In 1684, William Penn prayed for the salvation of the two-year-old city of Philadelphia, which was suffering from crime and poverty. Tensions were high and Penn didn’t think the city was living up to its promise of being a place of religious freedom and Brotherly Love.
Penn pled for the city to get it together: “My soul prays to God for thee that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blest and thy people saved.”
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Like a lot of Philadelphians, Mazzie Casher had walked by that prayer — which is inscribed on a plaque inside City Hall — countless times before noticing it, finally, on a scorching day in the summer of 2021. Casher, who had been tabling outside as part of a festival, slipped into City Hall for a taste of air conditioning, and took in Penn’s words for the first time.
“I read it, and I thought, Damn, he felt like that two years in? We’re still here dealing with this stuff,” says Casher, co-founder of Philly Truce, a nonprofit that’s focused on Black men and the reduction of violence in the city through neighborhood patrols, empowering events, mediations, and more.
Casher opens his new book, Brotherly Action: The Amen to Philadelphia’s 341-Year Old Prayer, with his reflections on Penn’s words. As he writes, the prayer contains no call to action or even a measuring stick for improvement. There’s not even an amen. So, in the book, Casher conjures up a way forward for government leaders to finally fulfill Penn’s unrealized hopes: a 25-year plan, inspired by the post-WWII Marshall Plan, which would set intricate benchmarks and a governmental apparatus for how to deploy resources in a way that sets Philly on a more positive course. “I thought: Can we legislate some Brotherly Love?”
Above all, Casher believes that the city has long suffered from a failure of imaginative planning when it comes to issues like crime, poverty, and quality of life. And yet, there’s reason to think we can still get there. “And that would be, man, that would be a story that would be as powerful as 1776,” he says.
I connected with Casher to learn more about his hopes for the book and the nonprofit’s upcoming “Year of Brotherly Action.” You can read more about Philly Truce, which Casher co-founded with high-school friend Steven Pickens, in this Citizen feature. You can order his book here. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Tell us more about the “Year of Brotherly Action” which kicks off on July 4? (Sign up here.)
This is about Black men celebrating Black men. On the Fourth of July, we’re having a 8:30am parade up in North Philly and ending up at Philadelphia Youth Basketball’s “Sixth Man” Center. And then we’re going to have games — basketball (mentor-mentee teams), flag football, a little dodgeball — along with a resource-pairing model, because we hope to have a ton of walk-ups. What we’re really fleshing out is a mechanism to capture those young people who show up, identifying their most pressing needs, and at least having a first touch in the room with a service provider of some sort. The goal is to connect youth with resources and role models, while sending a powerful message: Uplifting Black men is progress for all Philadelphians.
Why’d you peg this campaign to the Semiquincentennial?
This initiative, which is timed to count down to America’s 250th birthday next year, calls on the city to align the upliftment of Black men with the achievement of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s vision for a united, safer, and more prosperous Philadelphia.
A lot of times we’re not even organized enough to confront these young people who are terrorizing our neighborhoods, because we feel alone or there’s the threat of reprisal or violence. So, unity is necessary for so many reasons — for some peace, for grown men to feel safe enough to say to a young man, ‘Hey, this is not cool.
The objective is that we end up here again next year, with the parade and games as an established feature of the Fourth of July — Black men coming together to celebrate one another and be in community and brotherhood.
You were critical of Mayor Kenney’s approach to gun violence prevention, blaming poor communication and organizational awareness on less than stellar outcomes. Has the situation improved under Mayor Parker?
I think there’s been some improvement. I think that morale, especially within the Police Department, is better. For example, when we did Operation Hug the Block in 2022, the morale in the 24th [police district], where Kensington is, was horrible. They had been prohibited from doing so much. And it’s weird to say that, because I’m on the community side, too. You don’t want gung-ho cops roughing people up. You want a little bit of compassion. But there is a line.
Now, I think they have a leader they believe in more, [Commissioner] Kevin Bethel and a guy who came through the ranks. I also see a little bit more cooperation and a different kind of accountability, say, in the grant process. And, I should note, we were awarded our first sizable City grant under Parker. So a lot of that stuff, in terms of the relationship between that apparatus and grassroots organizations for violence prevention is a lot better.
Who’s the audience for this book?
