They were halfway across the street when Claude, in his deep, booming voice, called out, “Listen up, fellas, the reverend wants to talk with you!”
Claude had caught Jim by surprise. Jim could usually yap about anything until the seasons changed, and he’d planned on reaching out to the street dealers soon. But not this soon. Jim felt his pulse quicken as they approached the slingers.
Jim and Claude stopped on one side of the trash can. The dealers gathered on the other side, about five feet away, and stared hard at Jim, murder in their eyes.
The pastor shifted toward Claude until they were standing shoulder to shoulder. Jim blew out a white breath. He was scared, shaking, which he hoped the dope boys would mistake for shivering from the cold. Help me, God, Jim prayed to himself as he scanned his audience.
In the next moment, the words came to him.
“Listen, fellas. We’re gonna have to blow up that little house across the street,” Jim said calmly. “So those of you who have your stash there, now’s the time to get it out.”
The dealers looked at the house, then back at Jim.
Jim felt his neck muscles tense. He wondered: What would he do—what could he do—if the drug dealers bucked? What could he do if they declared war on him and his church?
A slinger named Chief stepped up to Jim. Chief was an American Indian, with a bronzed complexion and a ponytail that hung to his waist. He never smiled.
Could really use your help again here, God, Jim prayed to himself.
Chief extended his hand.
“Well, thank you, Reverend. Thank you so much,” Chief said.
The drug dealer and the minister shook hands. Jim exhaled as a sense of relief and gratitude washed over him.
Chief and the other slingers made a beeline for the doomed house.
Jim grew up a thousand miles from S Street, in a small cracker-box house in the working-class, racially segregated town of Conway, Arkansas. He was born in Fort Smith, hard by the Oklahoma state line, about two hundred miles from Conway. Jim was a toddler when his biological father was put in a state mental hospital. Jim’s mother divorced his father and supported herself and her boy by waitressing. She met and married a doctor, and the family moved to Conway when Jim was in the third grade. Jim’s mom and stepfather had two children, a boy and a girl.
Jim’s stepfather was a good doctor, but he was also a binge drinker. He was kind and fun when he was sober, but when he was drunk, he would scream at the kids and sometimes beat Jim’s mom. He would disappear for as long as two months at a time. Once when he was drunk, he waved around a gun and threatened to kill the entire family. Jim’s mother was also an alcoholic and prescription drug addict. Young Jim never doubted that his mother and stepfather loved him and his siblings. But thanks to their alcoholism, domestic tranquillity never lasted long.
Conway was a speck of a place where everybody knew everybody else’s business. What Jim’s family was going through wasn’t a secret. Many of the town’s residents considered themselves devout Christians, and their failure to help his family angered Jim.
“I hated the hypocrisy of many of the church people. They rejected us and stayed away from our family because we were such a mess,” he said. “On one level I didn’t blame them—but that wasn’t real Christianity.” As the oldest child, Jim assumed responsibility for the family, such as giving his mom money he earned from delivering newspapers and doing odd jobs so she’d have enough money for food.
When Jim was about ten, his stepfather and mother started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Back then, in the fifties, many AA meetings were held in people’s homes. Participants of different ages, races, and social classes were welcome—and all were treated the same. In an AA meeting, a wealthy banker was on the same level as a low-wage janitor. This is what Christianity is really about, Jim would realize later on: acceptance, compassion, egalitarianism, people with seemingly little in common coming together to help one another with a common problem. His stepfather and his mother quit drinking for a year, but neither could stay sober.
Jim’s home life didn’t prevent him from having a good time in high school, where he was popular. An average student, Jim was a talented dancer, and he played on the football team. He graduated in 1961 and landed a job with Southwestern Bell, repairing telephone lines on poles seventy-five feet in the air. He was already spending time in bars and at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with some of his hell-raising childhood friends and telephone-company co-workers. A small organized-crime group operated out of the hall. In an ostensibly dry county, the hall sold booze and ran an illegal gambling enterprise.
