A Family of Fighters

For one of the most prominent families in Boston, the Dorchester home of the Rev. Gloria White-Hammond and her husband, the Rev. Ray Hammond, is really quite modest. The living room is sparsely furnished in what White-Hammond likes to call "black period," with a few antique chairs and a settee she bought at auction a few years ago. The only other decorations are some shells and a painting of a black minister baptizing people in a river. In the front room hang stark photographs of Sudanese refugees, along with some pieces of African sculpture. The kitchen, however, could use a little attention. The drop ceiling is blackened and cracked, something the family has been trying to find time to fix.

But time is in short supply in their house these days. Though all the family members still live under one roof, it has taken six weeks of e-mailing to get them together for this Sunday dinner. As Gloria ushers me into the dining room, she apologizes for not having prepared a home-cooked meal. Styrofoam containers of sweet potatoes, creamed spinach, and steaming roast chicken from Boston Market sit in the middle of a plain paper tablecloth. "All right, who wants a thigh? A leg?" asks Gloria as she loads up plates of food and passes them to Ray and their two grown daughters, Mariama and Adiya. Her question is drowned out by the wailing of Adiya's 8-month-old daughter, Ella, who is herself passed from person to person in an effort to console her.

There's good reason this chicken isn't home cooked. The next day, Gloria, 56, is leaving for the Sudan for a fact-finding mission on the Darfur crisis, and she hasn't even started packing yet. Mariama, too, is heading to the airport tomorrow to take off for Philadelphia. And as Ray, 55, shovels down forkfuls of mashed potatoes, he gets up every few minutes to write a speech on his laptop for the induction ceremony of a new pastor, even though he just returned from preaching at his own church, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal in Jamaica Plain.

In the brief time they have together, talk turns to familial preoccupations, such as Mariama's upcoming wedding and shared stories of the church, which began in this very room 18 years ago after Ray curtailed his medical practice to take up the ministry. "He'd be up here preaching, and there'd be like 12 people right there," says Mariama. Family members laugh as they recall one service during which a parishioner flushed the toilet in a nearby bathroom in the middle of one of Ray's fire-and-brimstone homilies. From those humble beginnings, the family has together risen to unite people across the city and even the world. Ray has become one of the most powerful people in Boston, serving on the boards of two of the city's largest foundations – the Boston Foundation, of which he is chairman, and the Yawkey Foundation II – helping oversee a combined $1.25 billion in philanthropic assets. Gloria, who followed her husband into ministry nine years ago, is one of the most influential voices in raising public consciousness about the genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur. As head of the organization Project Hip-Hop, Mariama is a passionate youth advocate in the city at a time when it can't have enough of them, while her younger sister, Adiya, is taking on the less public, if no less difficult, task of becoming a Boston public school teacher.

"They are what I call 'quiet storms.' They don't beat their chests or seek attention," says Colette Phillips, a longtime Boston publicist who works with communities of color. "You almost don't know what they are doing until they are already fully engaged in it." Certainly, as power families in Boston go, this one is unique. For starters, they are African-American transplants in a city that has few visible leaders of color. But it's more than that. They have earned their positions not through wealth or political connections but through an ability to bring people together across barriers of class and race. "They have the ultimate transit visa," says Boston Foundation president Paul Grogan. "They can cross any frontier in this city, from the boardrooms of the wealthiest individuals to the kids on the meanest streets in Boston." With the state's first black governor poised to take office, there is renewed hope that Greater Boston may finally be able to shed its stubborn label of being a hard place to live for minorities, especially blacks, and that the region will instead eventually be seen as an increasingly multicultural haven. If that shift does materialize, there may no family – black, white, Asian, or other – in a better position to affect the future of the city on all levels, from grass roots to boardroom, than the Hammonds. In fact, in many ways, the Hammonds already seem like the first family of that "new Boston," a feat they've achieved not in spite of, but because of, the raw challenges and sometimes painful burdens they faced along the way.

"I'm glad you are going to tell the real story, and not justturn us into saints," Gloria White-Hammond says when we meet at a screening at the Museum of Fine Arts. Wearing an embroidered lime-green jacket and her trademark dangly earrings, she embraces and kisses me, speaking as if picking up a conversation we had left off just a few minutes before. "I don't know. I just didn't think there'd be so many people here," she says. Several hundred people pack the auditorium to see a film about her efforts in Sudan, a work in progress by longtime Boston newscaster Liz Walker, who herself became a minister at Bethel several years ago.

