New cleanup group hopes sprucing up East St. Louis will lead to other improvements
Koran Payton’s roots in East St. Louis run deep.
His godfather, Lee Coleman, was a former city manager, and his mother, Rita Payton, was active in the community. Kelly Payton, Koran’s father, was a leader of the Black Egyptians, a former street gang based in East St. Louis.
His family’s legacy inspires Payton to continue their tradition of promoting change in his hometown.
“I don’t have a choice not to be active,” said Payton, who is 31.
Payton is the leader of R.E.C. (Regular Everyday Citizens), a newly formed group of metro-east millennials who are dedicated to cleaning up East St. Louis.
Since June 27, the team has organized five cleanup events along Gray Boulevard that included picking up trash, cutting trees near abandoned houses and mowing grass to make sidewalks more visible, among other things.
Payton said he got the idea to start on Gray Boulevard when a resident told him about the trash along the street.
Abandoned homes and piles of trash in yards are prevalent in between residential properties on Gray Boulevard. Sidewalks are filled with debris clogged with grass that needs to be cut. Alleys near the street aren’t visible because of the surrounding trees that need to be trimmed.
Payton said conditions such as those are ubiquitous in East St. Louis, and it’s a trend that he started noticing when he was younger.
When Payton was only 6 months old, his father was fatally shot in East St. Louis. Payton was raised by his godfather and mom in the city.
He left East St. Louis in 2007 when he enlisted in the Army. He returned home in 2016 and later moved to Belleville. He works as a transportation management specialist at Scott Air Force Base.
But East St. Louis will always be his home.
“I’m from East St. Louis, born and raised,” he said. “I left and came back to the city, and it still looks the same.”
“We did a couple of Zoom meetings with the city about them wanting to reach out to Millennials and Gen Z, and a group of us had already gotten together because with the climate that it is right now, every Black person spiritually across the world seems to be angry right now. “
Motivated to help East St. Louis
Payton said the city’s conditions coupled with George Floyd’s death furthered his motivation to start a cleanup group.
“We saw people rioting and looting, but we saw that when the anger has built up so much behind a people continuously throughout the history of this country, every time there’s a tipping point, there’s an explosion, and I’ve always exploded,” Payton said. “So I decided instead of going out to the protests this time, I needed to figure something else out, and I had a couple of guys reach out to me for something to do.”
That’s how Pierre Wilson, Payton’s childhood friend, became involved in R.E.C. Although Wilson, who lives in Belleville, moved from East St. Louis as a child with his family, he said not much has changed since he left.
“It’s trash everywhere,” said Wilson, who is 28. “Bags of food, empty cans and the streets aren’t being taken care of. It’s not the best place for growth and development.”
Most of Wilson’s family still resides in East St. Louis, and he refers to the city as his home. He hopes the group’s beautification efforts can inspire more people in East St. Louis to get involved in cleaning the city.
Only half of the eight-member R.E.C. team is originally from East St. Louis. Wilson and Payton said the group encourages more resident participation by asking pedestrians along Gray Boulevard for help during cleanups and by posting a call for volunteers on Facebook.
“We’re picking up trash and we’re cleaning trees and brush by abandoned houses and fields,” said Wilson, who owns P’s Transportation Solutions in Belleville. “We’re actually just trying to put any effort we can into making this community look better than what it is. We’re hoping this effort will start a flame in this community and for the officials, so that we can really start making a real change.
“Cleaning a city is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s really a lot of work that has to be done outside of that, so we’re just hoping that this at least starts something and that it goes in the right direction.”
Residents appreciate the helping hand
Mary Brown sat on the porch in front of her house while the R.E.C. team cleaned up debris along Gray Boulevard on a recent Saturday afternoon. She offered the volunteers Popsicles to help stay hydrated in the 90-degree heat. Brown said there’s a need for more young people in the city to help in cleanup efforts.
“This is my mom’s house, so I’ve been living here for about 11 years,” Brown, an East St. Louis native, said. “You don’t find a whole lot of help, but I love what this group is doing.
