Just after 7 a.m. on the Lord's day, Rozina Knight herds three children down the stairs from a third-floor apartment onto the forlorn sidewalk of W Street SE. They walk briskly west, past the mini-mart that boasts "Beer and Wine, Open Sundays 9 a.m.," the boarded-up row houses, the young men with beepers who idle in puddles of broken glass.
Then, four blocks and a few minutes later, they step into a different world. They go to church. Knight's family and 2,000 others leave behind the gritty streetscape of Washington's Anacostia neighborhood at 8 o'clock, when they begin the early worship service at Union Temple Baptist Church. As they enter Union Temple's imposing sanctuary, they face a 60-foot portrait of a black Jesus, whose giant arms reach out as if to embrace them. Surrounding Him are 12 black apostles, including Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and South African President Nelson Mandela.
The packed pews are dotted with men and women dressed like tribal kings and queens, their flowing robes a display of African-inspired finery. And stationed like sentries in the aisles stand the stern-faced members of the church's own security detail, holding the world outside at bay.
At the center of it all, behind the pulpit, sits Union Temple's patriarch, the Rev. Willie F. Wilson. Rising from his ornate chair, the hand-carved throne of a chief in West Africa's Bretuo clan, Wilson might break into song, leading the congregation in his soaring baritone, his eyes often closed. He might quote the Bible, or the Koran, or Malcolm X, or all of them.
Wilson, 50, certainly will preach Christ's love. But he also may expound on contemporary culture -- one recent sermon was titled "Waiting to Exhale," after the popular book and movie. Then he can abruptly shift to an angry, in-your-face brand of politics. He once initiated a boycott of a Chinese American grocer who allegedly pulled a gun on a black customer, and he is a passionate defender of D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, a Union Temple member. Wilson recently organized street protests against the D.C. financial control board and disparaged its chairman, Andrew F. Brimmer, as a "foolish Negro."
In a generation, Wilson has built Union Temple from a flagging, 40-member chapel into a 6,000-member congregation that is one of the District's more influential religious and cultural institutions. It combines the majesty of a Gothic cathedral with the raw energy of a Pentecostal storefront. And its unique blend of Afrocentrism and the Gospel has brought new life into the ailing Anacostia community.
Every Sunday morning, middle-class African Americans from around the region proudly sit shoulder to shoulder with the neighborhood's poor. Church members operate an extensive network of social service programs. An annual church-sponsored street fair called Unifest drew more than 200,000 last month.
Union Temple under Wilson's ambitious leadership seeks to address not only its members' spiritual needs but their cultural, social and political aspirations as well. His audacious vision and bombastic, racially driven rhetoric have long antagonized some outside the church. But Union Temple has become a central force in the lives of many of its members. Rozina Knight believes that without it, she would be dead.
Knight says that two years ago, when she was a 25-year-old single mother with no high school diploma and a chaotic personal life, she contemplated suicide. "All my life, everybody that I loved hurt me," she said. "I was ready to die."
In desperation, she called the church down the street. "Once I talked to one sister, another called, then another called, then another called." Today, she attends some function at Union Temple five days a week. She is studying for her diploma and hopes to become a corrections officer. And she credits her turnaround to Union Temple.
"I a.m. motivated to do the right thing. Rev. Wilson motivates young black people," Knight said. "When I am at church, I feel like I am at home."
Sense of Injustice
All Willie Wilson wanted to do, he recalls, was sell some ice cream and make a little money. But in the 1950s, in the Tidewater Virginia city of Newport News, even street vending could be risky for a black youth of 16. As Wilson remembered it, he happened to be peddling near the white owner of a shop who did not welcome competition. And when the merchant called a police officer, Wilson got an unforgettable lesson in raw power.
"He put a cold, blue-steel .38 to my head and said, 'Nigger, didn't that man tell you to get out of this neighborhood?' " Wilson said in an interview. The incident "let me feel the extent of the racial hatred in this country. I was in a black neighborhood, and a white store owner complained about me."
Wilson moved on, but his outrage lingered. He said his powerful sense of injustice that day would eventually become a central motivation for much of what he does, second only to a deeply rooted and early flowering Christian faith. Today, those two concerns provide the foundation for Union Temple -- and the basis of Wilson's life's work.
Since he took over Union Temple in 1973, Wilson has built an institution devoted not only to the afterlife but also to instilling pride and a sense of self-worth in African Americans in this life. Early on, Union Temple rejected what Wilson calls a "European" version of Christianity and chose instead to combine the Bible with black-pride sensibility.
