Chicago CRED is where my cousin Cedric does that work every day.

What you gonna do for your community?

I ask myself that more than people know. Not as a slogan for a t-shirt. As a gut check, alone, at the end of a long day. And every time I ask it, one face shows up before anybody else’s: my cousin, Cedric Hawkins.

We don’t always give people their flowers while they can smell them. So I’m doing it now, in public, on purpose, and I’m doing it the way I do everything else on this site: straight, with my name on it.

This is my cousin. Not in the loose way people use that word.

My grandmother had ten kids, six girls and four boys. Our mothers are two of them, close in age, close their whole lives. That’s how Cedric and I ended up close too. Not the “we see each other at cookouts” kind of cousin, the “in and out of each other’s house before we could walk” kind.

We grew up on the same blocks on Chicago’s South Side, Roseland, around 104th. I was there until I was about nine or ten, then my family moved to Englewood and I was there until about thirteen. Different addresses, same story: family stacked on top of family, everybody’s kids raised by everybody.

So when I write about Cedric, understand what you’re reading. This isn’t a stranger’s profile. This is me talking about somebody I’ve known my entire life.

The part of the story that’s actually public, and it’s enough

In 2007, Cedric caught a federal life sentence under mandatory minimum drug laws. He went into a federal penitentiary three days after his first daughter was born. Read that again. Three days.

About ten years later, President Obama commuted his sentence. Cedric came home to the same streets he left. He didn’t disappear, and he didn’t come back looking for anybody who wronged him. He did something almost nobody expects from a man who just did a decade on a life sentence: he went back into those same neighborhoods to make peace in them.

In 2019, he started as a FLIP Peacekeeper in Roseland, walking the same blocks, talking to young men standing exactly where he used to stand. He got promoted to Outreach Worker, then Supervisor. Today he’s the Strategic Initiatives Manager for the South Side at Chicago CRED, one of the organizations actually doing the unglamorous, dangerous, un-photographed work of stopping a shooting before it happens instead of writing about it after.

Chicago CRED’s own materials say he’s lost more than six family members to gun violence in Roseland and West Pullman. That number should stop you cold. It didn’t stop him. If anything, it’s the reason he does what he does.

Watch it yourself before you take my word for it

PBS followed Cedric for their FIRSTHAND series on Chicago’s peacekeepers. Full episode, no cuts, nothing I’m choosing for you:

https://www.pbs.org/video/cedric-zwh4xk/

WTTW Chicago covered the same ground for their own “Firsthand: Peacekeepers” series, worth the watch too: watch Cedric’s episode on WTTW.

Loyalty over love. That’s the whole point of this post.

Here’s what I want to say straight to you, cousin, if you ever read this.

People throw the word “love” around easy because it’s a feeling, and feelings come and go. They get tested by distance, by bad days, by time. What you’ve shown me my whole life is something harder to fake and a lot harder to find: loyalty. You don’t have to feel a certain way about somebody every single day to be loyal to them. Loyalty is what’s still standing after the feeling leaves the room.

The Loyalty Over Love Hoodie: this post’s whole idea, stitched into a hoodie.

That’s what I see when I look at Cedric’s life. Loyalty to the block that almost swallowed him. Loyalty to the family he came home to. Loyalty to kids who don’t even know his name yet but are going to grow up safer because he chose peace over payback. His daughter, the one born three days before he went in, is grown now, doing good in school and in college. I’m not putting her name out here, that’s hers to give, not mine. But I’ll tell you this much: she’s proof that what he lost never got the last word.

I’ll be honest with you too. Peace has never come as easy to me as it comes to him. That’s part of why I salute him the way I do. Some men talk about staying calm. Cedric actually does it, walking into situations most of us would run from, and he does it as a job, every day, on purpose.

If you’re looking for the kind of man you’d want as a friend, a father, a husband, a brother, a cousin, or an uncle, this is what it actually looks like. Not the loudest guy in the room. Not the one making promises. The one who’s still there, still showing up, long after the feeling that started the relationship has come and gone. In today’s world, that’s rare enough to write a whole post about.

Why I’m telling you this instead of just posting a photo

Chicago Minded exists to prove one thing: where you start doesn’t have to be where you finish. Dig for the knowledge, build something real, grow into the life you actually want. Cedric didn’t read that off a poster somewhere. He lived it before I ever put words to it. A federal life sentence isn’t a plot twist in a movie, it’s a real cage, and he walked out of it and picked the hardest, lowest-paid, most necessary job there is: standing between angry young men and a decision they can’t take back.

And look, this isn’t a Chicago story. Chicago’s just where it happened to me. Every city has its own version of Cedric, somebody who came back from the worst thing that ever happened to them and decided to spend the rest of their life making sure it happens to fewer people. If that’s you, or somebody in your family, this post is for you too. I wrote more about starting over from the bottom in the piece on why your story isn’t over yet, and Cedric is proof it isn’t a nice idea, it’s something people actually do.

Loyalty shows up in more places than family

I think about this same idea when I look at why relationships fall apart over things that were never really about the thing people argue over. I wrote a whole post about why you keep having the same argument with the same person, and the short version is: love keeps people together in the good moments, but loyalty is what keeps people together when it isn’t good. Cedric’s whole life is that lesson with the volume turned all the way up.

It’s part of why, when I built ChessStrology, “loyalty over love” ended up being more than a line in a blog post. It’s stitched into a hoodie. Cedric’s an Aquarius, I’m a Libra. I’m not out here pushing astrology as something to live your life by, that’s not what this is. But if you know anything about sun signs, Aquarius is the one that’s supposed to march to its own beat and refuse to be boxed in by what everybody else expects. Man, if that doesn’t sound like my cousin, I don’t know what does. There’s a hoodie built around exactly that idea, Aquarius, Own Your Difference, and it’s the first thing that came to mind writing this, not as a pitch stapled onto a tribute, but because it’s the same idea this whole post is making: what you’re born into doesn’t get the final say on who you become. If you don’t know your own sign, check it while you’re there, we’ve probably already made yours too. I broke down how a piece of merch like that actually turns into real income, no inventory, no guessing, in how print-on-demand and digital products actually work.

Aquarius, Own Your Difference: Cedric’s sign.

One more thing, before you go

If Cedric’s story hit you, keep showing up. Keep being loyal when it would be easier to walk. And if you’re tired of getting called difficult for setting a boundary, I want you to have something. I put together a free guide called You Ain’t The Villain. It walks through how to say no at work without losing your job, how to say no at home without starting a war, and how to say no to your own family without becoming the bad guy in somebody else’s story. Twenty pages, and there’s one page near the back worth screenshotting.

Drop your email in the box at the bottom of this page and I’ll send it straight to you. No cost, no catch, just something I wish somebody had handed me a long time ago.

What you gonna do for your community?

You don’t have to run a nonprofit. You don’t need a title, a budget, or anybody’s permission. Cedric started as one man walking one block. Pick your block. Start there. And the next time somebody in your life shows up for you with no fanfare, no feeling required, just there, again and again. Tell them what it’s worth. Don’t wait until the flowers only work at a funeral.

Loyalty over love. Every time.