*“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.
The Mayor of Miami gives @unclelukereal1 from 2 Live Crew the keys to the city for his philanthropy & inspiration he gives to the Miami youth ??.
? @TheSource pic.twitter.com/dhVthZWIGK— 935 KDAY (@935KDAY) October 21, 2018
When the network sent Campbell the full season to review and approve, he says he was only able to get through two episode.
“I couldn’t look at the rest of them,” he revealed, as the series overall was too emotional for the original bad boy of hip-hop.
“You look at these kids and see what they go through, it’s touching. It’s the same thing everywhere,” he noted.
On His Calling To Help Save Lives In His Community Through Sports:
We all were separated because, most of the kids, unlike myself — I had both parents in the house — but most of the kids, they had single-parent households. So when you have single-parent households you don’t have the man in the house and you have some situations where you have parents that have 4 and 5 kids in the house and just to be able to take one or two of them out and then have a mentor with these young men who played the program and who experienced the same thing. Now they’re mentors year round. It’s not just a seasonal thing. That’s why we have programs all year round for the kids to participate in. So that they’ll have a father figure that’ll be with them forever.
On The Importance of Male Bonding Through Sports:
I know what football did for me and I know what it did for my friends. I still remember the days where we played a game then went to the fare after the games and played the arcade and had hot dogs. When that’s instilled in you, you wanna pass that on to other kids. Even in the area that did not have organized football, but I had my friends who I played with on Miami Beach. They were the first ones to come back and become those coaches.
Everyone in America needs to see Warriors of Liberty City on @STARZ. It’s not about football. It’s about the erosion of the American promise of opportunity. It’s about good people struggling. It’s about #humanity. @mavcarter @unclelukereal1 pic.twitter.com/6Cly1hPdYa
— Tom Garfinkel (@TomGarfinkel) October 5, 2018
On Doing God’s Work:
Everything I do is God sent. He pushes me in these directions and sometimes I don’t understand but then I look at it after the fact and say, ‘This is all your doing.’ You look at the kids that are successful and doing good and some of the ones that are not because we start losing a lot of kids, and that’s how I ended up getting into high school.
We’d have these babies from 4-15 and then they end up in high school and they join a gang. So I get into the high school and go ‘Oh, okay…the thugs want to be football players and the football players who ain’t thugs want to be thugs.’ So then we expanded the program and in the last 10-15 years, we got more kids in college at a record rate. I’ll go two weeks and take a bus and take ‘em on college tours. Because again, I was a hardcore kid in the neighborhood. My mom sent me to D.C. to live with my brothers. I’m seeing all these Black people doing professional things in suits and briefcases, you don’t see that in the south. And so I said, let me take these kids and start exposing them to colleges and universities and before you know it, you didn’t have to tell them what they wanted to do. They knew what they wanted to do and wanted to be.
Missed an episode? Use your cable provider to stream full episodes of “Warriors of Liberty City” on starz.com and the STARZ app.
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