It wasn’t long before Jim became part of the group, working for tough men who had nicknames like Two Ton and Jimmy Fiddler. He did small jobs for them, transporting liquor or starting craps games, and spent a couple of nights in jail for petty crimes and bar brawls. Jim’s mom warned him he was on the fast track to ruin, telling him, “Jimmy, you won’t live to vote.” By the time he was in his early twenties, he was miserable. To self-medicate, he popped pills and drank heavily. He would sometimes run into his mom in beer joints, nightclubs, and liquor stores.
“One day I looked in the mirror and I saw a stranger,” Jim recalled. “Who are you? Where are you going? I was a wreck. My life had no purpose, no meaning, no value to anyone.”
After one particularly hard night of drinking at an after-hours club in Little Rock, Jim and a friend were driving home when suddenly his buddy asked, “What do you think the good Lord thinks of all this, Jim?”
His pal was from a conservative, churchgoing family, and he was reflecting on his own drinking and carousing, Jim believed. But the question resonated with Jim. He’d been thinking about his own boozing, women-chasing, small-time-hoodlum-associating ways.
Jim gazed out of the car into the post-midnight darkness.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But I’m going to find out.”
Jim wasn’t sure if he could change his life, but he was determined to try. Without any particular plan, he moved to North Little Rock, renting a room in a three-room apartment. He didn’t know anybody in town. He wandered the streets, asking God to show him a sign. He started to wonder if he was going crazy, like his biological father.
One night, he got on his knees in his room and cried out: “God, if you’re there, please take me. I don’t know what to do.” As he finished his emotional prayer in tears, Jim felt an immediate release. His pain, despair, and anger dissipated. In their place, he felt healing, peace, and a sense of joy he’d never before experienced.
Jim quit drinking and started attending support-group meetings. He also decided it was time to get past his loathing of churches. When he was a child, Jim and his family had watched an Episcopal pastor, the Reverend Rufus J. Womble, on TV every morning at 7:55. Womble emphasized compassion and the healing power of God, not fire and brimstone. Jim went to Womble’s church one Sunday and met the pastor at the door after a service.
“My name’s Jim Dickerson. I’ve decided to turn my life over to God—or Jesus—or somebody,” he said, tears streaming down his face. Womble welcomed him. Jim’s faith began to take root.
Jim started volunteering at a local Boys Club, working with low-income children, all of them white. The club director, Jim Wetherington, had been slowly integrating the club, bringing in a black kid here, a black kid there. After Jim had been volunteering a few weeks, Wetherington hired him to be his assistant and the program director for the club. Jim helped recruit more black children, and the pace of integration picked up.
As more blacks joined the club, most of the whites left. But slowly, over the span of more than a year, many of them returned. The club was well run, and there weren’t a lot of options for structured recreation for kids in town.
For about three years, Jim attended Womble’s church. He even occasionally delivered his own sermon. Jim was a natural speaker, and Womble urged him to become an Episcopal minister. But Jim was worried about the church
’s lack of social activism and outreach. Jim lived in a black neighborhood and had joined civil rights marches, but he couldn’t invite his black friends to church because he knew they’d be treated badly. His fellow parishioners were exclusively white, financially well-off, and socially conservative. Three days after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 130 miles away in Memphis, Tennessee, Womble’s sermon didn’t even mention the slaying of the civil rights leader.
“They were segregationists, and I didn’t even realize it until then,” Jim said. Womble and his congregation had been good to him—but he knew he couldn’t stay.
In 1965, about a year after Jim began volunteering at the Boys Club, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he double-majored in political science and sociology. One of his courses was taught by Carol Smelley, a charismatic social worker who’d been instrumental in the state in establishing group homes for juvenile girls as an alternative to incarceration.
