Rev. James T. Meeks walks past beeper stores and wig shops, past the silent young men gathered in doorways of empty buildings, past dirt lots strewn with bottles and wrappers, and he pictures something else altogether.
Over there, the Baptist preacher in sunglasses imagines a new sit-down restaurant. Here, someday, could be a bowling alley, movie theater or maybe a skating rink. Meeks envisions a national chain grocery store too–one where the butcher’s meat is still bright red and the aisles are wide and glistening with the newest items advertised on TV.
Meeks wants to bring some small glimmer of North Michigan Avenue’s magnificence right here to South Michigan. “There’s gold in these hills,” Meeks insists, as he surveys his Far South Side neighborhood of Roseland.
Meeks, 42, is not someone who dreams modest dreams. His church, Salem Baptist, is huge–one of the largest black Baptist congregations in the city. His friends, including Jesse Jackson Jr. and Sr., and his alliances, which stretch all the way to City Hall, are impressive. His plans for his down-and-out neighborhood–whether it’s bringing in chain stores more at home in the suburbs or electing a new alderman–are broad-ranging and ambitious.
Grand plans are not hard to find among the city’s activist preachers and community leaders. But results on a grand scale are. Meeks first hinted at his ability to deliver–and stepped onto a wider stage–last fall when he decided to rid Roseland and neighboring communities of alcohol.
He succeeded in a big way: Residents voted to close 30 liquor establishments, the largest anti-alcohol victory in city history. Mayor Richard Daley praised Meeks’ efforts and the preacher began drawing national attention for his work.
After 14 years of building his congregation, Meeks emerged as one of the city’s most dynamic preachers and a leader who, with the right combination of energy, ideas and backing, might be able to reverse decades of neighborhood despair.
But obstacles stand between Meeks’ gilded vision and the realities of life in Roseland. Shop owners here long ago gave up and closed, and many of the storefronts still in business are barricaded behind metal–burglar bars, wrought iron and thick chain link.
Locked somewhere just behind the bars, too, it seems, is tangible change for this community.
A legal fight has delayed the liquor stores from being shut down. Meeks, who has no training in economic development, has yet to lure any new companies here. And Meeks’ plans have created problems of their own. He has stirred tensions within the neighborhood among those who fear change or don’t like his methods.
While last fall’s election centered on Roseland’s opinion of liquor stores, the April 13 aldermanic runoff might be viewed as a referendum on Meeks himself. The candidate he has backed, a church member with no political experience, is trying to overcome an opponent who captured more votes in the primary and whose father led this ward for more than a decade.
The neighborhood’s future isn’t all that’s at stake here. In the balance, too, is Meeks’ future as a leader in the long tradition of grass-roots movements from the black ministry.
Taking control
One Sunday morning in 1985, Meeks marched into the church he had led for five years and announced that he was leaving. He told the stunned congregation, which had expected a sermon, that he would be starting a new church. They could leave with him, he said.
Many did. Others stayed. Families were split.
“We were told that Meeks felt if he didn’t have control, he didn’t need to be the pastor,” recalled one member, who remained at Beth Eden Baptist Church in East Morgan Park, but watched her son follow Meeks. “I didn’t like the way he did it, disturbing the service, right then and there. It left the church in turmoil.”
According to Meeks, the dispute was over his contract. The deacons wanted Meeks to sign a one-year contract, but he insisted the church rules allowed him a longer term. It was a brassy stance for the pastor, who was young enough to be a son or grandson of those deacons and running his first church.
“Beth Eden’s structure was such that the leader had to get permission from the deacons to lead,” Meeks said. “I’m the kind of leader that I think I function best when I have the ability to see something, make a decision, and move on.”
Later that Sunday afternoon, 205 former Beth Eden members met with Meeks, and Salem Baptist Church was born. Never bashful, Meeks conceived Salem’s slogan: the Greatest Church in the World.
For five years, Meeks ran Salem from a rented church at 82nd Street and Jeffery Boulevard before moving to the Far South Side.
Salem paid $825,000 to the Catholic Archdiocese for a steepled brick church, 900-seat sanctuary and school building at 118th Street and Indiana Avenue, in West Pullman just south of Roseland. Meeks, his wife, Jamell–whom he met as a child when they attended the same home church, Shiloh Baptist–and their four children moved into a church-owned home in the area.
There, Meeks’ congregation grew so big, so fast, that, by this year, he was preaching four services a weekend. Salem Baptist claims 9,000 members, many of whom drive from other neighborhoods and southern suburbs on Sundays to compete for parking spaces along streets that sit empty the rest of the week.
