Mary Nelson came to Chicago in 1965 to help her brother get settled in as the new pastor at the Bethel Lutheran Church in the West Garfield Park neighborhood. She was 25 and had just completed a two-year stint of teaching in Tanzania.
“I came here to help my brother, who was a bachelor at the time, move in. And three days after he moved in, the first riots took place (on the West Side). On the Sunday he was being installed as pastor, the National Guard troops were out on the streets, and the tanks were rumbling by so loudly you couldn’t hear what was going on inside of church.
“The whole community was up in flames, and it was at that point that I said to myself, `Well, dang, I’d better stay here and help him out.”‘
And she did. In the process Nelson, now 54, helped build up the community as well. In 1979, with $5,000 collected from the congregation, she founded Bethel New Life, a non-profit organization under the auspices of Bethel Lutheran Church that has given the community affordable housing, jobs, day-care centers and services for seniors, youths and families.
The path that brought Nelson to this turning point in her life was, in part, an excellent preparation for her chosen life’s work. Her father had been a pastor in Washington during a time of turmoil of racial change there, and this fostered, in herself and her brother, an interest in working in an urban setting.
“When you’re young, you don’t know enough to be scared,” she says of facing the daily struggles of living in a riot-torn community.
“When I decided to stay, I didn’t think I was making a permanent commitment. I just thought I had to stay and do something at that time. Of course, then, as you get into it, one thing leads to the next, and each time you look at one thing, then the next thing opens up. It just sort of evolved; the scene has never gotten dull.
“If you’re going to work on development in a community, you’ve got to live there. How could I sell the place as a great place to live if it’s not good enough for me? If you don’t live in the community, you get divorced from what concerns people. So I hear the gun shots out of my window every night just like everyone else. It makes me much more conscious about the things we’ve all got to struggle with.”
Nelson says she just never made any long-term commitments to anything else or put any time limits on how long she would stay in the neighborhood.
“With the riots it was just clear that there weren’t going to be any short-term solutions,” she says. “I’ve been more worried about getting the job done than about how long I’d be staying.”
From 1965 to 1969 there were five riots in the West Garfield community. The first began after a fire truck, manned by the then all-white crew of firefighters in that community, struck and killed a black woman. Rev. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, touching off the most publicized and destructive of the conflagrations.
Nelson says this neither changed her mind nor strengthened her resolve. “It just said that there’s a lot of pain, and something’s got to happen.”
Nelson says her determination to be part of positive change on the West Side comes out of a family tradition, spearheaded by her mother.
“She was the kind of person who would say, `Come on, we’ve got to do something about this.’ She taught us that you don’t run away from problems; you tackle them.
“I was the youngest child, and during my senior year in high school, when I was the only child home, there was only one night when we didn’t have house guests. And those house guests could be anyone from somebody from around the world to someone who just got out of jail and needed a place to stay until they could get situated. So we always had the sense that the world was our family. We never thought in terms of my problems and somebody else’s problems.”
By the time Nelson had earned a master’s degree in urban education from Brown University, in Providence, R.I., she was ready to move out into the larger world.
She spent two years in Tanzania, where she was the head of the English department of a government-run rural secondary school, right at the time of independence.
“I wanted to do something in a global context, and that was a wonderful experience,” she says. “We physically built the school buildings. We mixed the glue ourselves. It was really building a nation.”
It was also laying the foundation, so to speak, for her work in West Garfield, where she again would be building, if not a nation, certainly a community.
Nelson refuses to take any credit for the accomplishments of Bethel New Life. “I can’t say it’s mine because there’s this really neat group of people who have been partners and have shared a vision and have hung in there through the tough times.
“And nothing could have happened in these difficult situations without the feeling that God was hanging in there with us, giving courage when ours waned and giving a vision of the possibilities when it looked so hopeless.
“It’s been 30 years of a lot of ups and downs: the struggles of the civil rights movement in the ’60s; the ’70s were a time of building and hope and figuring out how to do things; the ’80s of moving more from social services into community development; and now the epidemic of drugs and violence that threatens the sense of progress. In the ’90s, now, we’re reaping the results of a decade of greed.”
Nelson has maintained her commitment to the church, among other things continuing to play the organ at service on Sunday. She believes it is the spiritual base that has made Bethel New Life a success.
“The church really has been what I call the three G’s,” she says. “It’s the glue that holds us together with a common vision of the possibilities of what God holds out for us, when racism and ageism and all these other things would tear us apart; it’s the gasoline for the long haul, a sense that even when you’re so down and out you’re not in it alone; and it’s the guts to make the tough decisions and to know that God’s vision for all of us is justice and wholeness and opportunity and that it takes some risks.”
Nelson has plenty of plans. “We’ve done a lot of housing,” she says, “but it’s really clear that unless we do housing in critical mass, it isn’t going to turn the tide. We’ve done little projects of, say, 49 units. We’ve got to start packaging 300 units at a time so that it really can make a difference. And that’s a challenge.”
The conversion of the closed-down St. Anne Hospital campus is Nelson’s current challenge.
“We’re about a third of the way through. We’ve just finished constructing a children’s day-care center and converting one of the old buildings into a three-story small business center and training institute. Now we’re converting the chapel into a performing arts center. We’ve renovated two of the buildings and leased them out to community groups. We’re hoping to get the financing in place for 125 units of elderly housing. And we’re negotiating for health services for the newest wing of the hospital. It will be a source of life and jobs and community in the midst of the neighborhood.”
Nelson and Bethel are forming a partnership with Argonne National Laboratory to bring a recycling industrial park into the neighborhood, which would create jobs.
And Bethel is building day-care homes. “We’ve helped 25 women become self-employed, taking care of other people’s children, and we’ve also helped them get brand new homes that are licensable for these day-care centers through our self-help housing effort.”
Negotiating and making business deals are very much a part of Nelson’s job. She doesn’t believe her work suffers for lack of training in this area. “I think being a woman makes it easier to reach out and ask people for help. I tell people if I don’t know how to do something, or I say, `If you were in my shoes, what would you do?’
“We’ve always had a good group of corporate folks who have been advisers and have been willing to struggle with how to do each new thing. By having a community board and community ownership, you get a lot of formal and informal feedback.
“I live in the neighborhood, so when I go to get my morning paper, people are grabbing me and giving me ideas and suggestions. I think that being a woman, I don’t have to have all the answers.
“I also think you learn by doing. And I think you get confidence with experience and, maybe, with age. You get confidence that this problem that’s been staring you in the face, somehow there’s going to be some way to deal with it.”
Nelson also believes that it is easier for women to develop more participatory structures. Involving a lot of people in decision-making is something that comes naturally to women, she says. “Goodness sakes, nobody has all the answers.”