The result has its share of critics -- mainly members of Anacostia's older establishment -- who are put off by Wilson's melange of religion and pop culture and wonder what it really has meant for the beleaguered community. Others are uncomfortable with Wilson's racial consciousness, believing he too often tags color to religion. The criticism comes in murmurs from people -- both black and white -- unwilling to publicly take to task such a popular clergyman. "They have called me everything, including the anti-Christ," Wilson acknowledged in an interview. But he harbors no self-doubt.
"If you say Jesus has blond hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, then your mind concludes that Jesus is white, his Father is white," Wilson boomed from the pulpit recently. "And if God is great, then white people are great. The image of Jesus is for white supremacy, and it makes black people hate themselves."
"So many people have been conditioned by orthodox Christian views," Wilson said in the interview. "[But] Jesus was poor, the son of a carpenter, a blue-collar worker. He lived in the ghetto. . . . He developed a philosophy for the poor to deal with the oppression they were under."
Wilson's religious beliefs were instilled in the cradle. "Both my grandfathers were ministers, and when I was a child, [the family] used to travel around the country singing gospel music," he said.
His father was a Baptist deacon who passed his devotion along to all four of his children. Wilson remembers wanting to be a preacher from the time he was 5.
His political and racial sensibilities formed early as well. In 1958, when many southern blacks were being pressured to sign "voluntary" agreements that preserved school segregation, Wilson's father refused.
"It was a serious situation," he said. "My father was a janitor in the school system. They fired him from his job. Nobody would hire him, so we had to live off the land for a year and a half. . . . My parents taught me that if you are right, you have to stand, even if it is by yourself."
The Wilson family managed to put young Willie through Ohio University, and after a brief stint as a government social worker, the ministry beckoned. He received a master's degree in theology from Howard University, where he came to the attention of a struggling congregation in Anacostia called Union Temple. Church officials invited him for a job interview in the form of a trial sermon.
"When we first heard him preach, everybody was shaking their heads. We knew that he was the one," said Fairbell Jenkins, a Union Temple member for all of Wilson's 23 years there.
From the beginning, words like "dynamic" failed to adequately describe Wilson in the pulpit. A lavishly gifted singer and speaker, he has mastered the emotional, winding oratorical style favored by the African American clergy. Little time passed before the church overflowed its modest quarters and moved into the first of a succession of larger buildings. Today, the Union Temple sanctuary on W Street SE is valued at $4.2 million and is one of the most impressive structures in Anacostia. It, too, is bursting at the seams.
Also from the beginning, Wilson made it clear that he would steer the church into territory a cautious leader would avoid. He arrived on his first Sunday accompanied by a retinue of recovering drug addicts, all of whom he had treated as a social worker. Not even the most intractable social problems would be off limits. And no subject would be too controversial.
Especially politics. In 1986, during his boycott of the Chinese American merchant, he made headlines for the first time with his slash-and-burn rhetoric. If Anacostia residents had been less forgiving of the man, he said, "we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street." Critics branded the rhetoric intolerant and xenophobic, but Wilson said he was determined to fight "economic exploitation" in the black community.
School board member Bernard Gray (Ward 6), who is from Anacostia, was one of Wilson's most vocal critics at the time.
"We have worked together on some programs and we have disagreed on some programs. That incident we disagreed on," said Gray, who is the lawyer for Anacostia's Frederick Douglass Improvement Council. "Overall, he has made some positive contributions to the Anacostia community.
"During that time, a lot of black owners were selling their properties to Koreans. The Asian merchants were providing a service to the community," Gray said.
"Even if they were not black, there was no reason to take the law into our own hands."
More recently, Wilson has emerged as a key ally of Barry's. He organized a bus caravan to escort Barry home from prison after his drug conviction in 1990 and urged him to return to public life. In recent weeks, Wilson derided the city's financial control board as the "out-of-control board" and dispatched members to carry picket signs outside board members' homes.
Wilson's high public profile contrasts with the quiet of his private life. He won't discuss the church's budget or his salary. Since 1985, he has lived in a brick house in the Hillcrest section of Southeast Washington assessed at $186,000. That same year, he bought a gray Mercedes 300SL, which he still drives. His fun, Wilson says, is being at home, cooking for his wife and four children.