It was Walker who first bought into the idea of going to Sudan in 2001 after reading about Christians captured in the south of the country and sold into slavery in the Muslim north. Ray Hammond was enthusiastic about the trip with the aid group Christian Solidarity International. Fretting about the abrupt timing, Gloria White-Hammond went along, more out of a desire to keep her husband and friend safe than anything else. She didn't even understand why they were taking tents to sleep in. "I was so naive."

That summer, the group arrived in an almost biblical landscape, scarred by 18 years of civil war. Few roads and fewer buildings broke up the hot desert. As the group walked between villages, the silence was cut only by the occasional rumbling of a plane overhead, as apt to be a warplane on its way to drop bombs as an aid plane bringing food. When they found their first group of half-naked returned slaves, White-Hammond was shocked to see that nearly all of them were women and children. The men, she would learn later, were often killed outright. "The women were the ones who were enslaved, and they were raped, and they were beaten," she says. She noted the eerie similarity to African-American slave narratives. "You hear these stories," she says, "and connect them to those stories, and you think, 'Oh, my God, that is what they went through.'"

By the third group of interviews, White-Hammond had the first inkling of how important this desert country would become to her. "I can remember just kind of looking out over one of those groups and hearing this voice saying it would be my work," she says. That voice, she says matter-of-factly, was the voice of God, which had quietly been giving her instruction and wisdom since she was a teenager. Only a few months after she returned, the voice spoke again, telling her it was "time to go back." So she did, in February 2002, this time without family or friends. "I was like 'You are crazy,' " recalls Walker. "[But] Gloria just has such a quiet determination."

When she returned from that trip, White-Hammond, along with Walker and two other women, founded a group called My Sister's Keeper. It took more than a year of cutting through bureaucracy to get grinding mills to two villages so families there could prepare grain more quickly. Now the group is working on building a women's school in the village of Akon. "People say that a preacher really ends up with three or four sermons, and they keep doing variations of a theme," White-Hammond says. One of those themes for her, she says, is "Woman, get up. You have been abused."

Eventually, White-Hammond's efforts in Sudan earned her the attention of the Save Darfur Coalition, which tapped her as chairwoman of its national campaign, Million Voices for Darfur, aiming to send 1 million postcards to President Bush urging him to intervene in the region. White-Hammond entreated the movement to reach beyond the normal power brokers to include black churches, Muslims, and Sudanese-Americans. Planning for a rally in Washington in April, she helped raise the consciousness about Darfur from urban churches to middle-class suburbia. "Clearly, she helped us reach an audience and a constituency that we hadn't reached earlier," says David Rubenstein, executive director of the Save Darfur Coalition. In part because of her religious connection, she was one of seven people to meet with Bush on the eve of the rally. It was just the kind of bridge building White-Hammond thrives on. "I believe God does really want to use Sudan to make a point, and part of it is to demonstrate the power of diverse people coming together in support of a global issue. And we're doing it."

It was only once she got deeply involved in Sudan that she made the connection between the experiences of the women there and her own childhood. When she was 8, her father began molesting her and several of her sisters, an experience that she repressed until the birth of her first daughter, Mariama. She eventually confronted – and forgave – her father before he died. But, she says quietly, sitting in her living room with her hands crossed on her chest, "sometimes I still grieve for that little girl."

As she worked through that painful experience, she found solace in her husband. "He just held my hand and sat patiently with me for hours, day after day," she told the crowd at the MFA screening. "So my healing is because of having such a wonderful husband."

Gloria White and Ray Hammond met in church, introduced by the pastor of St. Paul AME in Cambridge in 1971. They were both young, good-looking, smart, and ambitious. A Philadelphia native and son of a Baptist preacher, Ray was a senior at Harvard College. Gloria had grown up a privileged Air Force brat and was a junior at Boston University. After graduation, each enrolled in medical school, Gloria at Tufts, Ray at Harvard. In the early 1980s, Ray began a grueling commute to Cape Cod to work as an ER doctor on the night shift, while his wife worked as a pediatrician at South End Community Health Center. "So many of the issues I saw weren't medical," he says. "They were social, political, or spiritual." Ever the preacher's son, Hammond returned to Harvard to get a religion degree before starting Bethel in 1988 in the dining room of their home in the Grove Hall section of Dorchester. After a few months, the church moved into a nursing home in Mattapan and then to its current home in a school gymnasium in Jamaica Plain.

