New grassroots justice ministry focuses on education, crime

BY ADAM PARKER

This was no ordinary church meeting. It was the largest and most diverse interfaith gathering the Charleston area has seen in decades.

The unusual size of the crowd, about 600, surprised the Rev. Nelson Rivers III of Charity Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston. It surprised the Rev. Danny Massie of First (Scots) Presbyterian Church. It surprised the Rev. Jeremy Rutledge of Circular Church.

So many people streamed into the sanctuary at St. James Presbyterian Church on James Island for the rally that extra chairs had to be unfolded in the aisles. Signs taped to the ends of pews indicated where each congregation should sit.

Many churches and one synagogue were represented. Wallingford Presbyterian brought 17 people; Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church brought a dozen; Holy Communion had 21. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim brought 24. The Unitarian Church had 55. New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist had 18.

They kept coming, for this was a pivotal moment in a new effort to address social ills in the community, and religious leaders, along with their congregations, are taking the bull by the horns.

They have formed a new organization called the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, hired a director and adopted the methodology of a Miami-based group called the Direct Action and Research Training Center, or DART.

‘Bring Three’

The Justice Ministry has been ramping up for a year. It began as a small cluster of clergy who met to find common ground. They engaged members of their respective congregations, began to build relationships and started the process of ascertaining community concerns. This was the first step in DART’s plan, the “listening phase.”

Next came the second phase, the “research-to-action process.” More people were engaged. Committees were formed. Problems were assessed. Stakeholders and policy makers were identified. This led to big meeting at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church at which participants settled on two pressing issues — education and crime — then went off to conduct research, hold meetings with school and law enforcement officials and begin to prepare for the third phase.

“It is a very democratic process, almost by necessity,” said the Rev. Joseph Darby, Justice Ministry co-president. Various houses of faith, each with its own set of views and priorities, are involved. So it’s important to target issues around which a consensus can be built.

As organizers gathered information, it became clear that ensuring all children receive a quality education was critical, according to Massie, who has been involved from the start. Studies show that 3^rd-graders who are not yet literate are significantly more likely to lag behind and falter in school, and they are also more likely to get in trouble with the law. The correlation between early childhood education and prison rates is clear, Massie said.

As the Justice Ministry efforts intensified, so did interest among congregations. The April 8 rally at St. James Presbyterian Church served to take the temperature of what appears to be a nascent grassroots, faith-based movement. Many clergy and lay people addressed the gathering, offering encouragement and status updates, and promising to bring others to the next event, the Nehemiah Action, scheduled for 7 p.m. April 29 at St. Matthew Baptist Church in North Charleston.

The mantra of the rally was: “Step up by showing up, and BRING THREE.” It was repeated over and over.

If each participant of the rally succeeds in bringing three others to the action, attendance will exceed 1,500. Joining the April 29 assembly will be school and law enforcement officials, legislators and community leaders, including mayors Joe Riley, Keith Summey and Billy Swails, police chiefs Greg Mullen and Eddie Driggers, Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon and Charleston County School District Superintendent Nancy McGinley, according to organizers.

Good tension

About 20 congregations are officially involved in the Justice Ministry, Massie said. But that number is likely to increase. There’s a lot of “immeasurable peripheral support.”

It’s essential to boost the momentum and transition from the research and consultation phase to the sustainable action phase in which investments can be made and pressure on policy makers applied, Darby said.

“This can’t be a rally to rally, it’s got to be ongoing,” he said. It’s got to result in the building of an influential grassroots power base.

At the rally, Education Committee member Cynthia Smalls told attendees that the Justice Ministry would push the school district to provide 400 more pre-K spots for 4-year-olds, adding to the 400 or so already funded. She said the ministry would promote implementation of a research-based curriculum and ask officials to track children’s progress through the third grade, a key turning point for very young students.

All children in the region deserve a quality education, she said. “Geography, race and income should not matter.”

Frank Hardie, co-chairman of the Crime and Violence Committee, cited some miserable statistics. More than half of juveniles who are detained eventually are jailed as adults, he said. Children who drop out of high school are far more likely to get in trouble with the law than those who finish their schooling. Non-violent young offenders are too often corralled in the Charleston County Juvenile Detention Center with violent offenders, who provide bad role models and expose children to dangerous ideas and lifestyles.

It is not uncommon for a 12-year-old arrested for a minor nonviolent offense to be jailed with a 17-year-old violent criminal, Hardie said.