“I love when they come around here and clean up. That’s a good thing. I’m 66 and it’s just hard for me to get out there because I used to do a lot of things like that.”
Brown said she used to trim the grass outside of her house and clean up the area more frequently before her mom passed away several years ago.
“My house wouldn’t be like this with the tall grass and stuff on the outside because I used to trim, but I love what they’re doing,” Brown said about R.E.C. “I used to do mine when my mom was here, but like I said, I’m a little bit older now and I have asthma and I can’t stand by the heat and different things, but I love what’s going on. I really do.”
Leroy Scott lives a few houses down from Brown. On a recent Saturday, he was on his way to pick up traffic cones for R.E.C to protect volunteers as they worked. Scott said the city should’ve been doing that.
“It’s a great thing that they’re doing,” said Scott, who has lived in his home for five years with his wife. “We’re taking care of our neighborhood ourselves, so the city should be doing their jobs, and not the citizens. We shouldn’t have volunteers cleaning up our area when we’re paying public works and the city to do what their job titles are. What they’re doing is a great thing, coming into the community, trying to clean up and straighten up what the city isn’t doing.”
Scott said he’s frustrated with having to always pick up the trash around his home. He said the trash mainly comes from people driving down the street and throwing bottles and other litter out of their cars.
“Where’s public safety, where’s the code enforcement officer, where are these people that we are paying to make sure that our city functions well?”
Changing the narrative in East St. Louis
Samuel Swanson, director of the East St. Louis Public Works Department, commends the new clean-up group for its efforts. He sends his staff to collect the trash bags from the cleanups on Gray Boulevard.
He said his team can’t please every resident in the area. He said his department could use more citizen help to eliminate the illegal dumping of trash in the area.
“We need help to do our job also,” Swanson said. “When citizens see people from other cities dumping trash in the area, it would be helpful if they got their license plate numbers and called the police. I don’t have 50 guys out there. I don’t have that kind of staffing. And with this coronavirus, I’ve had a couple of people off, so I don’t always have the manpower to do what we want to do.”
Swanson said his team consists of seven people, and he’s open to getting more people involved in cleanups. Each week, his team concentrates on a cleaning up an area of the city.
“We can’t be at every part of the city everyday,” Swanson said. “We take the work orders as they come in. If we’re over in one area, we tend to stay in that area for the day to see what else needs to be done.
“If you live in the east end of town, so starting Monday to Friday, we do everything we can do on the east end of town, which is cutting grass, figuring out how to get potholes patched up. We do as much as we can do in those five days.”
Payton said part of the reason why people tend to throw trash in the area is because of a lack of hope. “A lot of people within my city won’t clean anything up because there’s no sense of pride,” Payton said.
With his new cleanup group, Payton plans to strengthen that pride among East St. Louis residents.
“We want to make the narrative what the narrative was supposed to be in the beginning,” Payton said. “I came up in the Katherine Dunham dance program, playing baseball in Jackie Robinson Khoury League, dealing with computers in the JJK [Jackie Joyner-Kersee] Center, hooping in Lincoln Park. That is my city, so what I know and love I found out that that’s not what everyone thinks.”
Payton said that some people aren’t able to enjoy the city like he used to partially because East St. Louis needs more investment. That’s why his group’s next focus is to reinvest in abandoned properties to create more employment opportunities for residents in the area. He says his weekly cleanups are small, yet important, stepping stones in that process.
“Yea, we have our bad spots in the city, but I’d be damned if someone told me that we have more bad spots than good spots,” Payton said. “What we have is people that they don’t have hope anymore, so what I like to tell people is that to change the environment, you have to change the culture, and to change the culture, you have to change the environment, so what we’re trying to do now is change the environment, which will in turn change the culture, which will allow people to constantly change their environment.”
R.E.C. will meet on Saturday at 10 a.m. on Gray Boulevard for their next cleanup.
This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 7:30 AM.
