By Mark Brown
The Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — As a young man with the well-earned street name of Satan, James Anderson said he could pull the trigger on his gun, drop off his victim’s body at the edge of town, stop to eat chicken and potato salad on the way home and never think about it again.
“Since I was always carrying a gun, I was always shooting someone,” said Anderson, now 60 years old and not the least bit threatening in his conservative business suit, wire-rim glasses and easygoing smile.
These days Anderson is an associate pastor at Vernon Park Church of God, where he says just last week he was called upon to counsel three young men fresh from Cook County Jail.
That Anderson even lived this long is an inexplicable miracle to some who knew him in his younger days. That having survived he would be in a position to be a positive force in the community is more readily understood: He came under the influence of the Rev. Consuella York.
“Mother York,” as she was known by the inmates to whom she ministered at the jail and in Illinois’ prisons, will have been dead 15 years in December.
But her legacy remains so strong that about 200 people turned out Sunday evening at Mighty God Tabernacle, 74th and Michigan, for a memorial service in her honor.
Saving lives takes place one at a time
Maybe a third of those in attendance had spent time in County Jail on the wrong side of the bars. Most of them were murderers — in some cases convicted, in others not.
In doing the math with a fellow who knew their backgrounds better than I, it occurred to me that the men in the room may have been responsible for upwards of 100 killings on the streets of Chicago.
Yet their purpose here was entirely peaceful and an important reminder that saving lives most often takes place one at a time.
“This is history in the making, all in one place and nobody’s pulling out a gun. There’s people I been looking for for years, and they’re here now,” Anderson said with a mischievous grin, drawing a chuckle from the mix of rival gang members.
The organizer of the event was Bishop Michael Carter, pastor of Mighty God, whom I told you about a year ago.
Carter was a stickup man in his younger days, also headed for an early grave, before coming under the influence of Mother York at the jail. Now he and his wife run a small private school.
It had been Carter’s idea for several years to bring together former inmates who had been helped to turn away from violence either by Mother York or her disciples, hoping to show that if those men could learn to live together in harmony then the same holds true for the current generation of killers on Chicago’s streets. I’d promised Carter I’d be there if he ever pulled if off.
I met men like Benny Lee, a former Vice Lords general now 26 years out of prison and finishing up his Ph.D. while working as a drug counselor; Edward Bey, an original member of the Blackstone Rangers who spoke of putting down his gun after 15 murders, and Herbert Stevens-El, a still imposing man known as “Thunder” during his violent younger days.
‘When she talked to us, we listened.’
“God is in the saving business,” Carter observed, and while I don’t want to overdo the religion, you have to understand that’s the central theme in all these turnaround stories.
Mother York was a charismatic fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher who had such respect from the inmates that she could thump famed gang leader Larry Hoover on the forehead during her service to make a point — or walk a maximum security tier without fear to hand out her snacks and bars of soap.
“When she talked to us, we listened. All of us loved Mother York,” said Stevens-El, who did 36 years of a 100- to 200-year sentence after prosecutors unsuccessfully sought the death penalty for his murder conviction.
“It’s time now for all of us, look at yourselves,” Stevens-El said. “Look at our children. We the ones that got to straighten out our community. If you want to honor Mother York, straighten out your home.”
C. Richard English, a hard-nosed former jail warden who also fell under Mother York’s spell, still tries to work with any of the ex-inmates he believes are committed to doing right. “They’re trying to pay back, which is good, because they screwed things up,” English said.
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