Dr. Mary Foulke: “The community’s basic stand was, we’ve asked you for help, and you gave us a raid.”
Episcopalian minister Reverend Dr. Mary Foulke on the challenges and rewards of building community and providing support in a parish heavily affected by increasing gentrification and over-policing
The Reverend Dr. Mary Foulke is the rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. A native of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Foulke has been an Episcopal priest since 2001 and working in New York for the last fifteen years.
“I grew up in church” explained Dr. Foulke, as she sat down with New Yorkers for Justice to discuss the issues her West Harlem parish faces, “and my mother was a presbyterian minister. And after a long struggle not to be like my mother, I went to seminary and found my way into parish ministry. I really love making community.”
Dr. Foulke’s church has been active in serving the West Harlem community since 1823 and offers a variety of programs, including a social justice fellowship for young adults. We talked about the challenges her congregation faces and how they’re affected by police presence in the neighborhood, increasing gentrification, and economic pressures:
What brought you to West Harlem?
St. Mary’s. I had been working in the West Village as an associate for about 12 years, and [the position at] St. Mary’s came open and I really felt called to come here, both because I knew the mission of St. Mary’s, and its support and service to the community. And it just seemed like a great fit for me.
Can you talk a little about how criminal justice affects this community specifically, particularly vis-a-vis other parishes you’ve worked in?
Well, when I arrived here in 2014, it was not long after there’d been a huge raid on the public housing, in the Manhattanville and Grant houses. And it was just devastating for the community. It was very early in the morning. There were helicopters. It was really scary for a lot of people and yet it was complicated, because there’s no question that there were issues that needed to be addressed.
And so the community’s basic stand was, we’ve asked you for help, and you gave us a raid. And so it was a very difficult time. And we did court support for the young people who’d been picked up. We tried to support parents of young people. Some of those young people were involved in criminal activity. But people are very sure that not all of them were. So I arrived right in the middle of all that.
What was the raid about?
I think it was gang violence. There’s a tension between the two public housing complexes, but I think it’s more and more a function of of being ignored than it is real gang activity. I can’t say I know a lot about it, but that’s just my sense.
And so also not long before 2014, a young man had been killed in his apartment. He was mentally ill, his mother had called an ambulance, and the emergency services showed up, and he ended up getting shot and killed in his own apartment. So St. Mary’s was very involved in trying to get that case prosecuted — and it was never prosecuted. And we were court support for the civil case, and Mrs. Bah — his name was Mohamed Bah — and Mrs. Bah was finally awarded some kind of civil settlement. And now, actually, we’re still involved because the mayor is looking to appeal the case.
Every step of the way [Mrs. Bah] has to go through this whole ordeal of court, and listening to people justify the killing of her son, when she’s the one who called the ambulance. And it’s just brutal.
In cases like that, how does the church get involved? Did she find you or you found her?
We try to stay tuned to things going on in our neighborhood, and it was members of the congregation who brought the case to the congregation, and we’ve been involved by showing up for demonstrations of support or by sitting in the courtroom during the various trials.
What are the issues that affect your community the most heavily?
There’s a couple of things. We have a precinct right across the street, and one of the things that this community tries to do with the precinct is to work together so they’re not going to behave like an occupying force. And I think this precinct has a relatively good reputation in the community. So for example, the raids were completely outside the precinct. They were from headquarters or something, and the Mohamed Bah case was the emergency services, not the precinct. And so there’s a desire for community policing, but you can’t do that if you have people from outside who keep coming in and doing a lot of damage.
There’s a desire for community policing, but you can’t do that if you have people from outside who keep coming in and doing a lot of damage.
So I would say finding ways to work within the NYPD structure, but also, we are very active. The Close Rikers campaign was dear to many of our hearts. We have parishioners who’ve been on Rikers Island. We hosted a series where we read books together — we’ve read The New Jim Crow as a congregation — and that was part of a diocese-wide invitation to read and study. And that was the diocese was responding to the more national issues of police violence, but for us it was very relevant.
And we host a weekly support group for people recently incarcerated coming here. It’s called Circles of Support, and they meet every week to talk and strategize with one another. And I think the main thing is, employment is a big problem. It is hard for young people to get jobs and that leads to people not having enough to do.
So what kind of programs does the church have for particularly younger people who need jobs and are maybe having trouble finding them?
The church doesn’t have any particular program for young people at this point. We have in the past had programs. There was one called Allowances, where kids came and they did things around the church and around the neighborhood, and they would receive an allowance. That was a great program, but that hasn’t been in operation recently.
