Hazleton, Pennsylvania, is a small city (population: 25,000) that once boasted a thriving coal mining industry, but today has an unemployment rate double the national one. It’s best known now as the first American city to pass a law designed to get rid of undocumented immigrants by making their lives exceedingly difficult. Hazleton approved the measure — which prevents illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there — in 2006, four years before Arizona passed its similar “papers, please” law.
On the surface, it seems that little has changed in Hazleton since the law was enacted: the New York Times summed up the situation there last spring with its headline, “New Attitude on Immigration Skips an Old Coal Town.” But there are some folks working hard to make change happen. Their leader happens to be the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon.
Maddon grew up in Hazleton, in a time when most of its residents were white ethnics, predominantly Italian and Polish Americans. Since then, the city’s demographics have changed radically. According to census data, the percentage of Latino residents has surged, rising from 5 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2010.
In 2008, Maddon’s cousin, Elaine Maddon Curry, helped create Concerned Parents, an organization that provides services to immigrant families in Hazleton. But as the backlash against the city’s Latino population grew, Maddon found himself frustrated by all the anti-immigrant sentiment. He came to believe that Hazleton’s immigrants, and the city itself, needed more than services. It needed to build bridges between immigrants and the native-born, whites and Latinos. It needed a real and shared sense of community.
“We’re the same, just speak a different language,” Maddon says. “The Slovak, the Polish, the Irish, the Italians — we all started the same.”
In 2010, Maddon decided “to do something to repair what has been damaged here,” and since then has joined with his cousin and other like-minded residents of his hometown to establish the Hazleton Integration Project. As part of its first messaging campaign, the group plans to set up billboards throughout Hazleton with photos of city residents of many different ethnic backgrounds, all with the same tagline: “We are from Hazleton.”
The Hazleton ONE Community Center, set to open this summer, will serve as the project’s headquarters. Besides hosting the Concerned Parents group and providing homework help and athletic facilities, the center will offer Spanish-language classes, host cultural events, and sponsor other programs designed to bring together the city’s native-born whites and (mostly) immigrant Latinos. As Bob Curry, the president of the project’s board, describes it:
Yes, we will provide particular services. But the larger mission of integration will guide us everything we do. Services are one thing. Integration is quite another.… It’s a longer-range goal.
The group’s leadership includes both whites and Latinos. Eugenio Sosa, the executive director and himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, explains their approach:
This is following our dream…. We are starting with the children because, you know, children do not have prejudice. They are going to be spending time together, playing together, learning together, going to each others’ houses, learning about different cultures, how different people celebrate. It is just a great opportunity.
I learned about the Hazleton Integration Project through an organization called One Nation Indivisible (disclosure: I have donated to this group), whose purpose is to “support and celebrate” efforts at inclusion and integration, in particular those focused on immigrants to this country. Their definition of integration describes exactly what is going on in Hazleton.
Integration refers not merely to the absence of physical segregation. It is an aspiration best imagined by Martin Luther King. “Desegregation,” King wrote, could be accomplished by laws, but “integration,” acknowledges a web of mutuality — a shared fate. Integration is not synonymous with “desegregation” and “diversity.” Integration requires a full acceptance, a richer coming together, a willful expansion of community circles. Our project tells many stories about what advocates call “immigrant integration.” Used in this context, “integration” does not necessarily refer to the absence of physical segregation, but to a wide variety of practices, policies, and programs that respect, welcome, and fully incorporate immigrants into the communities where they live.
Joe Maddon and his colleagues at the Hazleton Integration Project are working at a grassroots level to improve their city and overcome its ethnic divides. I can’t think of worthier goals.
Correction, June 18, 2013: This blog post originally misidentified the cofounder of Concerned Parents. It is Elaine Maddon Curry, not Joe Maddon. The text has been edited to reflect this.
Too often we take for granted our own liberty. I am in an interracial relationship, and until certain issues come up, I often think nothing of it.
This story is one of those issues.
A small city in Georgia is finally taking steps towards desegregation of its high school's prom.
Ashburn, Georgia is located in south central Georgia and is reported to house around 4,400 people. Sixty-five percent of those are black, and 32 percent are white, according to census data.
Historically, students who attend Turner County High say that things have "always been this way" and that this seems to be the first successful attempt to integrate dances. All other efforts failed due to lack of student support and student turnout from both white and black groups.
It is 2007, and we are more than 50 years away from the fundamental Brown v. Board of Education decision, which effectively made academic segregation illegal based on inequality. However, too often Brown and other paramount decisions are the only things we look at when it comes to separation of races. Sometimes, its the legacy, not the legality, that confines us.