The crime committee is talking with the Charleston Youth Development Center about finding a way to help young people who have run afoul of the law stay in school and avoid a life of crime, he said.

Rabbi Stephanie Alexander said that the group likely will encounter some tension as it asks policymakers and legislators to change the status quo. But tension sometimes is necessary for change to occur, she said.

“We (all) want what is best for our city and its residents. Our job is to bring the brokenness to light,” Alexander said.

Playing catch-up

Jerod Frazier, a 37-year-old activist, law student, minister of social justice at Charity Missionary Baptist Church and member of the Crime and Violence Committee, said the meetings he has attended are highly organized and systematic discussions.

“The energy is palpable in the room,” Frazier said. Not only does the committee pore over data and other information, it records its discussions and rehearses its presentations. So when representatives meet with policymakers, they are efficient.

“We are on point, we have done the research,” he said. “We’re not pointing fingers, we’re presenting problems. We are essentially their think tank.”

The Rev. Bruce Jayne, a member of the Education Committee, was involved in a similar interfaith effort a few years ago, but it fell apart due to procedural and theological disagreements. Jayne said he was surprised at the lack of major obstacles this time around and credited the success of the Charleston Area Justice Ministry to its clear focus and common purpose and to the framework provided by DART.

“I’ve been here 23 years in this area,” Jayne said. “This is the first time I’ve seen any real result of churches working together across denominational lines. The beneficial, long-term side effect of this movement is it’s bringing the faith community together in a real way.”

Everyone agrees that education is the key, he said. If early childhood education is widely available and juvenile detention mitigated, then the high drop-out rates will be attacked from two directions, he said.

“We just need to play some catch-up ball; we’re in a society that’s held back a significant part of our population by reducing their opportunity to have decent incomes,” Jayne said, adding that much of this is due to situational poverty that can be ameliorated if priorities change in the community.

But it’s a long process, he said.

Churches and synagogues historically have done a good job with their “mercy ministries,” providing emergency aid to those in need, “but that doesn’t address systemic issues that cause people to live in poverty in the first place.”

This new Justice Ministry, which is tackling the causes of poverty and crime, will probably expand its scope in the years to come and, hopefully, provide a model for other South Carolina cities, Jayne said.

“Over time, we are going to see some significant change here,” he said. “It’s not only going to help poor people, it’s going to help the whole state.”

Where self-interest lies

John Calkins, executive director of DART, said it’s important for people in faith communities to do more than show mercy.

“Where we fall short is doing justice ministry, because what justice implies is holding systems accountable,” he said. “Police protect and serve. That works well for some in the community, not so well for other people. Systems are created good, for good purposes, but have fallen and need to be redeemed.”

DART, founded in 1982, works with about 20 organizations, including the Charleston Area Justice Ministry (which is soon to become a stand-alone nonprofit). About half are in Florida, where DART is based. Its recruiting institute is in Kansas and its training center is in Ohio.

Local groups decide for themselves what issues to tackle and DART provides organizational framework, Calkins said.

It also offers a biblical justification, drawn primarily from Micah 6:8, which reads: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Doing justly is something nearly all people of faith can agree on, he said. Hot-button social issues, like abortion or gay marriage, are avoided in favor of education, health care, crime and justice, unemployment, discrimination and more.

Treva Williams, the 36-year-old director of the Justice Ministry, moved to Charleston from Kansas last June after completing DART training and apprenticing as a fellow with the group called BREAD (Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity) in Columbus, Ohio, for five months.

Williams thinks of herself as a facilitator; she doesn’t dictate, she stands by as local faith leaders call the shots.

“The reason this works is because the work is done in the congregations, and the local people, the lay leaders and clergy, are the ones doing the work,” she said. “We try very hard to build relationships, to recognize where self-interests lie, and why it’s better for all of us if the city is more just.”

Though the Justice Ministry, the citizens of Lowcountry can gain a voice and influence public policy, she said.

“We tend to hand over so many things in our lives to the experts, and then so many years later wonder what happened.”

By 2015, the organization will include 50 local congregations. That’s the goal, she said.

Frazier, a former police officer who once was arrested on a violent offense but exonerated, said he has gained sympathy for people who are struggling to get by and respect for those unafraid to speak truth to power.

Change, he said, is necessary. Too many young people are stigmatized by criminal records and poor education. Too many lives are wasted or destroyed.

“So now our focus is to bring the message to leaders who want change that we will support you, we have your back,” he said. “And to those who don’t want change — we will not be silent.”