I didn’t have a narrow audience in mind. I just really wanted to say: This is who I am; this is why I came into this, and this is why I care. And then I thought about the Mayor — if you’re about public safety, if you’re about economic opportunity for all, then why can’t you, Mayor Parker, put something in motion? Why can’t you create something that we can celebrate at 500 years [of America’s founding]?
You drew inspiration from the post-WWII Marshall Plan while developing your 25-year plan — a draft piece of legislation is contained in your book — to improve Philly’s intractable issues. What did you take away or borrow from it?
Obviously, the 25-year plan is a conversation starter. I knew vaguely what the Marshall Plan was, but when I read it, I understood better there was a “whatever it takes” mentality. Plus, the whole idea of creating an agency within the government specifically to execute that process.
Your draft legislation — The 2050 Plan: Philadelphia Socioeconomic Parity Act of 2026 — calls for Philly to devote $750 million annually to reduce income inequality, gun violence, the gender pay gap and more. Has it gotten any traction from local legislators?
We’ve been sharing it with politicians. I think at least some of City Council has seen some version of it. So what we’re doing now is we have a project manager who comes from the political world, and he’s trying to weave Philly Truce and this plan into the conversation. We’re going to put a framework together that’s broad enough but also specific enough to really convey that there’s a no-holds-barred approach to fixing these issues, because it’s that bad. That’s the idea of borrowing from the Marshall Plan.
One chapter of the book focuses on the “Singapore Miracle,” a period (1965-1990) of dramatic economic growth and crime reduction in the Southeast Asian nation.
Singapore was at one time the poorest nation in Southeast Asia. They made up their minds that they were going to change that. [Singapore consistently ranks as one of the wealthiest and safest countries in the world today.] And that’s what I’m asking us to do.
Are we okay being the poorest big city? Are we okay with 23 percent poverty, one-third in the Black community? Are we okay with, you know, these educational outcomes? If Philly Truce is wildly successful at helping to drive down violent episodes, or even if every other org that has ever gotten a grant for gun violence prevention succeeds, we are still going to be here again in 25 years if we don’t plan for something else.
What about the argument that governments are inherently incapable of executing “big ideas”?
Brian Gordon is a very tenacious lawyer and a member of our board. We sat down and did a reasonable amount of research about where has a transformation like this happened? And so we found the Singapore thing. We also looked at the Marshall Plan generally. And then, ironically, I looked at the 2035 Plan here in Philadelphia. [The 2035 Plan, released in 2011, is a guiding document for development and growth in the city.]
Sometimes, the experience on the ground is that the City is utterly incompetent. When you look at the 2035 Plan you realize, oh no, they’re totally capable of sitting and thinking and researching and planning over the long run. And so that is my point of reference for the fact that they know how to do it when they want to.
What’s something that people often fail to grasp about cycles of gun violence?
Every time I’ve been able to sit with someone who was in one of these jams, often a perpetrator of a shooting, there was inevitably always a systemic failure of some sort along the way. It could be at their school or at their previous institution, somewhere where they were supposed to get the help and it didn’t come. And we have to at least factor that into their outcome.
I remember this one mom I was working with, her son was 21 and he was facing four counts of attempted homicide. She told me that something happened when he was 12 or 13 — I don’t know if he got arrested or what, but he somehow ended up in a facility. She told me that he wasn’t helped, right? When I was working with her, she had a husband, and they had a family unit where they were doing the best they could. But even in the best homes, the kid has to go outside. And societal influences have a different kind of influence than in the family. It’s almost like the family influence has to be remarkable [to protect them].
I find where we hit the wall between William Penn’s ideation and the reality is that we’re not necessarily putting that spirit into policy. We’ve got a lot of young men coming from broken homes. We’ve got a lot of hunger. We’ve got a lot of the effects of poverty going on. So, can we as a community agree to kind of stand in the gap a little bit more?
And Philly Truce is still doing Peace Patrols, correct?
Yes, that’s our flagship program which goes on Monday through Friday, and we’re still visiting blocks that have been highly impacted in recent times from multiple shootings, fatal and non-fatal. So that’s ongoing. We do have a special Peace Patrol engagement that we’re planning for back to school, which is to actually go on SEPTA trains. All of these things — the parade and games, the back-to-school engagement — are all activations of a Year of Brotherly action.
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