afraid to walk past that house and see all the gunshots in it, and to know that people in my neighborhood were gunned down like that,” said Coleman, now 50.
But his trauma didn’t end there. Coleman’s older sister died of leukemia at age 16, and as he grappled with that tragedy, his mother worked lowwage jobs that barely kept the lights on, or kept him fed.
“During that time, I felt very protective of my mother,” he said, “So I started selling drugs. I thought I was helping her out, but that took me down a whole other road…”
That road took Coleman to federal prison in 1998 on drug trafficking charges. But the road that took him out of incarceration was one that was obstructed by trauma and poverty when he was a child.
During his 13 years in prison, Coleman took advantage of the education that eluded him while he was on the outside. He earned his GED and an associate degree from Southwest Tennessee Community College. He took 59 vocational classes and earned his heating and air conditioning license.
When Coleman left prison in 2008, he sought out his friend, Eric Mhoon, who he met while in federal prison and who had, since 2005, been operating Upgrade Auto Sales in South Memphis.
“I was cutting the grass and trees around his lot, and he sold me my first car,” Coleman said. “I started asking him about the car business, and he became my mentor.”
Thus began the triumph for Coleman; a triumph that he hopes will blunt the poverty and trauma that he struggled with, and that many youths
in Hyde Park, where 41 percent of the people live below the poverty level, continue to grapple with.
After saving money from detailing jobs and other gigs, Coleman bought his first used car lot in 2015. With the help of Mhoon and support from people such as former Memphis City Councilman Joe Brown, he now owns three used car lots of Chelsea Street.
“I buy mostly Hondas, Nissans and Fords, so that middle class people can afford them and they can find parts for,” Coleman said.
Yet Coleman is quick to say he’s more than a car lot owner.
That’s because he also operates Partners In Unity; a charity in which former felons like himself and Mhoon, who spent 15 years in federal prison on drugtrafficking charges, support the communities they once scourged with their criminality.
In 2018, Coleman and his band of former felons gave away more than 1,000 backpacks to school children in the area, he said.
And since the COVID-19 crisis began last year, Partners in Unity has given away more than 2,700 boxes of food and produce. Last December, it gave around 330 winter coats and toys to children.
Curtis Mcdonald, who was Alice Marie Johnson’s co-defendant and who was released from prison last year after former President Trump granted him clemency, even joined in to help.
Coleman and Mcdonald became friends in prison.
“We do petting zoos for the kids, bounce houses, everything,” Coleman said. “We always honor three or four senior citizens in the community for their contributions.”
“And we’ve never asked for one penny from the neighborhood.”
But don’t think for one moment that Coleman believes charity is the sole route to help youths in Hyde Park or in South Memphis to avoid criminality. Much of that work through Partners In Unity is to show them the love that they might get from gangsters who’ll want them to commit crimes in return.
Coleman plans to show that love in a larger, legitimate way.
“My ultimate goal is to open the Hyde Park Automotive and Vocational Trade School, because skills pay bills,” he said.
That may sound lofty. But it can work.
People like Coleman and Mhoon, who have experienced prison, are perhaps the best examples to show youths that incarceration doesn’t have to be an inevitability.
Still, it’s tragic that the trauma and the poverty in such environments often influence youths to make bad choices first before realizing that there were better choices to be made; choices that would have spared them years in prison.
It’s tragic that many of them are sent to be reformed in the prison environment when they should have been nurtured in their natural environment.
“Everywhere I looked, there were people doing this [selling drugs],” said Mhoon, 51, who said his criminality was largely influenced by peer pressure. “They were selling coke and weed, and the people who had regular jobs weren’t making any money.”
Coleman and Mhoon can counteract that kind of peer pressure by making entrepreneurialism and vocational training cool and, to an extent, a streetwise choice.
By showing that it’s possible for Black men, men who have endured the ravages and the pressures of poverty of the streets, to succeed as citizens and as partners in business.
Not as partners in crime.