Review: Ambitious CSO presents heartfelt Verdi Requiem

BY ADAM PARKER

The Post and Courier

When Giuseppe Verdi wrote his Requiem he was something of an institution in Italy: the premier opera composer of his age and a strong advocate of national pride and culture.

His most recent opera, Aida, was a paean to love and country, replete with unmatched theatrical pageantry. When Italy’s other big-name composer, Giacomo Rossini, died in 1868, Verdi and others wanted to pay him tribute with a Requiem Mass (Verdi’s contribution was the “Libera me”), but the production never came off.

When Alessandro Manzoni, author of the important novel “The Betrothed” and unifier of the Italian language and spirit, died in 1873, Verdi decided to complete a Requiem in honor of his hero. What he produced is a masterpiece of the concert stage, an enormous work for choir, four vocal soloists and orchestra that melds the choral mass and opera styles.

At the heart of the work is profound human anxiety and longing — fear of death and hope for eternal life. These eternal sentiments, so magnificently expressed, are all the more extraordinary coming from a man who had no use for the Catholic Church and probably wasn’t religious. But Verdi’s combined humanism and patriotism fueled one of the most inspired musical works ever created.

And Saturday night, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, bolstered by the College of Charleston Concert Choir, joined by four up-and-coming singers and led by guest conductor Maximiano Valdes, offered up a moving and spirited rendering of the Requiem.

It was an ambitious performance with some symbolic significance. Not very long ago Charleston nearly lost its symphony orchestra. It did lose its musical maestro, David Stahl, who died of cancer in 2010, before he had a chance to revisit Verdi’s Requiem (one of his favorite works) with his beloved orchestra.

Saturday at the Sottile Theatre, then, was something of a minor miracle, a musical restoration completed, a clear indication that the symphony provides Charleston with something essential and fundamental: an expression of itself.

I confess I was nervous for the musicians. This is a very difficult piece. The quiet passages are meant to be extremely quiet; the loud parts are meant to be fortissimo, intensified with blaring brass and pounding bass drum. Singing it requires control, lots and lots of stamina, guts and excellent technique.

The performance was not perfect. Some of the movements, especially in the middle of the 90-minute-long piece, didn’t quite gel. The disparate parts — orchestra, chorus, soloists — each did fine, but sometimes the Requiem lacked a certain collective intensity and hush, a uniform sense of phrasing and expression across the overflowing stage.

It began with a solemn, delicate plea: “Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.” The melody is carried by the instruments; the chorus intones their segmented accompaniment: “Hear my prayer, unto thee all flesh shall come.”

And then the action starts, first with the solo singers each taking a turn with the “Kyrie eleison” (“Lord, have mercy on us”), and with the Earth-shattering “Dies irae” (“Day of wrath”). This is the Last Judgment, and the full chorus gave it everything it had. Valdes moved it along at a dramatic clip. It was hair-raising, scary, exciting, other-worldly indeed.

A sequence followed that showcased the soloists. Bass Adam Cioffari, a young singer with a warm, flexible tone and strong middle range, led off with Verdi’s lumbering version of Death. Tenor Harold Meers offered a clarion sound and terrific aria-like “Ingemisco.” Mezzo-soprano Cynthia Hanna displayed an impressive range and affecting chest voice, though her vibrato sometimes obscured her intonation. Soprano Jasmina Halimic sang convincingly with a lush and lovely tone, except at the top end of her range where some notes seemed a bit pinched.

I surely didn’t envy Halimic; the soprano part is the lynchpin of the whole piece. This is Verdi at his lyrical and dramatic best. The part demands intense discipline, musicianship, technique and endurance. Anyone familiar with this demanding piece waits impatiently for the “Requiem aeternam” and its quadruple-piano high B-flat.

As Halimic approached this famous note, she seemed to lose some steam, sagging under the pitch. And when she got there, it was a little rough and clipped.

The soloists generally were very good, but when singing together they didn’t always blend well or assert the tonality successfully.

The chorus, instead, was spot-on, well prepared by Rob Taylor and well led by Valdes. The orchestra, too, sounded great, despite some balance issues (a neighboring spectator thought the players were a little too loud at times, but I loved the intensity of the sound in the Sottile).

Valdes’ overall vision was evident, and his command of the music, and of the many musicians on stage, was admirable. That his vision was not entirely realized to its fullest potential was no significant loss, for what was realized was an exciting and memorable night of great music-making.