The harsh reality is that, in the United States, while separate but equal may be the law, affirmative action may exist ,and discrimination may be effectively illegal — hate is real and entrenched. If a group of four high school students in Georgia can work to change it, why can't we? Furthmore, why has it taken us so long?
Best of In The Fray 2005. Transgender prisoners face discrimination, harassment, and abuse above and beyond that of the traditional male and female prison population.
Story and photos by Emily Alpert
Tanya Smith experienced sexual harassment and medical neglect while incarcerated in California prisons.
In Idaho, inmate Linda Patricia Thompson wanted a transfer to a women’s prison. A male-to-female transgender woman, or MTF, she had been living as a woman for several years, had changed her name legally, and was taking black-market estrogen when she could. Thompson had never been able to afford sex reassignment surgery, nor could she obtain hormones legally: the signatures of two physicians and a psychiatrist were required, and she couldn’t afford the visits. Still, Thompson was assertively feminine, even in handcuffs. At the time of her arrest, she wore a dress and high heels.
But prison officials refused to transfer Thompson or to provide her with estrogen. Inmates are housed on the basis of genitalia, they told her, and in their eyes she was incontestably male. So Thompson took matters into her own hands — literally. In two separate incidents, she amputated her own male genitalia, nearly bleeding to death in the process.
“I thought she had to be nuts,” recalls attorney Bruce Bistline, who handled Thompson’s case. “But apparently that sort of self-mutilation is not extraordinary in the transgender prison population. The level of desperation is just that high.”
“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” writes transgender prisoner Meagan Calvillo of her experiences in various California prisons since 1999. Calvillo’s description is not unusual. Outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.
“There’s no real legal standard” for determining the placement of transgender prisoners, says Chris Daly, director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. At present, most California prisoners are assigned to male or female prisons on the basis of their genitalia, the same method applied by most states. “There’s a state-level mandate that prisons be segregated by sex, which they’ve interpreted to mean genitalia. Every prison we know of has interpreted it the same way.” As a result, transgender people who choose not to undergo sex reassignment surgery — or lack the means to do so — are housed with people of their birth gender.
“For instance,” says Daly, “someone who’s male-to-female, if she hasn’t had surgery or hasn’t been able to access it yet, will be housed with men — regardless of how long she’s lived as a woman, or what her gender presentation is like.”
One such person is Dee Farmer, an MTF whose landmark 1994 Supreme Court case, Farmer v. Brennan, found that prison authorities are liable for “deliberate indifference” to inmates’ safety, including situations of likely sexual assault. Farmer brought the suit in 1990 after she was brutally raped and beaten by another inmate in an Indiana prison. The assault occurred two weeks after she was placed in the general male population, despite her breast implants and longtime use of estrogen.
When housed with male prisoners, MTFs rapidly become the targets of sexual assault, as Farmer’s case illustrates. Some, like Farmer, have developed breasts from surgery or years of estrogen treatment. Others, though male in appearance, are immediately relegated to the bottom of prison’s social hierarchies by virtue of their feminine self-presentation.
As for female-to-male transgender people, “while they don’t face the same type of violence [from fellow prisoners], they face a lot of oppression on the part of guards,” explains Judy Greenspan, cofounder of the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP). “When they’re strip-searched, many FTMs who have had their breasts removed or take hormones are put on display. It’s psychological brutality … They’re demonized.”
Everyday humiliations for both MTFs and FTMs include verbal harassment, frivolous strip searches, and gender-stereotypic “grooming standards,” which set requirements for men and women’s hair length, facial hair, and use of cosmetics. “Prison guards refuse to call them by their chosen names or use their correct pronouns,” says Greenspan, exasperated. “They look at trans- and gender-variant prisoners as deviant.”
Attorney Alex Lee directs the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, based in Oakland, California.
Protective custody for so-called vulnerable inmates, including those who are HIV positive, offers a modicum of safety to transgender prisoners — at least from assaults by other inmates. Another, more common option is to confine transgender prisoners individually, in what is known as administrative segregation.
“It’s pretty much standard throughout California — except for San Francisco — that housing tends to be separate” for transgender prisoners, explains James Austin, a physician affiliated with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “So most of the facilities are single cells. We don’t have any ability to accommodate them otherwise.”
However, when assaults come from prison guards, as they frequently do, administrative housing isn’t safe, either, and may even be worse. Many individual confinement pens are intended for short-term punitive stays, or for highly aggressive, violent prisoners.
“Administrative segregation is basically punishment,” explains attorney Alex Lee, director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). “In prison, people call it the jail. It’s much more restrictive, and a lot of trans folks in prison get put there … simply because the prisons don’t know how to take care of them, and they’d rather err on the side of being more restrictive than not.”