His public confrontations have not endeared Wilson to more established members of the city's political and social hierarchy. Early in his career, the old-line families dismissed Wilson and his church as upstarts or worse; even now their style rankles. "I just don't see the community as being better off for them being there," said Frieda Murray, 77, a longtime District resident and founder of the Anacostia Garden Club.
But the phenomenal growth of Union Temple and Wilson's political connections have muted many critics. When President Clinton recently summoned 15 D.C. leaders to the White House to discuss the city's future, Wilson was among them.
"It comes down to knowing your purpose in life," he said. "My purpose is to enlighten people as to who they are."
Nourishing the Body Claude Braxton bends over a greasy stove, cutting biscuit dough and tossing strips into a swimming-pool-size kettle. He's the incarnation of the old expression "chief cook and bottle washer," a bald, sawed-off, muscled-up man of 60, clad in military fatigues and the green beret he wore in Vietnam, commanding his kitchen with a take-no-guff mien.
"Chicken and dumplings," Braxton snaps, as he serves up lunch to the first of almost 100 people who have nowhere else to eat. "This food keeps a lot of gentlemen from going back to Lorton," the District's huge prison complex. "Some of these guys don't get a good meal until Tuesday."
So begins another work week at the Soul Bowl, one of the largest soup kitchens in Anacostia and just one of the social services provided by Union Temple. The Soul Bowl has operated for more than a decade out of a crumbling former Masonic temple and serves as a lifeline for some of the neighborhood's hardest cases. The Soul Bowl is Claude Braxton's domain, and nobody eats without living up to Braxton's standards.
On this day, a man named Steve Coleman stumbles into the kitchen, obviously drunk and profanely threatening to kill his brother. "Wait a minute, you don't curse in here," Braxton curtly interjects. "I am not about that."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Braxton," Coleman replies, chastened. The next day Braxton escorts a sober Coleman to prayer meeting, leaving him smiling and clapping in the church pews. A week later Coleman would be back at the Soul Bowl, once again fighting a nasty hangover.That is how things go at Union Temple -- the idea is to bring God onto the street. The church's spiritual ministry is tied directly to an array of programs designed to meet the temporal needs of Anacostia residents. Little in the neighborhood is beyond Union Temple's reach.
If you are a child who has been arrested and accused of a crime, Union Temple can help. It runs a program called Harambee House, which provides lodging and counseling for about 12 troubled youths on any given night.
If you are in jail, Union Temple can help. One of the church's assistant pastors, the Rev. Lloyd Ellis, conducts worship services in the D.C. jail that are designed to connect inmates with rehabilitation programs.
If you are poor and have no place to live, Union Temple can help. The church's Agape Town Square is a 51-unit housing complex on Mississippi Avenue SE that provides apartments for the bargain rent of $400 a month.
And if you have AIDS, Union Temple can help. Since last year, the church has run its own AIDS ministry, which helps care for 20 people with the disease.
The Rev. Dana Olds started the AIDS program without the sponsorship of a church. She figured she and her work had two strikes against them: She is a woman, and many of those who suffer from AIDS are gay men, facts that she believes put off many conservative congregations.
But she says Wilson, the former caseworker, welcomed her without hesitation. "I was burying people and ministering to people, but I needed someone to love me," Olds said. "This church is my filling station."
Union Temple's social safety net is so expansive that the church seems to resemble a sort of mini-government, operating its own community welfare system. In fact, much of the work was begun with taxpayer money in the form of federal and city grants. Agape Town Square initially was renovated with $1.8 million in city and federal funds; the Soul Bowl got more than $80,000 a year in public money in the mid-1980s; and Harambee House continues to receive more than $200,000 a year from the city.
But the poor and the sick are not the only ones who benefit from Union Temple's largess. Wilson says that "when people can feel good about themselves, it raises their hopes; it builds a sense of community." Every year, he stages a giant celebration to make that happen.
The church's annual Unifest resembles nothing so much as a county fair, turning Anacostia's streets into a midway and bringing residents out for a casual stroll unlikely at any other time of year. Unifest "is critical to the fabric of the community," said Arrington Dixon, a former chairman of the D.C. Council and head of a business group called the Anacostia Coordinating Council.
The church also has built an award-winning youth choir that teaches its members not only how to sing but also how to excel. The creation of Wilson's wife, Mary -- an accomplished gospel singer -- the 200-member choir won a national competition two years ago and has released a compact disc that blends traditional gospel with jazz and hip-hop influences.