We are also in touch with All Souls Church, which is just down the road. There’s a program to teach kitchen skills to people who were recently incarcerated or people struggling with chronic unemployment, and so we’ve done a pilot here, and now I think they’re about to do a pilot at All Souls, but it takes a lot of support to make those things happen. And given the goal of it, it also takes the cooperation of the restaurants, too.
I think St. Mary’s was active in the Ban the Box, so we know how important it is to reduce the stigma of people who’ve been incarcerated, because job training is one thing, but just having people considered for a position is another. Some of them have skills, but they can’t get a job because of the stigma of incarceration.
So what are the biggest challenges here? What do you need more resources for, what do people outside of the community not understand about what’s happening here?
What I wish people would understand is the full humanity of people living here and the real struggles that everybody has. There are people who are hungry, and don’t have enough food to eat. We have a pantry. There are people who can’t get a job for lots of different reasons. There are people who struggle with many chronic health issues, and we have a medical clinic where we partner with Columbia University.
I think one of the things St. Mary’s lives out is that we want everybody to be recognized as a full human being, so if you care for other people as you would care for your family, you would not want them to be treated unfairly or discriminated against in employment, or over policed.
We have one person in the congregation — this happened a couple of years ago — who was visiting a friend in the Bronx, and the cops were looking for somebody. He got caught up in that and then was being held overnight. He couldn’t get to work and was fired. So [it’s important to understand] the impact of what it means to be just rounded up with a bunch of people.
The police want to round people up and sort it out later, but the impact on the community is huge. There are people with children at home. There are work commitments, family commitments — and these are for people not involved in criminal activity.
The police want to round people up and sort it out later, but the impact on the community is huge.
I think we stand for fairness for people who do get involved with criminal activity, but also to kind of shine the light on how much it affects people who are not involved at all. Things like a raid, which wasn’t a real helpful solution. On the one hand the area is under-policed, and then all of the sudden there’s this massive sweep.
So if there were more things in place already to help, then it wouldn’t be the shock that it is, and it wouldn’t have to be like that, because the police would already be engaged with whatever’s going on that’s not supposed to be going on.
What do you think the city could do better to help these kinds of situations?
I think they should invest in public housing so it’s safer. I think continuing to invest in community policing — more of that. I certainly look to government to try and make fair law and initiate programs for the most vulnerable, and I think the city is all of us. We all can do more to recognize our neighbors for who they are, and as full human beings.
So when you came here I’m sure you had certain expectations about what the community would be like, what the job would be like. What surprised you since you’ve been here?
I think there’s a couple of things. I had worked at St. Mary’s when I was in graduate school in the ’90s, the early ’90s. And it was a mostly black congregation, and when I came here, it’s now at least 50% white, so I think one surprise was the changing composition of the neighborhood. I knew it was changing. I knew things were gentrifying and — but I think I didn’t realize until I got here how much.
And I’m a white person. I’m a gentrifier too, but that’s one thing that surprised me. In terms of the neighborhood, I think we have to understand gentrification and how much work it is to bridge that divide. The public pool here was just totally rehabbed. And one of the community members who’s a member of the congregation is like, “white people are moving in and they’re fixing it up”. And there’s absolutely truth in that.
And if we can’t acknowledge that, we’re in trouble.
So then I see a swimming class for babies, and really young children and the grownups and from a distance anyway, it was all white people. I thought, wow, that’s really different. And then the pool the rest of the time is almost entirely black people. So how are we going to talk to each other, and understand each other as neighbors, both knowing that the suspicion and the way things play out is real?
At the same time, people coming in who are new to the neighborhood, [sometimes] think that they have all the answers or that they’re here to fix it up without having any kind of humility attached to that. I think that wasn’t necessarily the work I expected to be doing, but it’s the work, asking how do we talk to each other? How do we engage one another? How do we make a community with one another? That’s a lot of what I do.
So what’s the most rewarding thing you’ve worked on since you’ve been here?
Well, this is more about me than anything else, but for me it’s been the summer camp. I really, it’s a small summer camp, but it emphasizes movement and so we have a STEAM component to the curriculum, but there are at least two or three movement blocks a day. And all learning is hands on learning. And our goal is three things: one, fun for children, and play for children; two, encouraging them to find fun in learning. A lot of them struggle at school. And at least 50% — and last year I think it was like 80% of the children have some kind of learning issue, and so to try to inspire the notion that learning can be fun is a challenge and very rewarding. You see it happening.
And then three is providing parents or grown-ups — because some of them are grandparents and some of them are foster parents — with some respite, especially from some highly energetic kids who have challenges. And you know, summer is a time when kids are home 24/7 if they’re not in camp, and so for us it’s a ministry to the children, but also to the teenage counselors who come, and to the parents and grownups who look after these children.
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