In 2004, a Wyoming judge ruled that prison officials violated the constitutional rights of Miki Ann Dimarco, a person with an intersex condition, by placing her in an isolated high-security lockup for over a year. At the time of her conviction for check fraud, Dimarco was placed at the Wyoming Women’s Center: an unintentionally appropriate choice. Born with genitalia that might either be classified as a microphallus or an enlarged clitoris, Dimarco identifies and lives publicly as a woman.
However, when medical staff saw Dimarco’s genitalia, flustered officials decided to hold her in complete isolation in the prison’s maximum-security wing. Though a prison evaluation placed Dimarco at the lowest possible risk level, and doctors concluded she posed no sexual threat (she was “not sexually functional as a male,” according to staff), she was subjected to the same living conditions and restrictions as the Center’s most dangerous prisoners.
Administrative segregation “may ostensibly be a safer place,” Lee remarks, but “where are they going to put you to be away from the guards?” Many of Lee’s own clients won’t report abuse from other prisoners for fear of being placed in isolation. Or, as in the case of Tanya Smith, they’ll endure abuse to avoid it.
In 1995, when Tanya Smith was first incarcerated, she was immediately isolated as “a threat to the safety of the jail population, as a transgender,” she recalls. Smith is a tall African American transwoman with warm, dark eyes and a dainty silver nose ring. Recalling isolation, she purses her lips. “I couldn’t access any visitors. The mental health ward would not come see me at all.” Smith suffers from borderline personality disorder and requires a steady hormonal regimen. After six months, she was finally released to the general men’s population, a situation she found far preferable to isolation, which she refers to as “the hole.”
Three years later, when Smith returned to prison, a prison guard came on to her, saying “‘Ooh, you’re a real woman. Do you fuck?’” Smith says she sometimes stripped for officers to get medical attention, but this guard wanted more. “He threatened that I’d go back to the hole if I didn’t have sex with him — or oral copulation.” In exchange for sex, claims Smith, the guard kept her out of administrative segregation, protected her from other prisoners, and provided her with food, medicine, and clothing, even alcohol and drugs. When asked how she felt about the officer, Smith merely shrugs. “It was a way of survival,” she says simply. “Why complain when I’d get thrown into the hole?”
In California, the most notorious isolation facilities are known as Security Housing Units, or SHUs. Antoine Mahan is a board member of California Prison Focus, which opposes the use of SHUs. He is also a former prisoner who spent two years in a SHU at Corcoran State Prison. Mahan’s rounded face is both feminine and masculine at once: he wears his hair long, and favors women’s blouses and headbands. “People think I’ve taken hormones,” he divulges, “but I never have. That’s just my androgynous features.” He identifies as an African American gay male cross-dresser, but in prison, he says, “I was seen as transgender.”
Homeless, drug-addicted, and HIV positive, Mahan ricocheted between prison and the street from 1991 to 1997. Like Smith, he was approached by officers and prisoners for sex, regardless of his HIV status. Some assailants may have been HIV positive already; others may have wanted oral sex, which has a relatively low transmission rate. At a reception center for HIV-positive inmates, an officer began courting Mahan with food and gifts, hinting that he wanted sexual favors. Later, at the California Men’s Colony (CMC), Mahan says, “I had a lot of guys getting at me, and a lot of officers harassing me sexually. I was what they call in prison terms ‘fresh booty.’”
But the SHU, says Mahan, was far worse. In 1997, following a scuffle with another CMC prisoner, Mahan was transferred to Corcoran State Prison, one of the few California prisons equipped with an SHU. There, he says, “I went through more hell than I’ve ever been through in my life.” Mahan describes the SHU as “a nine-by-five cell — nine by five by six, that’s the length, the width and the height. It was a box. No ventilation whatsoever.” According to California Prison Focus, SHU prisoners spend at least twenty-three hours a day in their cells, have no phone access, compromised medical care, and no work training or educational programs.
It is unclear whether transgender prisoners are routinely assigned to California’s few SHUs, but California Prison Focus alleges that inmates accused of gang affiliation are regularly assigned there, regardless of their behavior, in a “draconian” effort to wipe out gangs. If transgender prisoners are perceived as making trouble — or provoking it — a similar rationale might apply.
“There were a lot of queens in jail,” Mahan mentions offhandedly. Transgender and gender-variant people, as a population, are incarcerated at even higher rates than the general population of African American men, although the majority of those incarcerated are also people of color. In San Francisco, a 1997 study conducted by the city’s Department of Public Health found that 67 percent of MTF respondents and 30 percent of FTM respondents had a history of incarceration. Almost a third of MTF respondents had been jailed in the past year. The numbers are staggering: among U.S. adults, only 3 percent are or have been incarcerated. Overall, “unless they’re rich, [most transgender people have] spent a little time in jail,” says Judy Greenspan.
