Recalling his childhood in Gary, Indiana, Ed Genesis refers to it as “tricky.”
In fact, the young Ed would have a hard time imagining the Ed of today — a 49-year-old Kalamazoo musician, educator, social justice warrior, and man on a mission to help youth navigate life’s rough roads.
But he says all of his experiences, good and not so good, have played a part in putting him on the path he walks today.
“My father was killed when I was 2 years old,” he says. “He was killed by off-duty police officers of the Gary, Indiana, police department during an unauthorized raid — there was a strong belief that the police were extorting the drug dealers inside. They shot him through a closed door. He was murdered. I didn’t know that story until my history teacher told me in 11th grade.”
Along with a sister and two brothers, Genesis, whose given name is Edward Griffin, was raised by his mother, grandmother and an uncle. His step-grandfather, a pastor in the Methodist Church, also had a hand in his upbringing.
But as a teen, Ed took to the streets and hung out with a local gang. Like so many of his peers, he got into trouble, got caught by the police, and found himself wearing handcuffs.
“There’s only so much a single mother can tell you at that age,” Genesis says. “My mother met a man in church and remarried, but then they did drugs together. I always blamed my stepfather — I no longer do. I was at my rebellious stage back then.”
In high school, Ed carried a gun for protection. By then, he was staying with an aunt and attending a different school in a different neighborhood, where a rival gang ruled the streets. The firearm, he believed, meant his survival.
“Enough people knew I had it,” he says. “So I was expelled from all Gary public schools. I had to call my grandmother, the family matriarch, to come get me because she was the most stable person in the family. I was ashamed.”
The expulsion prompted a family meeting. It was apparent to those who loved him most that all the pieces were there for Ed to end up having a fate similar to his father’s. To give him a fresh start would require leaving Gary and moving to Kalamazoo, where they had relatives. Ed, his mother and two brothers made the move in the middle of the night so that no one would know when they were leaving or their destination. Their belongings were packed into several garbage bags and dropped into the back of a car parked down the street from their home. It was owned by the great-aunt who had come from Kalamazoo to take them back to her home.
It was 1991, and Ed was just shy of 17 years old.
“It was a fresh start for the whole family. That’s what led us to Kalamazoo. Mama battled with addiction and went to rehab,” he says.
Trouble, however, still followed him, and within a year he found himself once again under arrest.
“I was at the mall with a couple of friends, and we were watching three white guys getting rowdy, jumping around and being rude,” Genesis recalls. “Someone called the police, and when they came, they questioned us. I was just one month shy of turning 18, charged with resisting and obstructing an officer because I yanked my arm away from an officer questioning me. When I said I didn’t do anything, they beat the crap out of us.”
It was his first felony charge. More arrests would follow, with Genesis ultimately spending time incarcerated in the Kalamazoo County Jail.
A great-aunt like an angel
But Genesis had not forgotten his father’s fate, nor would his family let him forget.
“My family would remind me my father was killed by the police,” he explains. “For the next six, seven years I was in and out of jail. My great-aunt would tell me, ‘Once you get into that system, it’s very hard to get out.’”
He sank into what he calls a “pity party,” convinced that no one had a life as troubled as his.
But his great-aunt Doris Gilbert told him he “had a chip on his shoulder” and that it was allowing him to stay angry, ready to pick a fight with anyone who might challenge him.
“She told me that at the end of the day I would end up with a lot of nothing,” Genesis says. “I didn’t know what she meant for a long time. She was very wise. She was instrumental in what I call nursing me back to health. I thank God, because she was like my angel.”
In 1995, Genesis was placed in KPEP (Kalamazoo Probation Enhancement Program), a residential program in Kalamazoo that gives former inmates a chance at going straight, offering a more structured form of probation than usual.
“When I ended up in KPEP, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to get into trouble anymore. I want to take my life a little more seriously,’” he says. “That’s when I changed my name to Genesis.
“My name is Edward Griffin — that’s my father’s name,” Genesis explains. “We had the Genesis Convention Center in Gary that was the concert hall. There was a chemical spill when I was in the fourth grade, and everyone had to go to Genesis. It was where people went in times of trouble.”
Music as a tool for change
With a new name, Genesis began to ponder how to move forward in life. Rap music had long been a passion for him, as was drawing. In 1999, Genesis started gained notoriety on the streets of Kalamazoo when one of his songs appeared on a compilation CD of hip-hop circulating through the city. He had written the song while incarcerated, inspired by a passage he’d read on how to chip away at a boulder — “just keep pounding” — and that became the title of his song.
“People who had never heard of me were beginning to ask, ‘Who is that guy?’” Genesis says. “When my great-aunt told me she was proud of me, I said, ‘I’m not making any money on this.’ She told me that doesn’t matter. ‘You are doing what you want to do,’ she said. And that’s what the streets started to tell me — you have something special, you sound different.”
Genesis felt an obligation to live the message of “Just Keep Pounding” in his own life. To that end he enrolled at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. But every path has its curves and bends, and Genesis still had to address that chip on his shoulder.
“I had that toxic masculine personality,” he says. “I was angry with this guy, and I went into his house and got charged with home invasion. Yeah, I was super embarrassed. It was like déjà vu from Gary. They came to my class at KVCC to get me out. When the officers came in, I knew they were there for me, and it got me expelled.”