Mary Wilson calls the choir and the church "a safe haven for many of these children," a place where they can learn to cope with a threatening world. Sometimes those lessons can be taught over a plate of chicken casserole.
On a recent day, 12-year-old Margaret Curtis was serving dinner at the Soul Bowl when a street fight came crashing into the building. Margaret watched in horror as one man chased another through the kitchen while the ever-present Braxton -- whom Margaret described as "like my grandfather" -- made sure the ruckus got nowhere near her. Braxton wanted Margaret safe but didn't mind if she was a little scared.
"Some things," Braxton told his charge, "are good for you to see."
Unlikely Colleagues
It's after 9 p.m., the Thursday prayer meeting is over, and a job awaits Robert Wilkins and Patrick Hill. They are about to put Union Temple to bed, locking doors and turning out lights in the stillness of the now-empty sanctuary.
Two less likely night-shift colleagues would be hard to find.
Wilkins, 32, is a Harvard-educated lawyer and D.C. public defender; Hill, 29, is a self-described former drug dealer. Wilkins is a Union Temple trustee who volunteers to look after the building; Hill makes his living as a church janitor. Wilkins joined the congregation "to be involved in a social action ministry"; Hill joined "for spiritual guidance that would keep me off the streets."
But the differences between them evaporate as they wrap up their chores and head for home. "Can I catch a ride?" Hill asks. "Yeah, sure," Wilkins replies. Describing their friendship later, Wilkins would observe, "God allowed all our lives to cross."
This easy relationship that bridges the divides of culture and class personifies Wilson's "vision" of Union Temple. At a time when many social forces are separating the privileged from the less fortunate in the African American community, Wilson aspires to bring them together.
On any given Sunday, Union Temple's pews will be sprinkled with lawyers and former gang members, lifelong Baptists and converts from other faiths. Eric Kareem, one of the church's assistant pastors, once flirted with Islam and now preaches from both the Bible and the Koran. "I know the truths in the Koran, and I know that Jesus is the Messiah," Kareem said.
Wilson has on several occasions defended Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and he invited Farrakhan to speak from the church's pulpit before last year's Million Man March. Although a number of Christian ministers have condemned Farrakhan because of his antisemitic rhetoric, Wilson championed a D.C. Council resolution praising Farrakhan as far back as 1989. Two years ago, Kareem spoke at a Howard rally that featured a number of people with a history of antisemitic statements and warned the "international Zionist cartel" against "messing" with Farrakhan.
Union Temple under Wilson emphasizes social action as "a model of . . . the teachings of Jesus. It is about doing what Jesus did with the disenfranchised and disinherited." The church calls on its members to help each other and to learn from each other.
Sometimes the teaching is quite literal. To unite the disparate elements of its congregation, Union Temple has a series of classes new members must attend. Some of the dogma is religious, but much of it is decidedly secular.
The congregation is divided into 13 tribes, each with its own chief. A Rites of Passage program for young people stresses positive self-image and cultural heritage. A Men and Women of the Temple program counsels adults with personal problems.
In one orientation class, instructors Ted and Rita Daniels draw from the Scriptures an endorsement of positive thinking. "Look at Jesus's life," Ted Daniels tells 75 students. "Jesus said, 'Marvel not at these things, but go and do likewise.' "
The church's approach has been and continues to be popular in Anacostia. Every month, Union Temple officials say, they add about 100 members to its rolls. So many people pass through the church's baptistery that its blue tiles crack from heavy use and often must be replaced. A box of spares is kept nearby.
Wilson and other leaders say the church's real success is measured not in numbers but in lives.
Troy Watts said that when he joined Union Temple two decades ago, "my family and the school system classified me as retarded. My family mistreated me. Kids would talk about me. . . . [People] said that I would be dumb for the rest of my life."
Today, Watts, 39, is a pillar of the church, a deacon, an usher and its chief custodian. "I feel God has called me to be a great leader," he said.
And sometimes the church turns students into teachers. Rozina Knight, the mother of three who came to Union Temple on the brink of suicide, still struggles with temptation; once, she said, she went to Sunday services with no sleep after partying all night.
But she went. She continues to employ the lessons she has learned, pursuing education, a job and independence. And she passes those lessons along to others. One night recently, she counseled someone very much like herself, a single mother driven to despair by problems with her boyfriend.
"I told her you can't kill yourself over a man," Knight said. "I have learned . . . that whatever I want to do, I can do it. If I have faith, it is mine."
© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company