TIP volunteer Nedjula Baguio, an MTF, offers one explanation: employment discrimination. Trans people are at a disadvantage in today’s service economy, she says, regardless of whether they can “pass.” Trans people who pass are more easily recognized as their presented gender: they may have taken hormones for many years or opted for breast implants or removal. Those who don’t pass are less easily categorized. Some are mid-transition, some lack the funds for hormones or surgery, and others feel at home between — or across, or beyond — the categories of male and female.
“I don’t think I ever pass,” says Baguio, despite her lean figure and softly curving mouth; she recalls a tense stop at a rural diner while en route to Vacaville, and winces. Her light skin is patterned with evocative tattoos: a heart being sewn up, a marionette cut from its strings.
Trans people who don’t pass “freak people out,” Baguio says simply, and in a service economy, that’s fatal. “Most people don’t want to have anything to do with you as a potential employee, for all the obvious reasons. Your gender presentation is going to be perceived as ‘freakish,’ and nobody will want to deal with you, period. You’re seen as interfering with moneymaking.”
Smith agrees. Drug-free and out of prison, her job search hasn’t been easy, as a former inmate or as a transwoman. “There’s not a lot of people willing to hire us,” she complains.
But finding work is no picnic for trans people who pass, reports Baguio. When supplying references or a work history for employers, they face another dilemma. If a prospective boss calls a former employer and asks about Susan — only to hear all about Sean — their reaction may not be charitable.
Consequently, a disproportionate number of trans people engage in sex work. Many turn to drugs to cope with the degradation they experience as transgender people and as sex workers, and are eventually incarcerated for prostitution or drug-related offenses — what Lee calls “survival crimes.” Others develop mental illness, another risk factor for landing in jail. Because employment discrimination, arrests, and sentencing patterns fall hardest on low-income people — predominantly people of color — transwomen of color are the majority of the trans prison population.
“It affects queer and transgender people across the board,” explains Baguio, “but for those communities [low-income people and people of color], you’re dealing with a double whammy.” Baguio offers her own experience as a multiracial transwoman for contrast. “I’m perceived as lighter-skinned. I’m not targeted a lot. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of hip artists; I’m not living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have a job where they’ve been accepting of my transition, and it’s not an issue. I make a decent wage and have been able to spend a fair amount of money on my transition, including electrolysis, health care, and access to hormones.”
Baguio also transitioned after college, insulating her from the hazards of the service economy. She hasn’t needed to engage in sex work, and hasn’t been exposed to its attendant health risks.
Dr. Lori Kohler is the founder of California’s only health clinic for trans prisoners, located at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. The dominant health issue among trans prisoners, she reports, is HIV/AIDS. “Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent [of transfeminine prisoners] at any given time are HIV infected,” she says. “And many are also Hep-C infected. The next greatest problem is addiction.”
Most of the prisoners Kohler sees are transwomen of color, incarcerated for nonviolent offenses related to drugs or sex work. Like Baguio, she cites the cycle of unemployment, sex work, and drug addiction. “These are not women that are working to pay for their drugs — these are women who are working for their lives, and end up using drugs to tolerate the life they’re forced into.”
Kohler has been working with transgender patients since 1994, when she took a job at the recently founded Transgender Clinic of the Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco. In 1999, the chief medical officer of the Vacaville facility approached Kohler and asked her to establish a clinic for the prison’s trans inmates. At the time of the clinic’s founding, the chief medical officer estimated that Kohler would be serving a total population of ten to fifteen patients. Six years later, Kohler says she’s seen roughly 3,000 unduplicated patients, and that there are about sixty trans prisoners at CMF at any given time.
Kohler says that her exposure to trans health issues is unusual among health professionals. “Care of trans people is not something that most medical people understand,” she says, and sighs. This ignorance is manifested most clearly, she says, in the issue of cross-gender hormone provision.
“As far as I know of, CMF and now CMC [California Men’s Colony] are the only two prisons in the country that actually have a physician who’s dedicated to providing good care, including cross-hormone therapies,” says Kohler. “In all other California prisons, access to cross-gender hormones is not guaranteed. It’s sporadic and inconsistent, and only given to very few people.”
In 2003, a U.S. District Court in Boston ruled that transgender prisoner Michelle Kosilek was entitled to hormone therapy; in the same year, New Hampshire ruled in favor of similar claims by state prisoner Lisa Barrett. Courts have generally recognized the responsibility of prisons to continue hormone treatment and psychological therapy, in compliance with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted to include the deliberate withholding of medical treatment.
