S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (8 page)

Shaw was also a vibrant cultural center. The Howard Theatre, built in 1910, was located one block north of S Street. Through the decades, the venue hosted dozens of prominent black entertainers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Otis Redding, and James Brown. White artists such as Buddy Holly and Danny Kaye also performed there.

Everything began to change on the evening of April 4, 1968, with the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., which sparked more than three days and nights of rioting across large swaths of the city. More than eleven thousand Army troops and another three thousand National Guardsmen were deployed in response to the looting and widespread burning of businesses. When it was over, twelve people had been killed, thousands had been injured, and more than nine hundred businesses had been damaged or destroyed. More than six hundred dwellings—apartments and single-family homes—had been ruined, many by fire.

Some of the worst destruction occurred in Shaw, on or near 7th Street. Hundreds of properties were damaged or destroyed. In the span of a few angry days and nights, Shaw was transformed from a flourishing neighborhood into an urban wasteland. In the wake of the rioting, thousands of white business owners and residents, as well as many middle-class blacks, fled Washington, taking their energy and ideas—and a big chunk of the city’s tax base—with them. The Howard Theatre closed in 1970.

In the eighties, while downtown Washington bloomed with new office buildings, restaurants, and hotels, the area around 7th and S languished. Nearly a decade and a half after the riots, it still resembled a bombed-out war zone. The streets remained full of abandoned brick shells and empty lots. The Howard Theatre reopened sporadically throughout the decade, then shut down again. The Hostess bakery, which employed dozens of bakers, wrappers, and truck drivers, would be shuttered a couple of years after the church took root at 614 S.

Over the years, Mayor Barry and the series of local council members who represented the neighborhood didn’t do nearly enough to encourage revitalization. This failure created a leadership vacuum on S Street—one that would be filled by a charismatic and dangerous man.

It wouldn’t be long before Jim crossed paths with him.

Jim moved quickly on the house. The owner owed $70,000 in tax liens. He was willing to sign over the building if Jim would assume the tax bite. Jim made some calls to a few people he knew at city hall and described his plan to establish a church on S Street. Eventually, the tax liens disappeared.

Jim drove Grace to S Street, eager to show her the future home of the church. He pulled over to the curb and pointed out the building. Grace was supportive, but Jim could tell she was nervous about the location. “She didn’t even get out of the car that first day,” he recalled.

Accompanied by church volunteers, Jim spent the first few months of 1984 cleaning out the house. They wore paper surgical masks to try to ward off the stench and donned work gloves to keep themselves from being pricked by one of the hundreds of used needles littering the floor. One trash bag at a time, they hauled away the detritus of junkie living.

One day, Jim wandered out to the street to chat with the drug dealers. Again, they gathered around the burning trash can.

“Listen up, fellas,” Jim said. “I’m not going to turn any of you in for drug dealing. We all have to get along. And more importantly, I’m here to help you find God and change your lives, if you so choose.”

The slingers didn’t say anything, but a couple of them silently nodded their heads in assent.

“One more thing,” Jim added. “When the church opens, all of you are welcome. You don’t need to dress up. Just come as you are.”

A few weeks later, a couple of plainclothes D.C. narcotics cops came to see Jim at the church. “You’ve got an awful drug problem on this street,” one of them said. “The top floor of this house would make a great observation post.”

“Let us help you out,” the second officer said. “We can clean out all these street dealers.”

Jim didn’t need to think about it. “No, thank you,” he said, politely but firmly.

Jim saw the shades of gray. He knew that most of the slingers were probably the main sources of income for their families. New Community would be untenable if people saw the church as being in league with the police. The street dealers didn’t come to church, but some of their kids did.

Besides, Jim didn’t trust cops. The organized-crime outfit he’d worked for in Arkansas had paid off the local police, the county sheriff, and the state police. Though he’d been on S Street only a short time, he already suspected that some D.C. cops were on the take, too. He’d seen squad cars roll into the alley on the side of the church. Drug dealers would follow the cars. The slingers would place something in the hands of the officers. The drug dealing on S Street was too brazen, Jim thought. Some cops had to be getting payoffs to look the other way.

The narcotics officers persisted: “Don’t you want to be a good citizen?” one of them said.

Jim stood firm. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. You have your job to do; I have mine. The church is here for everyone.”

The two cops shook their heads and walked out.

As soon as they left, Jim marched out to the burning trash can. He summoned the drug dealers, who gathered around him.

“I want you all to know that the cops just asked me to use the church as an observation post, and I told them no,” he said. “I don’t condone what you all are doing out here, you’re killing yourselves, each other, and your community, but I will not turn any of you in for selling drugs. However, if I ever witness any of you committing violence, I will tell the police, and if asked, I will testify against you truthfully. If you get in trouble with the law, don’t bother asking me to write a letter to the judge saying what a great churchgoing guy you are.

“And remember,” he added, “once it’s open, you’re all welcome at the church.”

New Community Church celebrated its first service on S Street on April 22, 1984—Easter Sunday.

It was a bright, unseasonably cold day. The renovation was far from complete. There were no windows. There was a huge hole in the floor of the main sanctuary, in the front of the house. The congregation adapted. Worshippers sat on metal folding chairs, wearing coats and gloves and scarves, exhaling white breath. Jim threw a piece of plywood over the big hole. Grace was among the worshippers. So were Ben, Rachel, and Andre.

Jim and his volunteers kept working on the church through the spring and into the summer. Almost every day, Jim would exchange hellos with a stout man who sat on a folding chair in the front yard of his row house, next door to the church. Everyone in the neighborhood called him Baldie.

