New Haven Independent

The summit formally invited women to take a leading part a conference Saturday morning at the Community Outreach Center on Orchard Street.

The conference addressed a broad range of issues that have been causing much soul-searching in New Haven’s African-American community — from single parenting to the large number of males in prison to the influence of hip hop and popular culture on teen behavior. Many women led the workshops such as Delores Linnen, here greeted by the Summit’s Deacon Stacey Spell in the signature yellow sweatshirt.

A social worker at Hilllhouse High School since 1987 as well as a minister in Newhalville’s Pitts Chapel U.F.W.B. Church, Linnen led a workshop entitled “Single Parenting: Losing My Children.” She wanted to make several powerful points and dispel some myths, all of which were born out by the testimonies of the participants, many of whom were active leaders in the church or community organizations:

“Kids are kids. Kids of single parents,” she said, “need exactly the same things as kids of two- parent families — love, recognition, support, trust. There are just fewer parents around to provide it.”

That’s also why, she added, that she dislikes the term “inner-city kids,” as if that were a special category suggesting this was a special breed of child with unique needs.

The problem was how are beleaguered parents to do the job? “You need to find yourself and love yourself first,” she said, “before you can give knowledge and love to a child. A 14-year-old is very impressionable. They need you. They model your behaviors….everything from saying thank you to how you conduct yourself with the opposite sex.”

“I did this project,” added Tanesha Bundy, another social worker from Hillhouse and a co-leader, “and I asked kids I work with to call their parents and simply say to them, ‘I love you.’ Many many reported that the parents responded by saying, ‘Uh oh, what did you do?’”

What does that tell you? From where I sit many kids act out precisely because all the adults in their lives — from the mom working three jobs to the dad in jail — have disappointed them. One boy told me that when he was told to respect his father, he said, “I’m 16 years old. He’s been in jail for 15 years. I hardly know him.”

The problem of modeling behaviors becomes acute if the parent is a child, as Lisa Wilborne (on the right, with Shanta Evans) attested. Then the modeling behavior runs the risk of being childish, adolescent behavior, and the cycle continues. Yet Wilborne, who has begun to run an informational and resource project for the Brotherhood in Westville Manor, where she lives, has successfully raised three kids, beginning with one when she was herself fourteen.

She found her modeling in faith, in her religious life, the model of Jesus, and in the teachings of the Christian Bible, a recurrent theme struck by the participants.

“Just the other night, one of my boys burst into my room,” she said, “…it was 4 in the morning….and he said, ‘There’s trouble, mamma. I need to pray.’ I told him I’d pray first for the strength, and then we prayed together and found the scripture in Timothy about fear. We worked things out.”

But David Via, an elder with Thomas Chapel Church of Christ on White Street, said he definitely found in the Bible the source of modeling and support that has seen through his sometimes rocky 20-year marriage. The church as institution in the black community, he said, was failing young mothers, young widows with children. “I spoke to my deacons the other week,” he said, “showing them chapter and verse on how the deacons of the church were created to ‘save the Greek widows,’ that is, they need to reach out to the single moms so that don’t bed down with a man out of just desperation … so they know men of the community care for them in the absence of a man. My deacons all nodded yes, but not one has reached out. No one has called our women. Black leadership must do a better job.” Which is what the Brotherhood Leadership Summit is about.

When Bundy reiterated, with a sigh, that “our father is our first boyfriend,” Via concurred. He said he’d done a terrible job raising his first daughter, a relationship now repaired. “I got it wrong because I was so afraid she was going to grow up to become the man that I used to be, not that I am now.” With formidable candor, he illustrated: “I got a call, at church even (!) last week from a woman I had run around with long ago in those days. And she had a kid. I never knew if it was mine; there were other men. Now, after my not hearing from her in more than 20 years she calls and says, ‘Your son is 28 years old. He’s in prison, a 15 year sentence, and he wants to see his father.’ This comes on the heels of my being diagnosed with inoperable cancer. I might not live long enough to see him out of jail. What’s my responsibility now today? What do I do?”

This was not easy stuff to deal with, and yet the atmosphere was one not only of candor, but the excitement of discovering everyone seemed to agree that solutions, modeling behaviors, all needed to be based on God. However, Shanta Evans (pictured above), a manager for Real Life/Real Talk, a new nationally-based and Ford Foundation funded organization teaching parents how to talk about sexuality with their kids (it will be starting up in the spring in New Haven), had a slightly different perspective. “It’s hard to have faith in God or anything if a parent abuses you,” she said, “if they act as if they are more powerful than God.”

“Even people who say they don’t have faith,” countered Wilborne, “they have it but might not know it. I say to people that you closed your eyes last night and you opened them this morning. Now who’s responsible for that?”

“Still,” said Linnen, “summing things up, “we must not forget the modeling. You just can’t say things to kids without embodying them. One boy told me at school he was to be the man of the house. But his father was always gone, the mom was working three jobs and was never home, and he was plain scared to be at home alone. How could he be the man of the house under such circumstances? So he hit the streets to find the answer there.”

And so it went. Could such talk have happened without the women? The point is that the conversation is being engaged. “We’re only presenters here,” Linnen said. “Not members … yet. But I love the way the Summit’s leaders are in all this addressing the whole person, all the ways the spirit can be broken, and restored.”

The next installment on elucidating what’s happening in the black family will be Dec. 15 at 9:30. Called “What We Don’t Know About Men - Bridging the Gap,” and black women will be there, and likely leading the way. Exploring such difficult and sensitive issues for many African-Americans is a fitting way, according to Deacon Spell (pictured above) to mark the first anniversary of the Summit, and to launch its second year. For more information, call 624-9228, or email here.