However, prisons have often been reluctant to provide hormone therapy if inmates do not have an existing prescription. Because low-income transwomen of color usually acquire hormones through the black market, few can furnish legal prescriptions.
As a result, explains Kohler, “most transwomen who are incarcerated end up being taken off of their hormones unless they can get a court order — they have to use the legal system to have access to their appropriate medical care.” And in other states, she adds, “it’s virtually impossible for them even to get a court order to access care.” Side effects of hormone deprivation can include depression, heart problems, and irregular blood pressure.
Undeterred, Kohler prescribes cross-gender hormones to any trans-identified prisoner: a renegade position among prison medical staff, who routinely ignore her prescriptions. “I’d say about half the medical staff will refill my medical orders if I’m not around, and the other half will not recognize my recommendations,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s any different than the medical community outside the prisons.”
Photos of female and trans prisoners cover the walls of Lee’s Oakland office.
After her life-threatening self-mutilation and the lawsuit that followed, Linda Thompson was eventually transferred to Kohler’s Vacaville facility in California. She was also granted a cash settlement contingent upon a confidentiality agreement about the suit. However, Bruce Bistline’s cocounsel, Lea Cooper, says that Thompson chose to violate the terms of the settlement agreement, foregoing most of the settlement money.
“Linda decided that she wanted to get the word out,” says Cooper. “That meant more than money to her.”
In California prisons, Thompson was finally able to access estrogen. Because her genitalia are not readily identifiable as female or male (something of a conundrum for prison assignment), she was housed in a small facility with other transwomen and gay men. After her release, Thompson sought jobs in Oregon, Wyoming, Los Angeles, and Washington, but couldn’t find paid work — not even sex work.
“She said she was too masculine to turn tricks,” Cooper explains. Eventually, at a loss for what to do next, Thompson got arrested for stealing copper wire from a construction site. “She told the judge she did it [got arrested] on purpose, because she didn’t have any more options,” Cooper says. Thompson is currently incarcerated at the Monroe Correctional Center in Monroe, Washington; on the basis of her birth genitalia, she has been housed in the men’s facility. As Cooper describes it, “Linda jokes, ‘What do I have to do, start menstruating to be considered a woman?’”
Though both do work that benefits trans prisoners, neither prisoners’ rights groups nor transgender advocates have specifically taken up their cause. “Transgender issues are not on the radar screen of most prisoners’ rights groups,” says Judy Greenspan, “and the transgender movement may not be prioritizing prisoners’ issues because they’re involved in trans survival and support services on the street.”
The Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee, cofounded by Greenspan, and the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, founded by Alex Lee, are two notable exceptions. Greenspan identifies as a gender-variant white woman: biologically female, she doesn’t conform to societal expectations of female behavior or appearance. She wears men’s clothing, cuts her hair short, and is occasionally taken for a man. For twenty years, Greenspan has worked with transgender prisoners, including Dee Farmer of Farmer v. Brennan. Lee is an FTM Asian American attorney who became interested in prison issues during law school and sought to connect them to transgender advocacy.
Lee believes the void in advocacy results from mainstream queer organizations’ “assimilationist politics … They want to pretend that we are all law-abiding citizens, that we’re perfect angels who want to be just like ‘normal’ straight people.” In doing so, he says, such groups jettison trans prisoners, who are predominantly low-income people of color.
Both TIP and TGIJP advocate for trans prisoners who are currently incarcerated, but Lee says that the long-term change needs to happen “before people go to prisons.” As Greenspan explains, “prison mirrors what’s going on in the outside, so-called free world. There are really no rights in the community, unless you’re living in San Francisco.”
But even in San Francisco County Jail, reports Tanya Smith, trans people are reviled. “You’d think the officers out here would think outside the box, in this liberal city, but they don’t. It’s horrible.”
In light of this reality, Linda Thompson’s choice to be rearrested makes sense, despite the harassment she continues to face as a prisoner. For many trans people, all the world’s a prison — on both sides of the bars.
UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
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Left to right, Kenny, Rachel, Quinlin, Bonnie, Nicole, and Tim gather outside Faith Christian Fellowship after a Sunday service in July.
In 1968, four days before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon in which he called eleven o’clock on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in America.”
Over thirty years later, even the most integration-minded churches still struggle to cross the cultural divides that keep Christians worshipping apart.
Last summer, I spent time among three mixed-race congregations in Baltimore, hoping to understand the challenges that today’s multicultural churches face. Baltimore, it seemed to me, was a good place to look. According to 2000 census estimates, Baltimore is 64 percent black and 31 percent white, with growing populations of Latinos and immigrants—a diverse metropolis, whose friendly atmosphere makes it the most Southern of Northern cities.
