Dantzler grew up on a farm; his sharecropper father died when he was 7, and he didn’t have much of a future — he had, he would say later, nothing more than a “downtrodden, go-nowhere life.”
But he had an older cousin, Willie. “He taught us how to be men,” Dantzler said later. “And I just soaked it up. I reveled in having an older man tell me things, listen to me and help me out.” Dantzler didn’t just appreciate the gesture, he paid it back. In 1968, while working multiple jobs to support his family (custodian, gardener, stockroom clerk, and more), he caught a boy trying to break into his house. He realized other boys were aimless too, kids “who needed to take all that youthful, hormonal, adolescent energy and put it toward something” positive, rather than crime. So he created the Challengers Boys & Girls Club in South Los Angeles, and served as a father figure for kids that didn’t have one.
The Club started with 12 boys; it’s now national, and has helped more than 34,000 kids grow up. His own sons work in the organization too: Corey Dantzler is Challenger’s CEO; Mark Dantzler is its program director. Dantzler died on July 6 after suffering a stroke just two months after his book, A Place to Go, A Place to Grow: Simple Things That Make a Difference for At-Risk Kids *, was published.