On a recent Sunday, a gospel choir belts praises to the rafters while 150 parishioners sway in folding chairs on the parquet. They are vibrating with the Holy Spirit by the time Hammond leaves the front row to step onstage for a sermon about personal transformation through God's "tough love."

"I want you to set aside all of those images of being carried in the hands of God. Amen?" Hammond booms, using the last word as a question, as if to say, "Is that spiritually clear?" His bald head hovers above a cream-colored shirt, while his rich voice thrums. "I hear a lot of people say, 'I prayed for something and all hell broke loose, and I don't know if I'm going to pray anymore.' Well, he answered your prayer. It's just you didn't know it."

He finishes: "Stand up. Don't go asking for protection so you can do what you want and go where you want to go. Stand up!" First to rise is his wife, who leaps up from the front row clapping and shouting "Yeah!"

The rousing display of unity says as much about where the couple have been as where they are today. Two decades ago, even as they seemed the very model of a black Christian family, the stress of raising two children on top of two high-powered careers was taking its toll on White-Hammond, who began feeling desperate and distant from her husband. Driving to visit his family one day in 1984, her stress became intolerable. "I told him I wanted out," she says. "I told him I wanted him to leave, and he refused to go." The two began a counseling program offered by the Catholic Church. "There was no huge fault or transgression. It wasn't fighting over money; it wasn't another woman or a man," says Hammond. "We just had a lot going on and hadn't created a lot of space to refresh ourselves and our relationship." As a result of the therapy, White-Hammond gradually began to soften her stance. "I asked God to restore my love for him, and he did," she says. Since then, the Hammonds have used their own marriage problems to counsel members of their church. Every August, they take off the whole month to travel, pray, read, and reinvigorate their relationship.

While the Hammonds were addressing their personal problems, the crack cocaine epidemic that began in the 1980s was taking its toll on the inner city. In May 1992, violence came into the churches with a knifing at a funeral at Morning Star Baptist Church. In response, ministers, including Hammond, Eugene Rivers, Jeffrey Brown, and Samuel Wood, cried "Enough," forming the Ten Point Coalition. They hit the streets at night to counsel youth. At the same time, they reached out to the police to target the worst gang members. Exactly how much the ministers contributed to the subsequent dramatic drop in killings in Boston – an 80 percent reduction between 1990 and 1999 – has always been a point of some contention. At the time, the ministers were hailed as saviors of the streets, and Rivers, the most outspoken of the group, became a national celebrity, eventually leaving to form the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation. Hammond, who frequently clashed with Rivers, has stayed on to continue the work of the original Ten Point Coalition. And his leadership got him noticed by Boston's notoriously closed-door power structure downtown.

Asked to join the Boston Foundation in 1999, Hammond was made chairman by 2002. Since then, the foundation has at least partially filled the power vacuum left by the scandalized Catholic Church and the now-defunct group of business leaders known as the Vault, taking the lead on issues such as affordable housing and education.

With Hammond's rise to power have come questions from some in the black community, accusing him of "going boardroom," of losing touch with the streets, even whispers of Uncle Tom. Hammond simply sees his work with the foundations as a natural evolution of his youth work. "If all you do is develop relationships with kids as a youth pastor or youth worker, then I think you've done them a disservice," he says. Politically, Hammond's stances have been those of a pragmatist and a preacher, advocating for more social services even as he has broken with some in the black community by supporting MCAS requirements for graduation and pushing for more pilot and charter schools. He has also lent his support to proponents of a statewide ban on gay marriage and even spoken in favor of a federal constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples. That stance, in particular, earned him criticism not only from some liberal black politicians but also from some of his own family.

"Weapons Will Be Confiscated" greets visitors to social night at Project Hip-Hop's office in Roxbury's Dudley Square. Inside, the office is a flurry of constructive activity. Teens in ripped jeans and sweat shirts practice dance routines, shoot pool, or browse MySpace pages on the computers. Moving from group to group, Mariama White-Hammond has clearly inherited both her mother's warmth and her father's air of command.

Growing up, she remembers her yard as the place where all the neighborhood kids hung out to escape the streets. "They used to joke and call us kids the Cosbys," she says. Her political awakening came during a trip to South Africa in 1996, when she learned more about the popular movement that had defeated apartheid.