This year, Meeks plans to raise $3 million from his congregation to build a 5,000-seat church. Meeks won’t say where the church will go, except that it will be in the Roseland area. Salem has acquired a portfolio of land in recent years. In 1995, the church bought nine lots beside the church at bargain prices at a county sale of land with overdue tax bills. The lots are now being used for parking. A block away, the church bought a longtime Michigan Avenue furniture store and converted it into a church annex.
Down the street, the church last fall opened an 11,500-square-foot Christian bookstore in a former liquor and drug store. The House of Peace, owned by the non-profit church, was renovated with a $650,000 bank loan and an additional $300,000 line of credit for store operations. The church, which had been financed with a loan from the same bank, was put up as collateral.
Chief among the ingredients fueling Salem’s rapid growth is Meeks himself. Unlike old-line Baptist ministers who focus on senior citizen members, Meeks’ personality attracts a younger crowd.
“He’s not the traditional pastor,” said Priscilla Williams, 43. “He’s open. There’s no shame to Rev. Meeks.”
The youngest child of a tile worker and a Sweetheart Cup Co. employee from Englewood, Meeks got his religious training at Dallas-based Bishop College, a now-defunct school where, in the late 1970s, hundreds of preachers-to-be found their voices trying out ideas in the dorms as much as the classrooms. Today, Meeks weaves jokes between passages of Scripture.
People should be allowed “bad hair” days in church without being judged, Meeks told his followers one Sunday, explaining why he sets no dress code for services. He went on, “I could go put my momma’s wig on if I wanted to.” The congregation giggled.
Outside the pulpit, this is no old-fashioned pastor either.
Some days, he wears a plastic Chicago Bulls watch on his wrist, Wrangler blue jeans and a leather jacket. He carries a mini-cell phone and pager, takes computer lessons, and will not hesitate to sneak french fries from the plates of people he’s just met.
Meeks cruises the neighborhood in a 1999 Jaguar. He said he agreed to the luxury car, which is leased in the church’s name, only after members of his congregation insisted that his old Ford embarrassed them.
He receives no set salary, he said, but gets weekly “love offerings” from his huge congregation. He declined to say how much this amounts to. He said Salem’s $6 million in annual revenue from church members, school tuition and the bookstore is spent mostly on salaries for 130 employees and loan repayments.
Last year, Salem’s head of marketing created a way that Meeks could earn more money if he chose to. Dwayne Bryant, who has since left the church marketing staff, said he incorporated James T. Meeks Ministries Inc. as a mechanism to let Meeks collect profits from the sales of his sermons on audio and video–items that are especially popular among members of the congregation. Meeks said he has taken none of the profits, which go to the church, and has not decided whether he will use the for-profit company to take a cut in the future.
Getting rich, Meeks says, is not one of his goals. “I worry about pastors who have ulterior motives, but I have found him to be true,” said Sheila Evans, 36, who drives to Salem from Calumet City.
Meeks holds programs for Salem members almost every day–workshops on how to pay your child’s college tuition, Bible study for singles, and 6 a.m. Friday prayer meetings for men only. “He . . . confronts the very real dilemmas that no one wants to talk about in public,” said Jesse Jackson Jr., the congressman, who has been a member of Meeks’ congregation for three years. “Things like, what drives your anxieties? How do you keep your marriage fresh?”
But helping church members with their daily lives, Meeks says, is not enough. He believes churches have a moral obligation to reach outside their own walls.
Groups from Salem have held anti-drug marches from the church to reputed dope houses. They ran a six-month tutoring program for kids when city attention turned to Roseland’s gang problems after the 1994 death of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, an 11-year-old killed in a gang shooting after he was named as the killer of another child.
Meeks has extended his reach beyond Roseland. He traveled with Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. to Greeleyville, S.C., to tour burned churches, and later to Jasper, Texas, to meet with the family of James Byrd Jr., the black man dragged to death behind the truck of a white man. Last month, Meeks held a prayer vigil after the bombing in Kosovo.
It’s a lot for one man to tackle. And Bishop Larry Trotter, pastor of Sweet Holy Spirit Full Gospel Baptist Church and Meeks’ prayer partner, worries that his best friend may be spreading himself too thin with so many different projects.
“I am very concerned that he’s doing too much,” said Trotter. “He has got a big heart, but my prayer for him is to find balance.”
Meeks’ latest–and most ambitious–cause is to create an economic renaissance in Roseland.
Roseland, once a Dutch farming community named for the flower bushes that thrived in its soil, grew into a popular shopping area with its own theater, Gately’s Peoples Store, Woolworth’s, and J.C. Penney.
Then suburban shopping malls arrived, steel industry jobs were lost, and whites moved away from the neighborhood, bounded roughly by Halsted Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, 92nd and 115th Streets.