Baldie turned forty that spring. He was six feet tall, with muscular arms, big shoulders, and, of course, a bald head. He had a wife and a couple of young daughters, but he didn’t seem to have a job. At times, Baldie drank beer as he sat in his yard. Sometimes he drank too much and yelled at his wife and kids.

Once, after Jim and Baldie exchanged their usual pleasantries, the church’s enigmatic neighbor said, “Anything you need, just let me know. Anything at all.”

Jim didn’t give the offer much thought. He figured Baldie was just showboating for the new guy on the block, pretending he could get things done. Now and then, Jim heard rumors about Baldie—that he’d done time, that he owned a cache of weapons, that he had a high-priced attorney on retainer. But he dismissed them as overheated street legends.

An architect friend of Jim’s visited the church in progress. He came up with an idea to close up one of the windows in the sanctuary and use the space to create an artistic crucifix using bricks. It would provide a dramatic backdrop to the altar.

Word of the plan filtered onto the street. One day, as Jim walked to the church, Baldie called out to him from his yard. “I heard about the crucifix. I know you need bricks. I’ll have my guys come over to help you.”

Jim humored Baldie. “Sure. Send them over. We’d be happy to have the help.” Jim didn’t think Baldie had any guys or could afford more than a couple of bricks.

The next day, ten of Baldie’s guys showed up at the church with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. They drank beer as they worked, using the bricks to construct the crucifix to the architect’s specifications.

Jim recognized some of the workers. He saw them every day—he’d even talked to a few of them. They sold drugs on the block. The picture snapped into focus: Baldie wasn’t some wannabe tough guy. The slingers worked for him. Baldie was the neighborhood drug kingpin.

The next day, Jim thanked Baldie for sending his guys over with the bricks.

“You’re welcome,” Baldie said. “Holler if you need anything.”

The offer was tempting. The fledgling church needed money. But Jim didn’t want to be indebted to the drug dealer who ran the block. He invited Baldie to church, but he never asked him about his business. He already knew enough. If he knew more, it could put him in a bad spot if the police ever started asking him questions.

A week or two after Baldie’s guys brought over the bricks, Jim noticed something: The slingers usually worked seven days a week, virtually around the clock, but on Sunday mornings they melted away. During the initial phase of the renovations, the slingers hadn’t bothered any church members, black or white. Now that the church was holding services, the drug dealers seemed to be ceding the block to the outsiders on Sunday mornings.

One weekday, a middle-aged suburban couple came to S Street to help out with the ongoing renovations. The two weren’t part of the congregation and hadn’t been in the neighborhood before. They quickly got lost. But they didn’t wander S Street for long. One of the slingers led them to the church. Jim welcomed his guests and thanked the drug dealer, who went back to his crack-selling post across the street.

“I think Baldie’s protecting us,” Jim told Grace one morning at the breakfast table. “I think he’s told his guys to watch out for us.”

Grace nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said. By then, most of the misgivings she’d had about S Street the first day Jim took her there had faded. Like Jim, she felt God’s presence on the block.

And she felt better knowing that Baldie had the church’s back.

Crack began to appear on S Street and in other D.C. drug zones the year the church was launched. In 1985, it slammed the city. The transition on S Street was seamless: Baldie’s guys simply started selling crack in addition to heroin and “bam,” or meth. Before long, they were dealing only crack. The drug traffic increased. S Street became one of the busiest open-air drug markets in the city.

Each summer, Baldie hosted a block party. Everything was on him. He’d break out a big grill and cook burgers and chicken and fill a cooler with ice, bottled water, and cans of soft drinks. The slingers got the afternoon off. They and neighborhood residents, as well as Jim and some of his church members, would eat Baldie’s food, down his drinks, and mingle. Little kids would open a fire hydrant and frolic in the gushing water.

Baldie did other things for his neighbors, too: If a struggling single mother was unable to pay the rent, Baldie would slip her some cash. If a young woman felt harassed by a too-persistent suitor, Baldie would have a word with the man. Now and then, he handed out candy to the neighborhood children, many of whom affectionately called him Uncle Baldie. And he continued to have the church’s back—even if Jim never stopped telling him and his slingers that drug dealing was a “new form of slavery.”

The street slingers were trapped, risking their lives and their freedom for crumbs, on behalf of a system that exploited them, as Jim saw it. Neighborhood dealers like Baldie made good money. Midlevel drug distributors, the people who provided crack, heroin, and other product to neighborhood dealers, were pulling in big cash. South American and Mexican drug cartel kingpins, who produced the drugs and transported them to the United States, raked in cartoonish amounts of money, hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

On the flip side, a burgeoning prison-industrial complex was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars by incarcerating hundreds of thousands of low-level drug dealers and addicts. Jim didn’t see the street dealers as villains. They were pawns—teenagers and young men who were considered disposable by their drug-dealer bosses and society.

The establishment of a church in the middle of the block did nothing to slow down the drug dealing. And the drug dealing didn’t discourage Jim and Grace from going forward with the church’s mission—even if it meant leading young kids into a combat zone.

In the fall of 1988, the church launched an after-school program for kids from the neighborhood. It was Grace’s idea. The church would offer classes in art, music, poetry—the kinds of subjects that weren’t available, or weren’t taught well, in the wretched public schools. It would be a good way for the church to become more involved in the daily lives of the people of the neighborhood, Grace and Jim thought.

Jim hired Cynthia Barron, a former schoolteacher with Peace Corps experience, to run the program. They started with six first graders. On a warm September afternoon, Cynthia, a pretty, willowy brunette, inaugurated the program by marching the boys and girls straight down S Street.

Dealers manned both sides of the street, as usual, but Cynthia and the kids walked to the church in peace. The dealers were protective of the kids. Baldie sat in his front yard and exchanged hellos with Cynthia as she led the children into the church.