Review: Graphic novel scales new heights with Chris Ware's 'Building Stories'

BY ADAM PARKER

The pictograph, or ancient cartoon, served as a means of communication that transcended time and tribe. It conveyed profound meaning about the way early humans lived and died, about the natural world and its challenges and about the relationships between the two.

When language eventually came along, it did not replace the image. If anything, it enhanced it. For illustration had evolved enormously and remained a primary method of communication. Illuminations lit up the parchments of ancient texts, and words were added to pictures to ensure clarity.

Modern-day comics really are an extension of this long tradition. Comic strips were a regular feature of newspapers (and still are). In 1933, the first comic book appeared, along with a significant new entertainment industry.

The funnies started getting more serious in the 1960s and 1970s with the appearance of “alternative comics” such as Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” and R. Crumb’s “Zap Comix” and “Fritz the Cat.” The evolution continued with the introduction of the “graphic novel,” extended comics that assumed many of the characteristics of traditional long-form fiction or storytelling, presented with cinematic flair.

With exceptions, most of this stuff wasn’t particularly good. But when Art Spiegelman published his remarkable “Maus” books, beginning in 1986, public perception of the graphic novel’s potential irrevocably changed. “Maus” treated a serious subject — the Holocaust — with grace, wit, intelligence and heart. Soon, other artists were permitting their graphic-storytelling ambitions to take form.

Chris Ware, the 45-year-old, Nebraska-born Spiegelman protégé, has taken the graphic novel to an unexpected new level. His “Building Stories” is presented as a box set of 14 separate items ranging from a fold-out game board-like panel, to accordion foldouts, to broadsheets, to hardcover books. They can be read in any order, which means the life of the unnamed female protagonist is pieced together slowly by the reader.

Make no mistake, this is a novel first and foremost, though it relies on storytelling that is surprisingly cinematic in its use of visual cues, lighting, perspective and “camera shots.” Ware’s sense of timing — the rhythm of the frames — is impeccable. And he presents them in sequences (not only horizontal) that keep the storytelling front and center, but engage movie techniques like occasional close-up shots interspersed among medium and wide shots. He does this in an effort to place us within the mind of his character, to perceive the world as she does, and to perceive her in ways that are intimate, respectful and fully realized.

What’s more, this expert visual technique serves to set Ware’s protagonist in a clear Chicago context that spans time and folds in various relationships and interactions — with parents, a boyfriend, a husband, a daughter, colleagues and schoolmates, space, structures, patterns, ideas and nature.

The language (dialogue, thoughts) is straight-forward, but the images are complex, and though they are drawn in stark perspective as if with protractor and compass, they somehow provide Ware with the objectified context he needs for getting so expertly into the head of his lead character. He does not stop short, portraying her emotional, physical and sexual life with a brutal honesty and a degree of sensitivity. She grows older before our eyes, coping with all that aging implies.

The narrative is unrelentingly honest, even bleak, portraying an urban woman with a physical disability struggle with her body, her dreams and her heart. In her ordinariness, she is presented as extraordinary: a person with suburban ambitions and a vague sense of history.

Ware introduces us to, among others, her aged landlady who is desperately holding onto her building, renting its apartments to tenant after tenant. The landlady has a history of her own, of course, and Ware brings it to light as if to show us how we misperceive the world and the people who inhabit it.

The building itself takes on a life of its own. It thinks and feels, stimulated by the activities within — the fighting couple, the family life, the lonely landlady eating her apple slices and thinking of all that’s lost to her.

A subplot is offered in the form of “Branford the Best Bee in the World,” a thinking creature who flits about searching for the unreachable. Branford serves to emphasize the existential questions presented by “Building Stories” even as his own struggles (with love, family, colony, food) playing out in colorful miniature and providing the reader a small distraction from the main character’s daily efforts.

Visually, Ware has taken his geometric style, interest in bold colors, skillful use of light and shade and amazing compositional approach to create something very large and very profound from its many respective parts. The stories not only build as the reader moves from one item to the next, they are about building — memories, landscapes, relationships, whole lives.

Parts of his “book,” 10 years in the making, have appeared previously in magazines, which suggests that he has approached this project incrementally, perhaps without fully knowing what the final result would be. The package of 14 distinct pieces certainly has no clear beginning, middle and end. It is a deconstruction of sorts, a narrative conceived in the mind then pulled apart and distributed. Yet, miraculously, there is reason and order and depth and logic to it all.

The drawings may be pristinely architectural, but the story is about as moving and humane as you can get.