The South Michigan Avenue business strip, which stretches to 121st Street, fell apart. Two-thirds of the avenue now is vacant lots and run-down or abandoned buildings, city Planning Department statistics show.
Of the shops that remain, some owners are white, Pakistani, Korean, Hispanic and Arab-American, a fact that has fanned racial tension with Roseland’s residents, more than 98 percent of whom are African-Americans.
Roseland has a glut of two businesses: beauty shops and liquor stores. There’s one of each on nearly every block.
Meeks said he considered that as he plotted the first step in promoting economic redevelopment.
He got the idea of banning liquor sales from a book, “In His Steps.” The 100-year-old novel, written by a Topeka, Kan., preacher, told the fictional adventures of a Midwestern minister who tried to change his community by figuring out how Jesus would have answered any given problem. In the face of criticism from the townspeople, the minister urged the town’s voters to ban the local saloon.
In the book, the liquor ban vote failed. In the 9th Ward last November, it won overwhelmingly.
The referendums had powerful help. An army of Meeks’ church members pushed for their cause, walking door to door, right down to Election Day. A whispering campaign also emerged in the neighborhood–that the vote-dry effort would affect only Arab-American business owners. It wasn’t true.
Meeks said his effort wasn’t about booze or religion or sin. It was about money. He said new businesses are not attracted to places with so many liquor stores, which tend to draw loiterers, gang members and vagrants.
He acknowledges that he has no education or experience in the field of economic development. “But this is just common sense,” Meeks said. “These businesses are saying if they come into your community where there are that many liquor establishments, their clientele isn’t going to be safe.”
A 1997 study by the Woodstock Institute, a group that promotes economic growth in low-income areas, found that Meeks’ basic theory about alcohol is right. Residents of Chicago neighborhoods that are predominantly black are likely to have twice as many liquor stores as are white neighborhoods. That, in turn, drives away other businesses from these black neighborhoods, the study found.
What the study didn’t look at, though, was what would happen if all those liquor stores were to close. Would new businesses come? Would the neighborhoods improve?
“We didn’t address that,” said Malcolm Bush, the Woodstock Institute’s president, “and I guess we don’t know,”
Obstacles along the way
A few days after the November election, Barbara Jeffery, a Roseland barmaid for 20 years, was laid off as her boss prepared to shut down.
City officials and Meeks have offered to help pay the costs for people like Jeffery if they complete a formal “job retraining program”–as part of another Meeks initiative that achieved widespread publicity.
No one has signed up for the program. Jeffery went to one program session and sat in a mostly empty conference room, rolling her eyes at city officials who told her it was OK to “feel anger” in times like these.
“Look, I’ve been around for a while,” said Jeffery, who said that at 58–and with grandchildren to care for at home–retraining was unrealistic for her. “This little job was keeping me together,” she said. “I can’t go to school for two to six months. What am I going to do?”
Meeks’ plan has set off controversy in pockets all over his neighborhood. His critics believe the pastor wasted time targeting alcohol, a legal business. Why not target only the trouble-making liquor stores, not all of them? Why create new unemployment and more empty buildings? Why not focus on drugs and gangs?
Inside Ralph’s Place, a glittery, mirrored tavern, Ralph Bellamy angrily points his cigarette at items around the room. The big-screen TV. The bar stools. The pool table.
“Where am I going to sell all this stuff?” Bellamy asked. “It didn’t just come out of the ground, you know. No one is going to buy this place now.”
Some business groups and social agencies in Roseland also question Meeks’ methods. Meeks worked alone on his plan for economic renaissance, they say, even though some of them long have been trying to improve the community and have staff members with training in attracting new businesses.
“Maybe Rev. Meeks just feels like people need to come to him,” said Willie Lomax, who leads an economic-development group called the Chicago Roseland Coalition for Community Control. “We’ve been for years fighting this kind of blighted area–and then we’re hit with this? We don’t need more empty places when the liquor stores close.”
Meeks’ harshest critics accuse him of ignoring these African-American-led organizations from the neighborhood while seeking out friends downtown, in Mayor Daley’s administration.
“Meeks and Daley are attached at the hip,” declared former Ald. Robert Shaw, Meeks’ biggest political enemy. “He’s trying to fool the people.”
This is a delicate issue for Meeks in a neighborhood where it’s unpopular to support a white leader but where help from City Hall could mean city-backed breaks and incentives for companies that might consider moving to Roseland.
It’s a new struggle for Meeks, who four years ago publicly endorsed Daley’s African-American opponent for mayor. But it’s familiar to one of his closest friends and mentors, Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who has managed to walk this tightrope with the Daley administration for several years.
