They planned this march through north Minneapolis long before Thurman Junior Blevins.
Hundreds of children, parents and teachers will make a 3.5-mile trek through the North Side and downtown on Friday morning. It's the annual Path to College Walk; each step the kindergartners and middle-schoolers and high-schoolers take is an act of faith in themselves and in a brighter future.
Their neighbors will come out to cheer them on. Five-hundred yard signs are already planted on lawns across north Minneapolis: Future College Grads Live Here.
If the rest of us want to join the party, the students would love a chance to talk about their neighborhood. The one you don't see in the footage of crime scene tape and curbside memorials to lives cut short by gun violence.
"I want them to know that North Side is not bad," said Anthony Key, who starts his junior year at Cooper High School this fall. He wants to study engineering at Duke.
The North Side is not bad. North Siders are not bad.
These kids deserve better. They deserve safe streets and schools where black students' graduation rates are as high as whites'. They deserve to call the police for help without worrying that someone is going to get hurt.
"North Side is a family," said Keirra Phillips, who will be a senior at St. Paul Conservatory for the Performing Arts this fall and who wants to go to college to study nursing and acting. "Everyone supports each other. Everybody comes together."