Thinking he might go to prison, Genesis quickly put the finishing touches on a new CD and published it. The CD came out as he learned he would not be doing time in prison after all.
“Everybody was coming to get the CD. It sold out,” he says. “I made it to MTV. I went around Kalamazoo and
Gary with it, and I met a woman, an organizer, who asked me if I had heard about mass incarceration, about the school-to-prison pipeline. I had not. She told me my voice would do so much more if I would learn about these things.”
Genesis did and at last found his way to a life on the right side of the law. With his music as a tool for change,
Genesis began selling more of it, and several of his songs were placed on television shows, including Forensic Files and The George Lopez Show. His songs today can be heard on Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Music, SoundCloud and other streaming platforms.
He also started We Active!, a community organization fighting against mass incar-ceration and the school-to-prison pipeline. The group has been recognized by the state of Michigan for its work on criminal justice reform in the Kalamazoo community.
Becoming a family man
His involvement in causes for social change also brought romance into Genesis’ life. He met and married Patrese Griffin, who was Kalamazoo’s vice mayor from 2019 to 2021 and now directs Kalamazoo County Continuum of Care (CoC), an organization working to reduce homelessness. The two have raised two sons and a daughter.
Griffin is also well known in the Kalamazoo community for her activism, including her efforts to eliminate discriminatory housing practices that deny people housing based on prior criminal convictions or evictions.
It’s a personal cause for her — the couple was temporarily homeless after being evicted from their rental home on the Northside when it was unexpectedly condemned. The couple believe Genesis’ criminal record made it difficult for them to find another home, facing discrimination for his past actions even though Genesis had turned his life around.
“We still live in the Northside,” Genesis says.
Fired up about social justice
Along with using his music to raise awareness for social causes, Genesis in 2018 founded the BLOCKS Club, which offers programs that teach youth “adulting” and economic skills and hosts healing circles to address trauma in the Black community. BLOCKS stands for Building Leadership Organizing Communities for Keys to Succeed.
“We use hip-hop as a tool for community organizing,” Genesis says. “We advocate for economic development as well as decreasing mass incarceration. One of our biggest things is working on anti-gun violence. I got training for this through Michigan United (a civil rights advocacy group). (At the) BLOCKS Club, there were only two of us, unpaid, for the first three years, but I got sent to every kind of training you could think of.”
Genesis traveled to Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., and attributes much of what he knows about community organizing to these trainings. After one such training on equity, Genesis returned home armed with new knowledge.
“I had thought equity was just about what banks do,” he says. “I learned equity is about my life.”
His first foray into social equity began with a fight about unfair parking enforcement practices. While moving furniture into his Northside home, he was told by law enforcement officers that he could not park in front of his home and was charged with a misdemeanor. Yet Genesis found he could park in front of a friend’s home in Portage with no problem. He saw it as an issue of equity and, after researching the legality of the No Parking signs posted in the Northside neighborhood, was able to get them removed in 2019.
At the same time, Genesis was tapping even more into his creative power. In 2018, he hosted the annual Kalamazoo Poetry Festival, which he did for six consecutive years. He performed at the Black Arts Festival and at the National Day of Racial Healing, an annual event presented by the Truth, Racial Healing and
Transformation program, formerly part of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation. He created Poetic Justice, a monthly open-mic event for poets that was originally held at the Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative, in the Edison neighborhood, and is now held on the second Saturday of each month at the Northside Association for Community Development.
And in 2017 he became co-director and community engagement director for Speak It Forward, an organization of outreach to youth that uses spoken-word entertainment. Genesis had met the group’s founders, Kirk Latimer and Gabriel Giron, many years before at a summer program where he and they were performing and the three connected.
“I jumped in, and I absolutely fell in love with it because I saw so many people who were like me when I was growing up,” Genesis says.
Speak It Forward has not only performed and offered workshops locally at the former Lakeside Academy, Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home, Starr Commonwealth and other sites, but also travels to locations nationwide.
When the Speak It Forward team was brought into some of these facilities, Genesis immediately made it known that he did not approve of the use of the term “at-risk youth.”
“No youth is born at risk, unless we are talking about their community or their school or their house, but we’re not talking about that,” he says. “I get what they are saying about youth slipping through the cracks, but it sounds different when you are the youth receiving that label. Let’s just call them what they are — young people.”
Genesis has made efforts to connect with younger kids as well. In 2022, he created The 4 Elements of Hip Hop, a coloring and activity book about the hip-hop music movement and its connection to social justice issues. The book has been used by libraries, schools and other organizations for outreach and education.
Now he’s a teacher too
Ever expanding his reach, Genesis in 2021 added college instructor to his resume, teaching his own curriculum in a Kalamazoo Valley Community College class titled “A Look at Social Justice Through a Hip Hop Lens.”
“I have teamed up with Communities in Schools to present the class to several schools in the area, and I have also taught it to some of the inmates at the Kalamazoo County Jail,” he says, noting that he hopes to teach the course at other colleges and locations.
With so many irons in so many fires, Genesis considers for a moment what has been most important in his life.
“I have changed the narrative of my life,” he says.
