Free How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey Page A

array of
furniture, space heaters, computer equipment and books. A steady
stream of advisors and well-wishers kept stopping by to see the
42-
year-old pastor, who greeted them in a track suit and work boots,
his hair
and beard growing a little nappy but his energy and spirits
undiminished by the long odyssey.
    We spoke with him a final time after he had
left the roof and begun work on his next project: finding funds to
build a community center where the motel once stood.
    This started with a shooting. Actually, it
started with ten shootings.
    In 2011, I did ten funerals of young black
men between the ages of 13 and 25 and none of those young men were
covered in the press or anything like that. And then the 11th
funeral was a young man by the name of Carlton Archer, 17 years
old. And right before the service began, some of the children
coming into our neighborhood for the funeral, they started being
shot at by another group of kids.
    I was upstairs, getting prepared, so I just
ran downstairs and I saw all these kids running into the church. I
saw kids underneath cars. I saw adults under cars. Everybody was
trying to hide. And it was just, it was chaotic—it was, it was
really scary. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my
life.
    Something drastic needed to be done.
Something radical.
    I used to be pastor of the West Point
Missionary Baptist Church18 in Bronzeville,19 on 35th and Cottage
Grove. It was real traditional, real conservative, with an upwardly
mobile-type congregation. So it wasn’t a good fit, because I was
young and progressive and wanted to do radical stuff. And so the
more radical stuff I would do, the angrier the leadership would
get—even though a lot of the church members loved it, because their
sons and daughters were coming back to the church. But a lot of
ex-cons, a lot of gangbangers, a lot of people who hadn’t been in
church before started coming, too.
    The leadership didn’t like that, and so I
decided that instead of trying to fight them for their church, I’d
just start what I felt led to create. And so that’s how New
Beginnings was birthed. We call it New Beginnings because it was a new beginning—I wanted to do something fresh and
creative and contemporary. We started the church in November 2000,
and we’ve been in this neighborhood for the last six years.
    The church building used to be a nationally
famous nightclub. In the 1950s and early 1960s, jazz entertainers
from all over would come to the city and perform at a place called
the Roberts Show Lounge. All the great entertainers played
there—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan. Muhammad Ali used
to frequent the club. Everybody who was somebody, they came to this
location.
    The club was owned by a man named Herman
Roberts, an entrepreneur way before his time. He was one of the
first black hotel owners in the Midwest, and he decided to build
this motel across the street from the Roberts Show Lounge, because,
back in the early 1960s, blacks did not feel comfortable going
downtown to stay. So he built this motel and a few others in
predominately black areas and became a very successful
businessman.
    See, back when everything was segregated,
people had no choices but to live in this area, take care of this
area. You had upper income, middle income, lower income living
together, and as a consequence those at lower income had people who
they could look to and say, “That’s Doctor Johnson or that’s
Attorney So-and-So, or that’s Mr. So-And-So who owns the store.”
They had living examples that education works and hard work pays
off and determination goes a long way. But as integration came,20
black people who had middle income and upper income started moving
out and going on with their lives. And so what we’re left with is a
neighborhood where people have been far removed from the American
Dream.
    Over time, Mr. Roberts started losing
business, so he sold the motel. And from that point on, it started
going down and