Teaching Kids, Enhancing Community, through Basketball

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Photo Credit: Tom Jenz

I became aware of Travis Landry, the Regional Vice President of WestCare Wisconsin, when he guested on WNOV’s “The Man Show” hosted by Keyon Jackson Malone.  Eventually, we met up at the WestCare Building on 4th and Wright where he sat his desk surrounded by paperwork, employees drifting in and out. He told me, “I’m one of those guys that provides resources to city residents who need the basics.” In other words, Landry’s work focuses on enhancing community well-being, mainly through juveniles and families in the central city. I found Landry to be one of those rare people who is totally open about his vulnerabilities and strengths.  A former high school athlete, he is now 50, but he seems ageless.

I understand that you use the sport of basketball to help Black juveniles.

My cousin Marcus Landry and I run a basketball camp on Saturdays. We teach young Black men fundamental basketball, but we are really teaching them to be respectful. We try to help these juveniles because most are raised in homes without fathers. Instead, they are raised by their mothers, and they often don’t understand respect and disrespect. Mom can tell ‘em to take out the trash, the boy says ‘Wait, I’m playing my video game’ or ‘I’m on my cell phone.’  Mom has to ask five times before the boy gets it done. That’s disrespect for their moms. Too much of that goin’ on.  

I don’t think they could get away with that behavior with a good strong dad.

Nope. My dad just had to look at the trash, then look at me. If he had to do that look a second time, I might get a whuppin.’    

One of the street leaders told me that something like 90% of inner city kids don’t have a father figure in the home. Does that sound right?

That sounds right, and that’s why we created our fundamental basketball camp at the Northcott Neighborhood House on 2nd and Wright. If we told the kids we’re gonna teach you how to be respectful young men, they’d never show up. They love basketball. We do the camp on Saturdays and have zoom calls on Wednesdays so we can see who’s been doing chores at home without mom asking them.  

How are the boys progressing?

Slowly, because we realize we’re still not touching them enough to retrain their thinking. They’ve been trained to be disrespectful, and they don’t even know they are being disrespectful. Mom keeps giving them too many chances. Me, I know about trouble. I started selling drugs when I was 15. I grew up in the drug culture since my house was next to the government housing projects. When I was 21, I spent two months in the House of Corrections for drug dealing before they put me on house arrest. I ask kids at my basketball camp if I put 300,000 dollars on this table, who can count it? Kids don’t know how to count that high. They don’t have the good education. I say, “If you can’t count to 300,000, how you gonna run a million-dollar company?” cause they all want to be millionaires.

This is a tragedy, what’s happening to these young Black kids through lack of learning. I suppose you can blame families, peer groups, schools, or the entrenched bureaucracy. I mean, who’s to blame? 

Sure, you can blame everybody, but we’re teaching the kids that you gotta hold yourself accountable. You gotta ask for help instead of blaming everybody else. But it’s hard for us to do this once or twice a week when they go right back into a family atmosphere where they make a bunch of excuses. You say you want to be a basketball player, then you gotta learn how to dribble. We try to eliminate excuses. It takes patience because this is a generation that is not being raised with respect.    

Travis, I want to talk about your generation, your background. What was your family like? Were you raised in the central city?

18th and Vliet, born and raised. My dad, his brother and sisters, came to Milwaukee for the job opportunities, better quality of life. He was born in Louisiana and my mom in Tennessee. Jobs were better here in the ‘60s. He worked at Schlitz Brewing. He was also one of the first Black contractors, and he did work for the city of Milwaukee. Him and my uncle had Landry Brothers Construction. My dad built our house in 1973. My mom died in 1978 from breast cancer.  I was was eight when she passed, so I don’t remember much about her. There were eight of us after she died.  One of my sisters did the grocery shopping, and the other did the discipline. We all had our roles in the family.  I am the youngest boy.  

What about your schooling?

I went to grade school at Urban Day, a Catholic School on 24th and Vliet. My dad made us walk to school everyday, snow, wind or rain. For high school, I went to Bradley Tech on the South Side. I studied plumbing for four years and I worked as an apprentice plumber for a year. Then, I worked as a manager at Domino’s Pizza. I thought I was making good money, $500 a week, but my dad told me I had to get a career or he’d kick my butt. In 1989, I started at Quad Graphics in Sussex.  I worked my way up to a shift leader in shipping and receiving. I worked at Quad for ten years.  

How was that experience working for a big company?

There were only five Black people at Quad Graphics in 1989. I started to realize white people wasn’t funny. But I made a lot of white friends. They were curious about me because of my Black culture. There were some who were racist and some who didn’t understand my culture. That’s where I learned there is a difference between being racist and not understanding community cultures. A Black person who is raised in Mequon don’t understand me because they weren’t raised in my city culture. They’d never make it in the hood, but I may not make it in Mequon. I think we have to start recognizing the difference between culture and racism.

Yeah, I’ve been focused on that for a long time. I’m a photographer, and one of my hobbies is going to rural auctions and talking to the folks, maybe taking their pictures. Rural culture, in other words. Those people keep conversations low and polite, stay away from personal issues, talk small town gossip or problems on the farm or the weather. For me, visiting Milwaukee’s inner city is like inhabiting another country, more emotion, loud raw talk, arguments, rap music, fast driving, laughing, swearing, hearts on the sleeves. I believe that if we Americans want to overcome racism, we need to connect. People of color and white people need to talk to one another, need to understand one another’s culture. Stop this anger, hatred, exaggeration.  