I soon found out, however, that the multicultural church movement has more than a few obstacles to overcome here. Many residents today describe Baltimore as a black and white city, not just for its demographics, but also for its history of racial conflict, which still plays out today in segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and segregated churches. Mutual suspicions run deep. Riots rocked Baltimore after King’s assassination, accelerating white flight. Renewal programs supported by the city government have rejuvenated areas such as the now-touristy downtown harbor and nearby Fells Point, but have generally failed to improve life in many black neighborhoods.
Three decades after the civil rights movement broke the color line at workplaces and lunch counters, the designation “multicultural” still raises eyebrows in Baltimore’s Christian community. The three congregations I got to know were fighting against this attitude, and were finding, despite all their good intentions, that building a racially diverse church is still no easy matter.
Not a ‘White’ Church
On a summer Sunday morning in Pen-Lucy, a struggling neighborhood on the northeast side of town, two thirty-something women walk down the sidewalk, arms encircling each other’s waists. One is black, the other white. They enter the church’s foyer through a stone archway built long ago, by a wealthier congregation. A tacked-on sign in upbeat, modern type announces the building’s current occupancy by “Faith Christian Fellowship.” The two friends stand in line to fill out nametags before searching for seats in the nearly full sanctuary. The music kicks in, and the multicolored “worship team” leads a gospel rendition of “Like A River Glorious.” The crowd of about 250 begins to respond, as variously as their many shades. Some clap and shake their hips, while others sit calmly nodding their head in time to the drums.
Pastor Stan Long says services weren’t always so inspiring. Visiting Faith in the early 1990s, he found the church “still struggling to get it together.” But he was greeted with change when he visited again, in 1999: “There were a lot more people, a lot more mixed people, the music was clearly more alive.” Long was so impressed that he quit his job as head pastor of a predominantly African American congregation across town to become co-pastor at Faith, which is explicitly multicultural, with an emphasis on racial reconciliation. It was good timing, as the church needed a black leader.
He and Craig Garriott, his white co-pastor, ask to meet with me as a pair. Long, whose curly hair is just beginning to whiten, is genial, quick to talk and laugh at the frustrations of running a multicultural ministry. Garriot’s thinning hair is blond, and he draws out his words, sometimes pausing to peer through his glasses. Both are in their late forties; both have five children. They’ve known each other for twenty years: Long was working for InterVarsity, a national Christian organization that focuses on college students, when he met Garriott, whose college group was doing a summer urban project at Faith. That was 1981; Faith was founded just a year before. But their current partnership is barely two years old. It is part of Faith’s attempt to attract more blacks to what some from the African American community call “a white church.”
Garriott calls the staff of Faith “intentionally diverse.” Indeed, he uses the word “intentional” like a mantra. It explains Faith’s struggles to address racial disparities by carefully monitoring the church’s leadership, worship styles, and even small group demographics. Before they got “intentional,” the church found that the covenant groups were self-segregating along race and class lines. So the church broke up the groups and started over, emphasizing the goals of reconciliation and diversity. Garriott insists there was “no quota system, [no] engineering system.” Now, the groups can no longer be characterized as white intellectual, African American, or blue collar. They’ve achieved a mix of people that’s echoed in the larger congregation—about 30 percent black, 30 percent Asian, and 40 percent white.
Garriott is surprised when Long says that black churches in the neighborhood don’t appreciate Faith’s multiculturalism. “You think they see us as a white church?” he asks.
“There’s no category for multicultural churches,” Long says. Even if a church has both black and white leadership, he explains, the tendency is for the black community to see the white person as the real leader. When sharing the platform with whites, he says, African American leaders are suspect—ingratiating Uncle Toms.
This barrier of historically unequal black/white relationships is why Long is excited to see the middle-class black families who’ve started coming to Faith. “You can’t have a church that’s truly a diverse community where there’s real dignity if the middle-class community is white and the blacks are poor.”
When they bought the current building in 1983, Faith’s founders felt its location on the border of two very different neighborhoods in North Baltimore would provide valuable racial diversity. Long’s concept of “true” diversity has become a concern only more recently. Because the church draws from both prosperous Guilford, near Johns Hopkins University, and distressed Pen-Lucy, examples of economic parity between the races are hard to come by.
In part because of its strong contingent of people from “outside,” the church is still struggling to attract members from the Pen-Lucy community. Faith’s Christian elementary school and sports programs are major avenues of recruitment for neighborhood kids and their parents. Faith also recently created a non-profit organization to focus on community development projects.
One of the biggest draws, however, is the music. Though the mix includes classical and contemporary, gospel is clearly the most crucial in attracting and retaining black families. The biggest problem facing an upcoming move to two services was scheduling so that the drummer could play at both.