Smelley and her husband, Wes, often had Jim and other students to their house for meals and long talks. Jim told her about his boyhood hatred of Christian hypocrisy, his days as a hell-raiser, his frustrations with the churches he’d attended—not only Womble’s but also a Presbyterian church that was more concerned with social action and placed little emphasis on connecting with God as an individual. Smelley loaned Jim two books: Call to Commitment and Journey Inward, Journey Outward, both written by Elizabeth O’Connor. They told the story of the founding of the Church of the Saviour, an unconventional church in Washington, D.C.
The books had an immediate and dramatic impact on Jim. The Church of the Saviour, O’Connor wrote, aimed to “recover … something of the vitality and life, vigor and power of the early Christian community.” It was organized around small congregations and even smaller “mission groups” that explore how the Gospels are relevant to members’ lives. One doesn’t need to be an ordained minister to start such a congregation—in the Church of the Saviour, every member is considered a minister.
“It was the kind of church I had in me,” Jim said. “It was a commitment of your life to God, a commitment that helps you live your faith according to your gifts and your calling in challenging ways. It was about more than just going to church on Sunday morning.”
Smelley told Jim he should consider launching his own congregation in Little Rock and encouraged him to investigate the Church of the Saviour in person. He went to Washington in 1968 and again in 1969. The church’s structure was familiar and comforting to him. “The Church of the Saviour had that AA flavor,” he said. “These were small groups, with the emphasis on personal transformation and reaching out. It was very egalitarian.”
On his first visit, Jim heard church co-founder Gordon Cosby preach. “Gordon said, ‘The church is a laboratory for change,’” Jim recalled. “That was the opposite of what I’d seen in other churches, which were static and resistant to change.”
After his second visit, Jim returned to Little Rock and continued his education. In January 1971, on a cold gray day, Jim stuffed his belongings into an old Ford and headed for D.C. “I looked like someone from The Grapes of Wrath, heading east,” Jim recalled. He moved to Washington to join the Church of the Saviour and learn as much as he could about it, hoping eventually to found a congregation in Arkansas.
In D.C., Jim launched a nonprofit called Rehabilitation of Men and Houses. He recruited men who were fresh out of prison, jail, or detox to renovate homes. The program helped them learn or sharpen their skills and develop a work history. As word of the group spread, a couple of guys who lived at a local Mennonite service home and had carpentry experience volunteered to help out.
One night, after a day of renovating houses, Jim drove the men back to their group house, which was located at the corner of 14th and W Streets NW, in the middle of the zone that had been devastated by the 1968 riots. There he met Grace Martin, a beautiful young Mennonite woman who was also a resident of the home. Jim was immediately smitten. Grace was not.
Jim persisted. He got himself an invitation to dinner at the group house and chatted her up. Later, he took her for a walk in Rock Creek Park, where they strolled by a cemetery. Grace wanted to explore, so they climbed over the cemetery’s iron fence. He was gazing at a tombstone when he heard Grace cry out in pain: She’d been climbing a memorial topped with a three-foot-tall concrete cross and lost her balance. The cross had tumbled onto her ankle, breaking it.
Jim put her on his shoulders and, somehow, scaled the seven-foot fence without dropping her. He carried Grace to his car, and an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the street led them to the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital. Because she had no insurance, Grace could stay in the facility just one night; the next day, she was taken to D.C. General Hospital, the city’s public hospital in Southeast.
Grace’s injury was gruesome: She had open wounds on both sides of her ankle. Fearing that an infection would invade her bones, doctors decided not to set the ankle until the wounds healed. Nurses cleaned up the wounds. But the ankle wouldn’t heal. Doctors refused to release her, saying that she needed surgery and that if they allowed her to leave, they couldn’t guarantee there would be a bed for her later.
For several weeks, Grace was on a surgery list, but she never made it to the operating room. She begged to be released, saying she’d come back for surgery after her ankle healed, but her doctors wouldn’t budge. They insisted there wouldn’t be a bed for her if she left.