That’s good, that’s true.  A lot is about the different cultures and fears.  

Back to your career. What did you do after Quad Graphics?  Start working at WestCare?  

I started my own construction company, owned some houses, but personal circumstances led to a business downturn. In 2010, Dr James White came back in town from Washington DC to resurrect the Harambee project. He called and said he needed me as a building contractor. Dr White was inspirational, and so I agreed to work for free to help resurrect Harambee. We worked for two years without pay, but we did good work. In 2012, Dr White brought in Dick Steinberg, CEO of the national Westcare Foundation. Dick hired Dr White, me and Claudia Brewer who’s now the business manager. That’s when we became Westcare Wisconsin. I came in as a construction supervisor and was given a salary. By 2020, I was taking care of buildings in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, doing environmental care for all those facilities.  

As a regional vice president, are you still doing construction for WestCare?

Yes, but I’ve been focusing on Wisconsin. Besides construction, I also have responsibility for other services. WestCare is in 18 states, and each affiliate has its own identity. At WestCare Wisconsin in Milwaukee, we do youth services and substance abuse prevention. States are different. In Ohio, the drug Fentanyl is a big problem. In Milwaukee, it isn’t. Here, drug users might crunch up opioids, mix it with marijuana and smoke it. You gotta understand. Some kids are influenced by rap music which might be telling them how to get high on cough syrup and prescription drugs. That kind of thing. We work with juveniles from the Vel Phillips Detention Center. We teach them soft job skills, knowing how to build a resume, how to act on a job. Some kids don’t understand what hard work means, that you don’t get a break every hour, that you need to take initiative on the job. If somebody say something you don’t like, get used to it. People gonna say stuff you don’t like for the rest of your life. Life ain’t fair. Life ain’t wrapped around you. 

Let’s talk about violence, a big problem in the central city. Reckless driving, stealing cars, gang activity, shootings, even killings. I just read these statistics this morning. Since 2015, there have been 674 homicides in the city. I hate to say this, but they were almost all Black on Black. This doesn’t even include the staggering number of shootings. This year alone, homicide and shootings are on the rise, and aggravated assaults are up more than 25%.  

Kids get into violence because it’s what they see all day long. Your brother gets a gun, you want a gun,. Your relatives, sisters or friends smoke weed, you smoke weed. You get competitions between gangs, you wanna one-up the other group. They steal a car, you gotta steal a car. Police and fire sirens, fights on the streets. That’s all associated with negativity. And think of those video games the kids play, and the movies, TV, all that violence. Kids don’t realize that when you shoot a gun, that’s it. When you drive a car and hit someone, that’s that, too. They think you can pop back out of the sky and fall to the ground and hey man look at me, I got four lives. Their minds are not trained to realize that when I shoot you, I gonna kill you. They get in a car, drive recklessly like Grand Theft Auto, run a few lights, run into a tree, jump out and get into another car and keep going. It’s like a video game. A kid don’t understand real violence. 

And so much of a child’s future depends on home life, schools, neighborhood, community, and the friends they end up with.  

A kid’s responsibility should be to go to school, get good grades, do their chores, and be obedient to their parents. And of course, play. By a kid, I mean a freshman and under. When a kid is 8, 9, 10, or 11 and they are seeing violence all day long in the media or in video games, or with an uncle or brother, stepdad or dad smoking weed all day long, or mama going through affordable housing issues. Their dwellings have rats and mice or no hot water. Now they thinking something ain’t right, I need to do something and that something can turn out bad. Our goal at WestCare Wisconsin is to help the kids, but we also have to help the mom or dad or grandma or guardian. If we not helping the whole family, we are not helping. Houses need hot running water, a refrigerator and stove, food and clothing. 

And you do this through your various programs?

Here are a few of our programs. Substance Abuse prevention inside of MPS. We work with the Vel Phillips Detention Center for At Risk Youth. We help with community-based crime reduction with the police department, tracking assaults, robberies, and worse crimes. We do community cleanup and provide resources to the neighborhood block captains. Through our junior youth action council, we give 10-14 year olds interpersonal skills so before they make it to high school. We do this because once they get to high school, they get stuck with peer pressure, and they wanna be cool hangin’ with the big homies, which might mean breaking the law. We do want them to be cool but focus on a dream, a positive dream.  

I understand you get the families involved, too.  

Last thing we did with the junior youth action council was have a game day. Everybody came with their families, had fun, played board games. Often, grandmas, moms and dads who raise their kids don’t have time for fun at home.  hey too busy with chores or being gone to a job, just surviving. There are grandparents 70 and above caring for grandkids who are 13 or 14. That’s almost impossible. They get talk-back all day long from the kids, or kids don’t listen, get up when they want to, go to bed when they want to. Too much for grandma to deal with. These young folks, old folks, everybody. We need to learn that you can’t just talk about Black Lives Matter if you don’t live like Black lives matter.