*“Warriors of Liberty City” is an eye-opening 6-part documentary that explores Liberty City, a crime-ridden neighborhood in Miami, Florida that is arguably the NFL’s most successful football factory.
Produced by LeBron James, the STARZ series follows a season with the Liberty City Warriors, a youth football program founded by an unlikely mentor: Luther Campbell (2 Live Crew), better known as “Uncle Luke.”
Now in its 29th year, the Liberty City Warriors Optimist Club is a youth organization that sponsors sports teams, dance, cheerleading, tutoring and academic support.
“What we do in our program, we take football and use it as a tool to lure the kids into the program but it’s really more about education,” Campbell tells EUR/Electronic Urban Report. “Because the first thing we do is tell the mom to come in and fill out an application for your kid to play. Two things in that application are very important: Do you have a voter’s registration card? If you check “No” we’re going to give you an application so you can go vote. And the next thing is, we need your kid’s last report card. We take his last report card and break the numbers down. After we break the numbers down, if he’s not over a 2.0 GPA, he automatically gets thrown into tutoring. We don’t turn them away.”
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Continuing, he added: “Now this kid is in tutoring. He’s getting educated because he wants to be there and able to play. Nine times out of ten, he’ll get the academic requirements and then he’ll get hooked on the academic part of it because he knows it coincides together. Our program goes year-round. I started it because I was a kid playing organized football on Miami Beach but the bad thing about it was that was the only place we could play organized sports. We had to be off Miami Beach at 6:00pm because, at the time, if you were black on Miami Beach after 6:00 you go to jail. This is what I’m experiencing as a kid. So that’s what made me start the program.”
The Liberty City neighborhood of Miami is primarily African-American and largely lower-income and boasts a number of notable football players including Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, Willis McGahee and Devonta Freeman.
“Everybody looks at the success stories of the players who came out of there, you know the guys who played in the Super Bowl like Chad Johnson. But my favorite success story is a little, undersized kid, smaller than everybody that didn’t grow too tall, single parent household — difficult situation,” said Luke. “He comes in and gets the tutoring. He then gets hooked on education. He then goes to college. He ends up in college not through football, on academics. Leaves college to come back home and becomes a lawyer and then from a lawyer he becomes a defense attorney, from a defense attorney, through the program, he gets elected to become a Commissioner and Chairman of the Board. And as Chairman of the Board, the first thing he does is build a $6.5 million facility with classrooms that the program never had. You can’t even write that up! That’s the beautiful part about it. Those are the stories we have from the program, other than just football.
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