Daniel Rubin: Words from a tough guy: Violence is a loser's game

How do you grab high school students' attention two days before the final bell?

You bring in the scar-faced, shotgun-toting, duster-wearing, gay vigilante who tormented Baltimore drug dealers on HBO's

The Wire

.

And you get him to preach nonviolence.

Omar was coming.

Yesterday, Omar Little dropped in on a classroom of Germantown High School upperclassmen. Or, rather, the actor who played him did - a 41-year-old veteran of the New York stage named Michael K. Williams, who spent 90 minutes detailing a youth of misspent opportunities.

His message was simple: Information is your weapon. Pursue it like you pursue your fun. And violence is a loser's play.

"If you can walk away, walk away," said the man whose forehead and cheek are crossed by a deep scar left from a bar fight on his 25th birthday.

Today's streets are more dangerous than they were in the '80s in his native Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush, he said. "Life has become a little cheaper."

Williams warned the students against imitating him, on-screen or off. He was a nerdy kid with a tough-love mom - "She sent me out in the streets of the projects with a bow tie and short pants."

He never took to the classroom, and didn't make it past eighth grade. "I got a GED - a good-enough diploma," he said. He floated, taking drugs but never dealing, and wound up getting kicked out of the house at age 18.

His saw a vision of his future one day while working a menial job at Pfizer. Janet Jackson danced across his screen.

Williams spent the next seven years dancing. He had to learn to be a good listener, understanding when "to take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth."

Job offers came in. At first he was self-conscious about his scar but found that people wanted his look for their music videos. Then the rapper Tupac Shakur saw Williams' photograph and thought him right to play his little brother in the film

Bullet.

Despite the spotlights, Williams still had trouble. No one had taught him to balance a checkbook or put any money away. He needed a financial babysitter, as he put it.

"The golden opportunities you have now," he said, "I screwed up. I didn't have a Plan B."

He spent the rest of his time imploring the students to plan for what happens after graduation when, as he put it, no one looks out for you.

Williams had driven down at the invitation of J. Whyatt Mondesire, head of the local NAACP, who'd heard the actor being interviewed on National Public Radio and thought kids would heed his story.

"I'm a 60-year-old civil-rights activist," Mondesire said. "Kids look at me, hear my message, and yawn."

But they'd listen to the man who played the Robin Hood of the hood, a villain with his own code, he figured. Mondesire asked the school district where Williams should speak. The district picked Germantown, which Mondesire hadn't visited since the winter of 2007, when two students broke the neck of their teacher, Frank Burd.

Williams noted how Germantown High School had made some real progress. He read from a list of statistics - how serious incidents had plunged by two-thirds this year, how expulsions were down 40 percent, how after six years the school newspaper had returned.

"These numbers are huge," he said. "The city is watching."

When it was time for questions, he asked most of them.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked a quiet girl in braids toward the back.

"An obstetrician," replied Akeithia Deal, an 18-year-old junior.

"Break it down for me," he pleaded, meaning:

Say what

?

A doctor who delivers babies, she replied, and he savored those words. "Good for you. What have you done to research that job?"

She told him how next year she'll be attending a program at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Again he nodded.

He approached a boy in the back, who was surrounded by a entourage of young ladies.

"A songwriter," said Anthony Oliver, 17.

"You understand residuals?"

"Yes, my mom went on the Internet.

"Your mom?"

But Oliver didn't need Mom's help to seize the moment. He asked Williams if he'd appear in his first video. And Williams said yes.

The star directed one of his friends who'd driven down with him to get the teen's name and number to reward him for speaking up.

"Closed-mouth doesn't get a thing," the actor said. "It happens just like that."