Mitchell: Group calls for political and community action to end violence
By MARY MITCHELL August 12, 2013 7:24PM
The Rev. Marcenia Richards, pastor of the Life Center and executive director of Fierce Women of Faith, calls for more community and political action to reduce gun violence in Chicago and the suburbs at a rally Sunday on the South Side. | Dan Rozek~Sun-Times
Updated: September 14, 2013 6:15AM
Recently, a 64-year-old African-American school bus driver came under fire for failing to intervene when three black teens assaulted a 13-year-old white teen on the bus.
Although the driver pulled the bus over and begged dispatchers to send help, he physically did nothing to stop the fight on July 9 in Florida.
John Moody later told CNN he was “in shock” and “petrified,” and that he had done all he could. The victim suffered two black eyes and a broken arm. Three 15-year-olds were arrested and charged with the assault. Police determined that the teens attacked the 13-year-old after he “told officials at their dropout prevention school that one of them had tried to sell him drugs,” CNN reported.
This is an example of the bullying behavior that goes on every day in a lot of communities.
People see bad things happen but are too scared to say anything.
The bus driver’s failure to help this victim is sad but not surprising. The truth is, many of us would have done the same thing. Fear stops us from talking to police even when we know the victim could have been our son or daughter, or our wife or husband, or our mother or father.
It wasn’t always like this.
Decades ago, black people in the South locked arms and marched past water hoses and vicious dogs to get to the voting booths. Before that, they banded together to stand up against lynch mobs and hooded killers that had come to steal their land.
These brave black people fought back even though they knew they had little chance of winning the fight.
Today, few of us have the courage it takes to rid our neighborhoods of predators.
That is one reason I have joined the “Fierce Women of Faith” movement. The not-for-profit group has brought together women from several faith communities including St. Sabina Church; The Life Center; Trinity United Church of Christ; Jewish Council on Urban Affairs; Galewood Community Church; the Fourth Presbyterian Church and the Beth Hillel Congregation Bnai Emunah.
Last Thursday, I stood in one of the groups that prayed for peace on four corners at Central Park and Madison.
These women were white, black, young and old. Some of them were pastors and others, like Monica Moss, were pastors’ wives. They came from suburbs like Wilmette, as well as from the Garfield Park area.
“I prayed to God to show me what I needed to do and I realized so very quickly that it required going out to use my voice as a woman, to use my voice as a Christian woman and to use my voice as a mother, because that is where my heart is,” Moss told me.
“We have to stop being afraid,” Brenda Smith proclaimed at the group’s first anti-violence rally at the South Side’s Lowden Homes last month.
Besides consistent prayer, the FWF is calling for more political and community action to end the gun violence.
But it is the role prayer plays in addressing the ongoing violence on the South and West sides of the city that interests me.
I’ve depended on prayer to get me through the worst of times in my own life. In fact, more than three in four (76 percent) African Americans surveyed for a Pew Research project in 2009 said they pray daily.
On Thursday, the prayer circles near Garfield Park publicly prayed for an end to the shootings that have claimed so many young lives. Each woman wore a fuschia rebozo or scarf, a symbol of our status as protectors of the children in our communities.
Obviously believers are praying in homes and in their churches. But public prayer on a street corner is a demonstration of faith over fear.
Thankfully, many motorists drove by and honked their horns in a show of support. Honestly, I’m not sure what we would have done had the reception been unfavorable.
But the words of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay often come to mind:
“If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot . . . , If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!”
