Brian Bakke

By Eugene Kim

This month, for our profile section on peacemakers, we considered Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela, humanitarians such as Father Gregory Boyle, and human rights advocates such as Narges Mohammadi.  In good company, Brian Bakke was nominated alongside this list of household names and world changers. Most of the Cultivare Team were curious to know which nation Bakke had liberated or how many decades he served in prison.  Brian’s contribution to peacemaking, as he describes it, is two decades of “sweeping da block.”

For his day job, Brian Bakke was responsible for Mustard Seed Foundation grants to churches and ministries across North and South America.  When he and his wife Lisa moved into his all-black DC neighborhood in 2001 he heard God speaking, “Go get a broom and use it. Don’t say anything till someone talks to you – sweep in silence.”  As he sweeps the block, Brian has discovered and removed switchblades, used condoms, guns, meth needles, and clubs -- discarded and oftentimes intentionally hidden behind fences and in street gutters.  Brian, in his bright orange vest, swept the block in silence for nearly a year before the matron of his neighborhood broke the silence: “Why are you sweeping the block?”  Today every neighbor and their child, grandmother and dog in a 3-block radius knows the towering white man who sweeps the block in silence. His Saturday morning schedule is so consistent that neighbors wait at their windows to greet Brian as he sweeps in front of their homes.  He currently averages 2.5 tons of trash and refuse a year that he removes from his neighborhood route, and on some mornings, he will remove over a dozen weapons. 

After 15 years of sweeping the block, Brian was invited to dialogue with the Imam and the Board of Directors of Masjid Muhammad, the first mosque in the US constructed by enslaved African Americans.  They asked Brian to teach them how to serve and engage with their communities, concluding the meeting with these words: “We know that you are a Christian. We have been watching you sweep in front of our mosque for years.  You have been preaching a sermon, and we’ve been listening.”

When White extremists threatened to bomb and shoot up the mosque on the 20th Anniversary of the Million Man March in DC, Brian showed up with his broom and paced menacingly up and down the street, ready to put himself between his Muslim neighbors and armed terrorists. Recently, he was interviewed and honored on a live global broadcast with Kyai Haji Yahya Cholil Staquf, General Secretary of the world’s largest Muslim organization with 90 million followers for his heroic acts of peacemaking.

As a result, people have heard about the guy who sweeps the block, and Brian has been approached to help shut down crack houses and get police to respond to emergency calls in black neighborhoods. He hosts progressive dinners up and down his street with his neighbors. He has painted murals of Jesus that local gangs respect and protect.  Gang members hand him their weapons.  He attends their celebrations and mourns with them at their funerals.  He has turned people who wanted to kill him and kill each other into some of his best friends.

Brian is a street sweeper, an untold hero, a disrupter, a peacemaker.  Brian challenges us to consider “what is your broom?  How might God be calling you to be a peacemaker in your community?