Patty Prasada-Rao, a member of Faith since 1994, worries that the church is still not doing enough to locate itself as a community church: “It can be discouraging if … you see mostly white faces or Asian faces because it draws a lot of Hopkins students.” Because of these “outsiders,” she describes it as a regional church focused on community development rather than a community church.
A former Hopkins student herself, Prasada-Rao is now director of resource development at the Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, an organization struggling to define itself as community-based. The Habitat where she works was started by another multicultural church in Baltimore, a much smaller one called New Song.
A mural two blocks south of New Song suggests black/white partnerships within the community, July 2001.
Singing a New Song
Pastor Thurman Williams likes to joke about meeting people and explaining he’s from New Song, a church of about fifty members in West Baltimore. New Psalmist! they exclaim, and pile high praise on the gifted brother.
There are many reasons to mistake him for a preacher from one of the oldest and most prestigious black churches in the city. Though only in his early thirties, he has the charismatic presence of a seasoned minister. And though he grew up in middle-class, suburban D.C., he exchanges greetings easily as we walk the streets of Sandtown. He calls, “Hey ladies,” or “Hey bro’, how’re you?” as he passes people cooling off on their stoops.
He’s made this neighborhood—one of the poorest in the city—his home for almost two years. He lives in the row house where the church was founded in 1988. (New Song has since moved to a larger building three blocks away.) It’s there that I meet his wife Evie, toting infant son Joshua. Williams’s family itself is a multicultural church success story. He met Evie, a member of New Song, before becoming pastor there in 2000. Although she is white, her presence in the mostly black neighborhood is accepted, and Joshua is passed from lap to lap at church. In a neighborhood where Williams says most churches are “comprised of folks who drive in and drive back out—people that grew up here and left,” his commitment is a cornerstone of New Song’s plan. “We wanted to be a church for people right here,” he explains.
Across the street is the neighborhood pool, thronged with kids battling the summer heat. Pointing up the street, five houses down, Williams shows where, just yesterday, men shot at a church member’s home. The kids at the pool dove to the ground in fear. But the streets are busy again today, the pool is full. Business is as usual at the nearby Habitat office, Health Center, and Learning Center, all established by New Song with numerous grants.
These neighborhood resources are all part of New Song’s three R’s: Relocation, Reconciliation, Redistribution. The first principle can be especially challenging. When New Song’s white founders, Allan Tibbels, wife Susan, and friend Mark Gornik, moved to Sandtown fifteen years ago, people were not welcoming, believing them to be narcs, or maybe just crazy. Now, after earning the trust of the community and bringing millions of dollars in resources and services, their own kids have the neighborhood lingo down.
Sylvia Simmons is a black church member who moved her two daughters from East Baltimore to Sandtown; she became a Habitat homeowner there in 1992. Now in her mid-thirties, she’s seen a man shot and killed, escaped gunfire next to her house, and had a co-worker injured by crossfire while making a phone call—all since the move. Yet she remains committed to the neighborhood, arguing, “When will the rebuilding start, how can it start, if we all run away?”
Simmons’s loyalty stems from her close ties to New Song. Her current job as a medical assistant, as well as her home, were gleaned from close ties to the church. “I saw the good that was being done and I was a recipient of that,” she says. Yet when her small Pentecostal fellowship decided in 1992 to combine services with New Song, a Presbyterian Church of America, it was difficult at first. “We were used to the shouting and the jumping and being very active in the service and this was totally different, very reserved,” she says.
The process of both congregations adapting to each other was gradual and difficult. “I cried through it and I prayed about it and was puzzled about it and I looked at my pastor initially like, ‘Why did you do this? And why are we here?'” she says. One of Simmons’s greatest and most difficult realizations, she says, was that “God has other sheep.” Her denomination was not the only one that was Christian. She refers to Acts 2, describing the day of Pentecost, on which tongues of fire appeared and a crowd of men speaking different languages miraculously understood each other. This scene is the model of many churches attempting to claim a multicultural status, and is often cited as Biblical proof of God’s approval.
“The racial thing is what will continue to eat at you ’til you leave here, if you’re allowed to,” Simmons acknowledges. New Song’s leadership still struggles with mistrust. Placing more power in the hands of community members and addressing longstanding inequalities are constant issues. “We want to feel as blacks in this community that we have the freedom still to know what’s best for us and have that respected,” she explains.
At Habitat, Prasada-Rao sometimes groans under the burden of black/white misunderstanding. Indian American and dark-skinned, Prasada-Rao often finds herself in the position of mediator, a bridge between black and white in Baltimore.