Meeks picks his words carefully when asked about Daley. They’re not exactly “friends,” Meeks said. “What, you think we play golf together or something? We don’t.” But then Meeks shifts course again. Daley has cooperated on everything the pastor has asked for when it comes to improving Roseland, he said.
Last year, Daley held a news conference at Meeks’ church to encourage neighborhoods to consider banning alcohol in their communities too. This winter, Meeks held the peace by endorsing no one in the race for mayor. Daley himself visited Meeks’ bookstore last month.
Shaw charged Meeks’ ultimate goal is to acquire political might in this community. His evidence? The political campaign of Anthony Beale, Meeks’ church member, against Shaw’s son for the 9th Ward aldermanic seat Shaw held until he won another political office late last year.
Shaw called Beale a “puppet” for Meeks, who Shaw asserts has his own higher political aspirations. Beale, 31, is a systems analyst with no political experience. With a strong grass-roots campaign largely by church members, he managed to win 26 percent of the vote in a field of 10 candidates, forcing a runoff April 13. Shaw’s son, Herbert, won 31 percent of the vote in February.
Meeks has campaigned for Beale in his spare time and contributed $1,900 to Beale’s campaign, financial disclosure reports show.
That contribution led someone to file a complaint, which is now in the hands of the Internal Revenue Service. Non-profit churches, which are tax exempt, are banned from making political contributions.
IRS spokeswoman Sue Hales said she is barred from commenting on any specific investigation. But Hales also said that rules barring churches from participating in politics are not intended to stop individuals–even pastors–from making donations. Meeks said the contribution was from him, personally, not the church.
Of all the controversy Meeks’ plans have drawn, however, one question rises above the rest: Can he revive Roseland?
Twenty-seven of the liquor stores are still open, city records show. They had been expected to lose their licenses in December, but lawyers for the businesses fought back and are pledging to appeal a Cook County Circuit Court judge’s ruling that the election results would stand.
Historically, most legal challenges to vote-dry efforts in the city have failed, but the liquor stores likely will remain open longer–perhaps for months–as all the appeals are heard.
Last year, Meeks pledged to persuade three major businesses to move to the area by March 1, but none has made formal promises yet, Meeks acknowledges.
So far, then, Meeks’ only economic development is his own bookstore. He won’t say exactly how it’s doing. The store, often packed after church on Sundays, sometimes sits nearly empty on weekdays. Its cafe–complete with latte machines and espresso makers–has yet to open.
Meeks said he is not troubled by the delays. He can’t control the court system. And without those liquor stores closed yet, it’s hard to persuade new businesses to move in.
But what if the plan doesn’t work? What if no new businesses ever come here? Meeks frowned at the suggestion.
“I would roll the dice, and say on a gamble that I would rather see the liquor establishments close and nothing come in, than to see them open, and nobody ever have tried to do anything to make a difference.”
`Some church has to lead’
Meeks insists he’s not interested in becoming famous, not thinking about national politics or a national stage. He does not rule out the idea of running for office himself one day, but for now, his ambitions seem focused on Roseland.
Inside Salem one Sunday, Meeks is telling his congregation to ignore their doubters–some of whom have been calling talk radio shows–and focus on what they can do in the neighborhood. Like the Old Testament’s Nehemiah, who learned that Jerusalem’s walls had been broken down, Meeks says, someone must rise up and try to fix a community.
The seats inside Salem’s lilac sanctuary are full, and overflow crowds watch Meeks on video screens in the church gym and the annex a block away. Jamell Meeks is watching from the sanctuary’s front row, on her husband’s far right, as always. The pastor’s sturdy 5-foot-6-inch frame is ballooned 10 feet high on the video wall just behind him.
“I came here to tell all of our critics today that you cannot have it both ways,” Meeks tells the congregation. “You cannot get on the radio and say, `These preachers ain’t no good, and they ain’t doing nothing about the problems in the community.’ And then, when we stand up to try to make a difference, you cannot criticize what we do. . . . You’re either going to criticize us because we ain’t doing nothing or you’re going to shut up when we start doing something.
“Help me out, somebody,” Meeks calls out, his husky voice rising. “I challenge these radio talk show hosts. I challenge them to a duel, anytime, anywhere!” The crowd called back: “Go on, go preacher.”
“Any of them who wants to challenge me to who can move people, who can mobilize people, who can build a people, I’ll meet them anytime, anywhere, with a thousand more people than they could bring. . . .”
Meeks takes a swig from a glass of Gatorade, wipes his forehead and goes on.
“Chicago is going to hell. Without Jesus as its savior, our communities are in despair. Some church has to lead, am I right about it? They have sucked us into believing that it is not our place in the society to change the community.”
Meeks is screaming now.
“We can’t wait on them! How are the people of God going to wait on the unsaved world to change the world?”
