Reticent she’s not. Talk with Rev. Willie T. Barrow, chairman of the board and CEO of Operation PUSH (People United To Save Humanity) for any length of time, and it’s clear that this outspoken dynamo has a definite and well-thought-out plan for remedying many of society’s urban woes.
Glance over her 12-page list of accomplishments, awards and memberships in local and national organizations, and it’s evident that Barrow is eminently qualified to speak about and suggest solutions to large-scale problems that confront people of different races and backgrounds.
Barrow, 69, who has been head of Operation PUSH since 1993, is also an ordained minister. She is co-pastor, with Rev. Claude Wyatt and his wife, labor leader Addie Wyatt, of the Vernon Park Church of God, 90th Street and Stony Island Avenue.
Born in Burton, Texas, Barrow was the second youngest of seven children. She met Clyde, her husband of 49 years, while they were working as welders at the Kaiser Co. shipyard in Portland, Ore. They journeyed to California to seek work (to no avail), then came to Chicago in June 1945, where Willie Barrow became youth director at Langley Avenue Church of God.
Barrow recalls her first impressions of Chicago:
“Coming from Portland, I had never seen so many people-the way people moved, the way people walked, they were always in a hurry. It bothered me that nobody really spoke to anybody else. And I came (originally) from the South where everybody spoke to everybody, whether they knew you or not. In Chicago, nobody was speaking to each other. I really had to make an adjustment to that.”
The racial discrimination Barrow and her husband encountered as they searched for housing are etched in her mind.
“When we drove around looking for apartments, we were told. `You can`t live here, you can’t live there.’ And I believed that if you had the money, you could live wherever you wanted. But that was not true. I thought when I came to Chicago that everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. We (blacks) couldn’t go to certain restaurants or people would stare at us; they would look at us as if we were in the wrong place. We just felt unwanted.”
After working at the Langley Avenue Church of God, Barrow became a file clerk at the Chicago headquarters of Montgomery Ward & Co. She went on to work as a saleswoman for Woolworth’s at 47th Street and Calumet Avenue, then in 1947, became a meatpacker with Armour & Co.
Barrow became involved in the civil rights movement as a field-worker in Chicago, “making $25 a week” with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was an organizer in the 1963 March on Washington, helped set up chapters of the movement’s Poor People’s Campaign across the country and before her current leadership position, served in several capacities within Operation PUSH.
Barrow also has been a leader of the delegation to South Africa for the release of Nelson Mandela; an advance coordinator of a Middle East delegation (led by PUSH founder Rev. Jesse Jackson), which met with Middle Eastern heads of state; chairman of the 1984 Illinois Jackson for President campaign and delegate to numerous Illinois and national Democratic Party conventions.
Mother of two (a daughter, Patricia, and a son, Keith, now deceased), Barrow is passionately committed to protecting the welfare of children. Over the years she has been a mentor to more than 48 black and Caucasian children, encouraging many of them to attend college and achieve other personal and professional goals.
“I call them all my godchildren,” Barrow says proudly. “I say, `I’m here for you, for whatever you need. If you want to go to school, I’m here for you; if you are scared to talk to your mother and father, here’s Grandma.’ “
Much of Operation PUSH’s agenda for 1994, Barrow says, has involved children: enabling more to attend college through an aggressive Operation PUSH college-bound program; in PUSH’s “alternative to incarceration” plan, whereby children committing first-time offenses would not be sent to jail but instead would receive training and guidance from ministers and other community leaders; and Operation PUSH’s “one-church, one-school program.” Several Chicago-area churches participate in that program; Barrow and other PUSH leaders hope the plan will eventually be augmented in a substantial number of churches throughout the country.
“We have children with two parents or one parent raising them, but we also have hundreds of children whom nobody is mentoring and taking by the hand,” Barrow says. “We ought to have mentoring in our churches in the evening-and our churches wouldn’t be closed if we had programs. But we are not creating outlets for our children, so they’re turning on each other because there’s nowhere to go.
“We must try to protect our children and at the same time fight one of the real enemies, which is guns. If they (government officials) can stop cigars from coming in from Cuba, they certainly ought to be able to stop the guns from coming into our community.”
Another type of violence that is of great concern to Barrow is the domestic violence that is taking place within a growing number of families.
“Domestic violence does not have a black face, a white face, a brown face, it has a woman’s face,” Barrow says. “Women are being violently harassed, almost to the point that they have nowhere to go. We’re not getting the kind of protection we need, and nobody is dealing with the real violence, which is the violence in the home. I am determined that we (at Operation PUSH) focus on domestic violence as well as crime in the street. There’s more crime in the home than there is in the street.”
Barrow is active in the Chicago branch of the National Political Congress of Black Women. The group is monitoring the lyrics to gangster rap music and confronting record companies that record lyrics that are particularly offensive to black women.
“Even though we all have problems as women, black women have double and triple the problems because of their race, their sex and their culture,” Barrow says. “So we’re saying to the record companies, that if they cannot give contracts to musicians to record decent music, then we’re going to boycott their record companies and the stores.”
As the chairman of the board and CEO of Operation PUSH, Barrow is a member of the Chicago Network, comprised of women who are leaders within Chicago-based organizations.
“We decided that women need to come together and talk about their leadership roles and the fact that as women-black and white-we are not on many major corporate boards. So we meet about 10 times a year, listen to different speakers and share our thoughts with each other.”
Asked about some of the positive things taking place in society, Barrow pauses before answering:
“Young people are flocking back to the churches,” she says. “I’ve seen it in my own congregation, 50 percent of which is made up of young people-and the percentage has increased in just the past 18 months. They’ve got their MBAs and their Ph.D.s, and they’re still saying that they feel empty. They’re looking for satisfaction, and they’re not finding it in drugs, liquor or in profanity. So they look to the church to satisfy them.
“That’s what’s sustained me over the years,” Barrow says-“my faith in God and my faith in my family. I believe in family cohesiveness and that families ought to talk to each other to resolve conflict.
“That’s why society is in such critical shape: Sisters and brothers aren’t speaking to each other, mothers and fathers are falling out and never falling back in. This year what I’m saying to people on college campuses, in churches and at gatherings where I speak is for families to unite, to come home, to come together, to forgive.”
If anyone can spread the message, Rev. Willie T. Barrow can.
