Designer unveils 'Peace' T-shirt line

The man who designed the ''Stop Snitchin' " T-shirts, but pulled them off his store's shelves last month at the urging of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said yesterday that he hopes to start a more positive fashion trend.

Antonio Ennis, owner of the Antonio Ansaldi clothing store in Dorchester, and about a dozen members of Boston's hip-hop and youth development communities, unveiled a new line of purple and black ''Start Peace" T-shirts yesterday. They said it's their answer to the violence in the city, which claimed 75 lives in 2005, Boston's highest homicide rate in a decade.

''The choice now is to start peace and get rid of a lot of the senseless violence that's going on," Ennis said. ''We do not want a repeat of 2005."

Cindy Diggs, who helped design the T-shirts, said the local hip-hop community is working on an album about peace in Boston.

''Hip-hop was originally created to quell violence back in the 1970s," said Diggs, who founded the hip-hop advocacy group Us Making Moves Forever. ''We want to be able to go to graduations and not funerals."

Menino, who once helped Ennis get a business loan, asked him and other storeowners to stop selling the ''Stop Snitchin' " T-shirts because courthouse spectators were wearing them to intimidate witnesses during homicide trials.

Menino said he attended yesterday's event because it will take the entire community to curb violence. He bought an XXL T-shirt in an ''urban fit" -- about 4 inches longer than the ''concerned adult fit" -- to show that ''we're not going to tolerate that nonsense," he said.

Jazz Wise, a city youth worker who runs a hip-hop culture program for teenagers, said she hopes the T-shirts send a direct, simple message to youth. Two of the four young men killed in a Dorchester basement last month belonged to her hip-hop program when they were in high school.

''Kids are really into materialistic things, brand names and all that," Wise said. ''If they see a positive message coming from an urban store, they're going to be more likely to soak it all up and even try to push the word."

The front of the shirts say ''Start Peace" on a stop sign background, echoing the ''Stop Snitchin' " design. On the back, the shirts read: ''It's time we made peace a part of our lifestyle. Peace in the streets 2006 and beyond. If we don't support ourselves, we can't expect anyone else to."

Half of the proceeds from the $20 shirts, sold in three styles, will benefit the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute's Survivors of Homicide fund, Ennis said. The institute helps victims' families pay for funerals, memorial buttons, and transportation to funerals and trials, said Clementina Chéry, who founded the institute after her son Louis Brown was killed when he was caught in gang crossfire in 1993.

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.