Mariama see Project Hip-Hop as not just a youth group but as a seed for social change, with members mixing rap and break dancing with political campaigns to address neighborhood issues. Unlike her parents, who take pains to avoid political labels, Mariama sees herself as a progressive, which explains why her group has organized against disproportionate military recruiting of minorities and staged well-publicized rallies to prevent the deportation of a popular Fenway High School teacher. When that failed, Mariama got on a train to Washington and won the support of Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who postponed the deportation. In that campaign, as well as in others, White-Hammond deflects credit from herself onto her group. "People just really, really don't listen to young people, especially young black people," she says.

In her organization, the young people determine the focus of campaigns. "Most other jobs, they give you something to do," 17-year-old Roxbury resident Brandon Davis tells me. "Here they ask us what we want to do." Known to his friends as Styx, he wears an all-black Red Sox cap and dog tags with the name of his older brother, killed in a drive-by shooting when Davis was 3. His latest campaign with Project Hip-Hop is to save street memorials, the totems of flowers and stuffed animals attached to street posts to memorialize shooting deaths. When city councilors discussed putting a limit on the memorials, Davis and others pushed for a meeting with Councilor Sam Yoon, during which they proposed letting victims' families decide how long the memorials should be kept. "If we hadn't met with them, they'd already have their plan," says Davis. "Now at least our voice will be heard."

Even while Mariama, 27, has been working to influence public policy, she has been reluctant to call upon her parents' connections to the city power structure. "I love them, and I'm not going to not claim my parents," she says. "But if you don't ask me, I'm not going to tell you."

The two daughters are much more liberal in attitude than their parents on social policy, especially on gay marriage. "That's a huge thing that we will never find common ground on," Mariama's sister, Adiya, says. "I think everyone has finally accepted that." With her dreadlocks and nose ring, 24-year-old Adiya calls herself the "free spirit-slash-black sheep" of the family. While she goes to church for social reasons, she says she doesn't share the family's religious beliefs or the desire for such a public role. "When I was younger, I always felt I had to measure up to what my parents were doing," she says. "Now I am just going to do what I have been called to do."

She may not crave the public attention, but she has inherited her family's social conscience, studying to become a schoolteacher through the Boston Teacher Residency program, and working to establish a support group for teenage moms. When she first found out she was pregnant, she considered abortion. (She and Ella's father are no longer together.) "I said there's no way I am having this baby. I am not telling Ray and Gloria; they are going to kill me." When she did tell her parents, it was a source of tension, especially with her father; judging by the way the whole family dotes on her daughter, however, time has healed any rift. Hammond now regularly brings up Ella in sermons. "He got soft," jokes Mariama after her father leaves for his church induction. "He really loves Ella."

Mariama is even more outspoken than her sister about the gay marriage debate. "Regardless of how you feel, the fact that the church could mobilize that hugely around an issue that Jesus didn't even talk about, when there are tons of issues that Jesus directly addressed in his life that we had never mobilized like that for, I was just like, wow." It sounds almost like the beginnings of a stump speech, and in fact over the past few months, Mariama has become more involved in electoral politics, serving as a ward coordinator for Deval Patrick in Dorchester and listening to private pleas for her to run for City Council. But for the time being, at least, she has decided on a different, yet familiar, course.

Last winter, Mariama traveled south with young people from her group to volunteer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was struck by the unshaken faith of African-American women who had lost everything. Over the course of three weeks, the experience caused her to finally answer a call she'd been ignoring since childhood – to the ministry.

She recently started a five-year training program in the AME Church and just passed her first hurdle by giving a sermon at Bethel. "If I didn't feel called, I wouldn't be doing this," she says. "If Jesus can give me grace, I can cut other people some slack. Some of these next five years will teach me humility, because I'm not going to be able to say everything I want to say."

It's that combination of passion and humility that clearly marks her as her parents' daughter and that makes all of the Hammonds so influential among those they touch. "It's part of our calling," says Gloria White-Hammond. "It's just what we do." She remembers one day during the holidays a few years ago when the family was running from a church fellowship breakfast to a Ten Point gift-exchange party, then to a party in a wealthy suburb, and then to a service with military families at Hanscom Air Force Base.

"I remember just turning to Ray at the end of it and saying there aren't that many people who can go to this many different kinds of gatherings in one day," she says with a laugh. "I think our job is almost to be ambassadors to some extent to communities who, if left to their own design, might not ever interact with each other."Michael Blanding is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain and frequent Globe Magazine contributor.

E-mail him at michael@michaelblanding.com.