“I said one day, out of excitement, ‘I wanna be an FBI agent!’” recalls Brewer. “And my father said, ‘You’re not allowed in the FBI. They don’t allow blacks to be FBI agents.’” Brewer’s father was a steelworker with a sixthgrade education, and his mother didn’t make it past the fifth grade. But Brewer, surrounded by gang violence, was convinced an education would get him wherever he wanted to go. So each morning, he took two buses and an L train to Lindblom Technical High School, where he got A’s (and one B) and took honors courses. He dreamed of going to college and studying architectural engineering.
“If teenagers have the right education, they won’t have any problems,” he told Newsweek in 1966, when he was 15. “The gang members were taught this, but it just didn’t sink in.… When they get to be 18 and it’s time to get a job, then they find out that they need a good high school education to land one. So crime is the easiest way out. There’s no pressure like there is in school.”