From a bank-robbing mastermind to mediating gang turf battles in the nation’s capital, Tyrone Parker’s new memoir covers how faith in God and belief in people helped him become one of the District’s most consequential anti-violence activists.

Parker’s ability to convince gangbangers to put down their guns has earned him awards from President Biden and landed him invitations to speak before international think tanks in Ukraine.

In his memoir, “The Man, The Message, & The Mission That Helped Save Our Nation’s Capital: The Story of Tyrone Parker,” the 78-year-old D.C. native writes about how his work and the peacekeeping efforts of others over the decades helped reduce the notoriously high number of killings — the city was known in the 1990s as the country’s “murder capital,” but by 2012, that number had fallen to the modern low of 88.

Doing his part to reverse that violent trend was rewarding work for an ex-con who grew up in a broken home and spent his young adult life in prison.

Parker credits his faith.

“God was on my side. Through the good times and bad times, he’s always been there,” he said.

Parker still reflects on how the tough times in his youth made him into who he is today.

He wrote about feeling powerless as a boy when he watched his father, a convict himself, beat his mother while growing up in Northeast. As he got older and his parents separated, he shared how he was groomed by a woman who lived with his mother.

Parker said he started stealing from cash registers at 14, and got his first conviction at 16. By the time he was 22, Parker was orchestrating bank robberies throughout the District and beating criminal cases brought by Metropolitan Police and the FBI.

Those years on the street left scars. He was stabbed by a group of hoodlums when he was a teen, and narrowly survived a police shooting years later.

But Parker couldn’t evade the law forever. In 1968, he was given a 75-year sentence on various charges — a result of what he said was the Nixon administration’s desire for law and order.

The robber was sent to Lorton Reformatory, the District’s former prison campus in northern Virginia, where Parker said he experienced some of his darkest years. A low point came when he said his mother took her own life because she was so despondent over him and his brother’s criminal ways.

He was paroled in 1984 and grew closer to God, but Parker didn’t dedicate his life to activism until the murder of his son five years later pushed him to help other D.C. families avoid the same pain.

“I remembered the difficult moments of my life, and they were times that saddened me, but I was so thankful that I made it through, because I could have easily not made a contribution to the greater good,” Parker said.

The Alliance of Concerned Men formed in 1991 between Parker and fellow classmates from Eastern High School — some of whom, like Parker, were still on probation — and the nonprofit worked to establish themselves as peacemakers in the city’s most violent neighborhoods.

Armed with nothing but their faith, Parker said those efforts paid off in 1997 when the Alliance spearheaded a truce between warring gangs in the Benning Terrace housing projects, better known as “Simple City.”

Parker said the truce in Simple City was successful because “we created the environment that they all can still be men and walk out as men, but agreed to end the violence.”

A large part of that had to do with giving jobs to the often fatherless teens and young men. Being employed gave them a responsibility to themselves and their families, and harmony in the neighborhood soon followed.

The Alliance’s grassroots approach became a template used by other anti-violence nonprofits and later government-run violence prevention programs for years to come.

Parker was heralded as a pioneer in anti-violence work, and received commendations from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in 2010 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Biden last year.

He said the key to his success is seeing the good in men who, like himself, were typically reformed convicts who wanted to atone for their past by steering today’s youth down a better path.

That work continues for Parker. He is shepherding along a new generation of peacekeepers in Communities Respecting Everyone’s Will to Survive, or CREWS, a volunteer-run organization that does school safety and gang mediations in Southeast.

CREWS’ goal is to remain free from government funding as long as possible because, as Parker explained, anti-violence programs have become such an institution in the city that there are too many agendas to consider when being added to the annual budget.

He said he believes the lack of godly conviction in the people doing violence prevention is, in part, why none of the city programs are as transformational as the Alliance of Concerned Men has been.

“Doing this work, you gotta have people that are spiritual and willing to take the hits … not making decisions that are going to be popular more so than meaningful.” Parker said. “The government, it can never do this work just from 9 to 5. It’s not a 9 to 5 job. It’s a calling.”

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.