Grace reached her limit during Thanksgiving week. “I had had it, so I told them I was leaving, and if they weren’t going to give me crutches I would get someone to bring me some,” she recalled. Hospital administrators had Grace sign a document releasing the hospital from liability if she suffered any medical complications after she left.
“I told them I didn’t care where they put me when I returned for my surgery,” Grace said. “They could put me on the floor or in the hall if they didn’t have a bed for me.” The hospital gave her crutches and released her.
Grace went home for Thanksgiving, and her ankle quickly improved. She returned to D.C. General for her surgery in December. Her ankle hadn’t healed correctly, however, so doctors decided to rebreak it and insert pins. Grace had to stay in the hospital, often in horrible pain, until early February.
In all, she spent two and a half months in the hospital, restricted to her bed.
It was a perfect opportunity for a persistent suitor. Jim visited Grace every day. Little by little, he won her over. Near the end of her stay, he asked Grace to marry him.
She said yes.
Jim remained in close contact with the Smelleys and his other friends in Arkansas. He entered the Virginia Theological Seminary, where he earned a master’s in theological studies. In 1975, he and Grace moved to Little Rock. But Jim’s attempts to establish a church in his home state went nowhere. After a year, he and Grace returned to D.C., where he tried to launch a church out of a home in Northwest Washington, the way the Church of the Saviour had started. A handful of congregants met a few times—then didn’t. Another effort was more successful and became the Community House Church. But Jim eventually left. He wanted to lead a church located in a low-income neighborhood, somewhere where people needed help.
By now, Jim and Grace had three young children: Ben, Rachel, and Andre. For a year, the family attended Jubilee Church, an offshoot of the Church of the Saviour whose members met in a coffee shop and bookstore in Adams Morgan. In 1981, Jim attempted once more to start his own church. With twelve core members, he founded New Community Church. The flock consisted of whites and blacks. All were District residents. They met for Sunday services in the office of a nonprofit group on 14th Street Northwest.
In late 1983, Jim heard about the abandoned row house on S Street and drove over to check it out. He pulled to the curb and gawked: The big house had no windows. Junkies sat on the windowsills and injected heroin. Hookers led johns into the house for quickies. Squat
ters ducked in and out of the place as they pleased. The rest of the block was no better, with slingers brazenly serving a steady stream of customers. The drivers of the Hostess bakery’s delivery trucks sometimes had to wait for the completion of a drug deal before turning onto the block.
He walked into the house as a couple of squatters walked out. The first two floors were littered with clothes, food cartons, and syringes. The stench of human urine and feces was overpowering. Jim climbed to the second floor, then the third. He stopped in his tracks. Not long before he heard about the house, he’d had a dream: “I was in a room in a poor neighborhood. A single unadorned lightbulb was hanging from the ceiling. There was another person in the room. I couldn’t tell who, but I wasn’t afraid. The room was painted green.”
Now, in the house on S Street, Jim stared at the walls: The paint on the third floor was green. Jim realized the person in the room in his dream was Jesus.
Jim considered the dream—and the hard reality of the junkies, hookers, squatters, and slingers who populated the street. This must be where God needs us, he concluded. After all, Jesus had walked easily among the sinners and the outcasts, the neglected and the rejected.
The place was perfect.
Crack hadn’t made it to D.C. when Jim first ventured onto S Street. But the area, in the Shaw neighborhood, a few blocks east of downtown, had been a 24-7 drug emporium since the early 1970s. Among some cops, the street was known as the “Fast Lane.”
Until the end of the 1960s, Shaw had been a stable, affordable, predominantly black residential neighborhood. Its turn-of-the-century row houses and World War II–era apartment buildings were occupied by laborers, nurses, civil servants, and hotel and restaurant workers. Thriving businesses lined the retail corridor of 7th Street Northwest.
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.
S Street Rising Page 5