Father Paul Washington remembered

Mumia, above, was minister of information for the Black Panther Party at 16, president of the Philadelphia Society of Black Journalists at 25. Today, Mumia is a wrongly convicted political prisoner held for 24 years on Pennsylvania's death row.

Excerpted from a Jan. 26 audio column.

To think of Fr. Paul Washington is, in many ways, to think of the many radical and revolutionary movements that have swept through Black Philadelphia for a half a century. For, no matter the movement, they found a place of refuge behind the brownstone walls of the Church of the Advocate. Fr. Paul Washington opened his arms, his heart, and his church to activists from many movements.

His 1994 autobiography, “Other Sheep
I Have,” is as such a story of his life and upbringing, as it is a record of struggles, large and small, popular and unpopular, that moved him to play a role.

He tells us of the struggle of the national and local Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC), a group of Black veterans of the Southern freedom movement, who demanded reparations from rich, white church denominations in the North. He met and worked with the late civil rights acti vist, student activist, mayoral candidate and later law professor, Muhammad Kenyatta, when “Mo” was a 25-year-old Baptist preacher. Fr. Paul would say of him, “He had great charm and gift of persuasion the likes of which I had never experienced before.” [p. 33]

Before long, other groups would make their way to him, and like a station on the Underground Railroad, no one would be turned away.

The 1968 Black Power conference would attract young folks from across
the country to his church. In 1970, the local and national Black Panther Party would call his church home for several weeks. It would become meeting place, press office, mess hall, sleeping quarters and office.

When Chicago Panther officers
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered by a police/FBI death squad on Dec. 4, 1969 (Fred in his bed!), Fr. Paul would open the church for mourners some ten days later, and 1,000 people would brave the December cold and the state’s aura of fear to attend this memorial to the slain Panthers.

Fr. Paul loved his people; not just members of his church; not just folks from Diamond Street; he loved his people; his ‘other sheep’ like Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the Mother’s Day massacre of May 13, 1985 when police bombed the MOVE Home in West Philadelphia, killing 11 men, women and children.

I think this act of state murder reminded him of the assassination of Fred Hampton so many years before. But, in a real sense, this was worse for these were babies!

Fr. Paul Washington spoke out eloquently and often, a prophet in life’s wilderness. At a time when most wealthy, well-known Black preachers were praying for the mayor, Fr. Paul was on the side of the bombed, not the bombers!

His church became a lighthouse of liber ation and marked the ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal church.

For Fr. Paul, it was just another case of ‘other sheep’; the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, women, gays, the distraught; ‘other sheep’ who knew he was on their side.

It is many of us who have filled the pews in his memory, just ‘other sheep,’ like you and me who knew he was with us.

Go to prisonradio.org to hear this audio column in its entirety and other Mumia columns.