There’s not a day that goes by at work that’s free from racial issues. Disagreements may not get trumpeted in church on Sundays. But during the week, at the various centers started by New Song, hurt feelings and resentment announce themselves. At times Patty wishes reconciliation didn’t take so long. “I wish I could say to the white folks I know, ‘Because you come from this perspective you have no idea what it’s like,'” she says. “I wish I could say to the black folks I know, ‘Not everyone has it out for you … not every comment that is made is a racial slur.'”
Getting beyond Color-Blindness
But patience is crucial in the multicultural church business. So is a large measure of forgiveness. Michael Coles has learned both lessons, the hard way.
Coles, in his late forties, is the first African American pastor at Seventh Baptist, a browning church on the corner of St. Paul and North Avenue. Seventh Baptist is not his first multicultural flock. After graduating from seminary, Coles and his best friend at the time, who is white, started a multicultural church in Columbia, Maryland. When his co-pastor was disqualified for misconduct, Coles found that some members of the congregation were not ready to accept him as the sole leader of the church. Though they were willing to hug him on Sundays, Coles says, “I had people come up to me and say, ‘I just can’t sit under a black preacher.'”
It took Coles time to get over his bitterness, especially toward white Christians. But since 1996, he has taken pride in leading Seventh Baptist, a church that didn’t allow black people to sit on its outside steps in the 1930s and 1940s. Warm and voluble, he offers an easygoing pat on the back and sometimes a grandfatherly “Be good” as he says goodbye to congregants. At the same time, he responds to questions with take-it-or-leave-it candor. Some white members of the congregation have found his coming unpalatable. He is not surprised.
Coles chuckles at the rhetorical questions put by those advocating color-blindness, mimicking their air of innocence with a smooth drawl: “Why can’t we all just get along together? Why can’t we just be Church?” He responds, “I believe one of the most racist statements that anyone can say is that God does not see color, because if God does not see color, then he made an awful mistake.” His laughter booms—”an awful mistake.” For Coles, seeing and acknowledging differences is a first step toward tolerance.
Coles’s anti-color-blind approach is to discuss divisive subjects in the open and to challenge perceptions. He replaced the old Sunday School curriculum with texts targeted at urban and African American congregations. He brought up the O.J. Simpson trial in a sermon, before an audience that is usually about 60 percent black and 40 percent white.
Betty Strand, seventy-nine, has been going to Seventh Baptist since 1940, when it was almost entirely white. Since then, whites have fled Baltimore, and the area around the church has grown darker. Strand, who is white, approved of hiring of a black pastor to attract more people from the surrounding neighborhood.
She knows some people who left because of Coles’s race and because of the church’s changing worship style, with its new emphasis on gospel. Of those who remain, she says, “We think an awful lot of Pastor Mike. He’s a down-to-earth Bible preaching minister, who doesn’t mince words.”
Coles will need all his evangelistic skills to face the challenges of staying multicultural on North Avenue, a street many associate with abandoned homes, drug deals, and even homicides. He will have to hold on to a nucleus of white families, even as he convinces neighbors that Seventh Baptist has divorced its racist past, and that the local rumor, “Mike is pastoring a white church,” is simply not true.
He accepts the challenge with a certain enjoyment, and sees his unique position as an advantage. When white folk, interested in helping, ask, “What can I do?” he sees other black pastors responding, “We don’t need you.” Coles is happy to end the impasse and accept resources from outside his church and city. In return, he offers suburban congregations the opportunity to overcome their negative perceptions. He describes a recent visit by a white Baptist congregation: “We had a group come up, their expectation was that someone was going to get hurt, someone was going to possibly die, their things were going to get stolen … at the end of the week, they were so blessed to realize there are good people here. They went back home with a 180-degree [different] idea of what the city was all about.”
In Baltimore, integrating the most segregated hour in America remains a sought-after dream. “It’s just not very clean or smooth, it’s very messy,” says New Song’s Thurman Williams. “There’s always something coming up that let’s you know there’s issues that haven’t been dealt with.” Patty Prasada-Rao agrees. “It’s hard, it feels impossible, but I believe that it’s important, it’s what God wants. If you can’t do it in the church, it’s going to be hopeless to do it anywhere else,” she says.
I visit New Song’s service on a hot July Sunday. Two blocks from a basketball court where men are warming up for a game, I find a small congregation of about thirty-five people. A third are white, a third are kids of both colors talking intently or teasing each other. A doctor from the Health Center, her daughter, and her husband are the lone Asian family. Sylvia Simmons has promised me an un-Presbyterian style of worship: “Lots of upbeat music, clapping and stomping.” The low hubbub quiets for a moment of silence. On the front wall, behind the electronic keyboard that serves as an organ, there is a sentence spelled out in puffy, sparkling letters: “Nothing is too hard for God.”
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