Hungry people start walking toward Ward Chapel AME Church before dawn on Saturday mornings. They walk to receive a hearty breakfast. They walk for the acceptance and respect they receive at the church.

For some, it’s their only meal of the day. They are black and white, young and old. Even on cold, snowy days, people often line up early before the church doors open.

Ward Chapel AME Church was formed in Peoria 170 years ago, part of the 200-year old international AME Church, the oldest independent Protestant church founded by Black people.

The Ward Chapel breakfast ministry has a long, painful legacy stemming back to a remarkable young African American man who grew up in Peoria and was killed in Chicago in a predawn police raid on the apartment of Fred Hampton, state chairman of the Black Panther Party. It’s a raid often referred to as an assassination.

Linking this past with the present is Cleo Carter, a trustee of Ward Chapel AME Church and director of the breakfast ministry.

Carter, 70, runs the breakfast ministry with precision reflective of his 35 years in management at Caterpillar Inc.

He and his volunteers feed up to 80 people every Saturday. Last year they fed more than 3,000 people through the breakfast ministry.

“My wife was born in this church,” Carter said. “I had not gone to church for 45 years, and I wanted to give back.”

Seven years ago he took over the breakfast ministry that had its origins in the volunteer work of Mark Clark, a 22-year-old member of the Black Panther Party who took to heart the two missions of the Black Panthers: free breakfast programs and community health clinics.

“He went to almost every church in this community asking to start a free breakfast program, and he was refused everywhere except here. Pastor Blaine Ramsey said yes. Mark served food to children five days a week for months until church members voted to discontinue his involvement because of the FBI investigation,” Carter said.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memo at the time: “The Breakfast for Children Program (BCP) has been instituted by the BPP (Black Panther Party) in several cities to provide a stable breakfast for ghetto children. … The program has met with some success and has resulted in considerable favorable publicity for the BPP. … The resulting publicity tends to portray the BPP in a favorable light and clouds the violent nature of the group and its ultimate aim of insurrection. The BCP promotes at least tacit support for the BPP among naive individuals … and, what is more distressing, provides the BPP with a ready audience composed of highly impressionable youths. … Consequently, the BCP represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities … to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”

Carter said, “I personally knew Mark growing up. I was a few years older. His mother used to ask me to escort him to the baseball park. She didn’t want him going to the park alone.”

Carter said the young Mark was subdued, athletic and intelligent.

Carter said he remembers how painful it was to learn of Mark Clark’s death Dec. 4, 1969, in a police raid in Chicago. Everyone in the black community in Peoria was stunned, he said.

Mark was one of 17 children of a minister father and a mother who fed every hungry person she met. He went to Manual High School but did not graduate. He was a member of the Peoria Chapter of the NAACP and was active in civil rights causes. Then NAACP president John Gwynn considered him a leader.

Clark was impressed with the two core goals of the Black Panthers. After reading the party’s 10-point program asserting civil rights, education, housing, jobs, land, bread, justice and peace, he joined the Black Panther Party and started a chapter in Peoria.

Panther demands for justice and equality in 1969 were met with charges by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover that the Black Panthers were the “greatest threat to internal security of the country.” The FBI infiltrated the Panthers with informants, surveilled the organization and stoked a PR campaign alleging Panthers were violent terrorists. Accounts indicate the FBI even reached out to journalists.

An editorial in the Peoria Journal Star just days after Clark was gunned down charged: “Hate coupled with intimidation and demagoguery made the Panthers into a sort of a black Ku Klux Klan. The white sheet was replaced with the black beret and jacket.”

However, ballistics reports of the Chicago apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark died tell a different story.

The Panthers had reports of a secret FBI operation to kill them. Clark was assigned to security the night of Dec. 4, 1969. He was in a front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap. He was killed instantly by a shot to the heart. As he fell, the shotgun in his lap discharged. That was the only shot fired from inside the apartment. Police sprayed the apartment with 99 bullets, killing Hampton point blank in the head and seriously injuring four others. U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush was the party’s second in command but was not in the apartment that night.

The Rev. Bessie Rush, minister at South Side Mission in Peoria, had joined the Black Panthers Party as a teenager growing up in Chicago.

“What attracted me as a young teen was that the Panthers were so proactive for change in the African American community with the free breakfast program, free health clinics and a shoe program,” she said. “We didn’t see the social ills of our community being addressed and here comes the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers were not villains. They were heroes.”

The African American community saw that Panthers were committed to change, and Panthers advocated for justice.

Rush said, “They did not promote violence. The promoted protection.”

Throughout American history, it has been viewed as a virtue to express patriotism to country and community. However, when the Black Panthers expressed patriotism and equality for African Americans, they were viewed as a dangerous threat, Rush said.

“As Panthers, we wanted to stop violence against people of color. I was just a young girl coming into awareness of self, and I’m grateful for the Panthers. Thank God for the opportunities the Panthers provided,” she said.

Today, 47 years after his death at age 22, the breakfast program Mark Clark started for children continues but with a different clientele. About 80 percent of the people eating at the breakfast program are homeless. Some are veterans, some are disabled. Financing comes from an annual budget allocation made by the church and from donations of food and money. Cleo Carter said the church recently was able to purchase a $10,000 Castle Stove and oven with a donation from someone who was hoping to start a similar program in Kewanee.

Eating breakfast on a recent Saturday, a man who gave his name only as “Bones” said, “I wouldn’t have breakfast without this program. I’ve been coming here for 10 years, and they actually feed you here. You can go back in line for more food. There are a lot of stupid places out there, but not here. Here we’re accepted and treated with respect.”

 

Climate Change is a “Moral Issue”

The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) adopted an urgent call for action on climate change at its 50^th general conference in Philadelphia in July.

It is the first resolution addressing climate change in the church’s 200-year history.

Rev. Elaine Gordon, minister at Ward Chapel AME Church in Peoria, said, “Global climate change is clearly obvious. Everyone has to become involved. It is a moral issue.”

Gordon said the impacts of climate change are most severe on the world’s most vulnerable people.

“We have 145 congregations in India,” she said. “We are a global church, and as we look at living conditions in Haiti, poorer sections of West Africa, we see the impact of negligence, greed and corruption. It is horrendous to think of what we have done.”

Gordon said the Peoria church converted from burning oil to a high-efficiency natural gas furnace. All lights have been converted to energy efficient bulbs. The church recycles and collects aluminum.

“It is a moral issue to become more aware of good stewardship of the Earth,” she said. “We cannot abdicate our responsibility to care for the Earth.”

The church policy tackles overall reductions in the use of fossil fuels.