Homeless minister fights eviction from Salvation Army shelter

Five living in one room, all in school

By Chinta Strausberg

 

Bad luck seems to follow Rev. Derrell E. Gray, 42, and his family of five who are now living in a one-room Salvation Army Shelter, 800 West Lawrence, but are again facing eviction if he doesn’t agree to move his family to Rockford or Peoria, Illinois because his family, labeled “high function impact” has over-stayed their legal limit of 120-days.

The former associate pastor of Triedstone Full Baptist Church headed by Bishop Simon Gordon, Gray has fallen on financial hard times and is currently living with his wife, three sons, 7, 11 and 17 and a 2-year-old daughter at the North Side shelter.

But the clock is ticking fast against this couple both of whom are taking online college courses and their children are in public schools. Rev. Gray is a senior at Liberty University Online and will be receiving his first degree in theology with a minor in business management. He is scheduled to graduate this summer and will then enter law school.

Having asked Bishop Gordon for a leave of absence while he deals with his homelessness, Rev. Gray, the father of seven children, said Salvation Army Shelter officials have allegedly given him an option, to move to Peoria, Illinois or get evicted from their shelter. Gray has refused to sign that agreement and wonders each day if he and his family will be thrown out on the streets of Chicago.

When asked what happened that led to his homelessness, Gray said he has been unemployed for three-years and ironically he just received a letter from the Illinois Department of Employment Security stating he owes them nearly $1700 because “they accidently put me on a program I wasn’t suppose to be on but they still are holding me responsible for it.”

With unemployment benefits long expired, Gray went through all of his savings and maxed out on his credit cards negatively affecting his credit rating. To add insult to injury, Rev. Gray recently received a call from a South Side storage company asking for him to pay his two-month past due storage bill.

When Gray went online and paid for one month plus late fees, he was shocked to learn his belongings from the home he had been evicted from had been auctioned off the same day a half-hour after he talked to and sent them $75 and late fees. They then sent him a bill for $100 for the “inconvenience” for having to auction off his items.  “It was done illegally,” Gray said sighing.

After trying several business enterprises, Gray said those ventures didn’t work out either because “not only was I going through a hard time but everyone else was too especially African Americans during this recession.” Not only didn’t those business ventures work out, but also they cost Rev. Gray even more money.

With no funds left to pay his rent, Rev. Gray said one day “the sheriff’s officers knocked on our apartment door and we were evicted from our home at 111^th and Racine.”

“In looking around for shelters, we ended up on the North Side at the Salvation Army which turns out to be a much better community than the one we were in specially when it comes to crime,” said Gray.

Before moving to 111^th and Racine, Rev. Gray held prayer vigils around the city of Chicago where he promoted his “Chain of Chains” anti-violence campaigns that ironically including one vigil held at 111^th and Racine where a year later he lived and was recently evicted from his home.

“As a consequence of being evicted, we ended up in a better neighborhood with better and safer schools.” Gray said his children are now exposed to a better education as opposed to where they attended on the South Side where many times his son never had homework.

“We are now at the point where the shelter has said we have to move out. I just began another campaign called, “Speak Up, Chicago.” He said originally it was targeted for physical violence in our communities but realized that in addition there is also economical and psychological violence being perpetrated on the black community.

“When I look at the job picture and black ownership in our communities, you find none. There is a direct correlation between the joblessness as well as the violence that occurs in the African American communities.”

With about 97 percent of those in his shelter being black, Rev. Gray said, “I have been told that there is no housing in the city of Chicago. There is no low income available. There is no Section 8 available to assist my family which puts us in a more serious situation in that because of our economic situation even if we were able to afford to move into a community it would more than likely be one of the communities that deal with the bloodshed that has plagued Chicago particularly this year with more than 400 homicides.”

He is now faced with the possibility of being evicted with the shelter and the possibility of uprooting his family again “only to put them back in harms way in a community that everyone knows has issues of physical, economic and psychological violence.”

“It seems to me that there is a political agenda to remove poor and impoverished African Americans from the city of Chicago. I was told that if I didn’t fill out applications for other cities like Rockford or Peoria that I would not be able to stay and if I did I would be able to stay to January 2013,” said Gray.

Rev. Gray has two other children from a previous marriage, two daughters, 25 and 13, and an 11-year-old son who live on the West Side of Chicago. His 13-year-old daughter has applied for a scholarship.

“You can’t ask me to separate myself from my children and move to another city leaving them without their father in their lives. That is an unreasonable request to make. I feel there is an attempt to force my hand to divide my family and to relocate to a city I have no desire to be in,” said Gray.

“I think that is associated with someone’s political agenda to remove impoverished African Americans from the city of Chicago for their own purpose and agenda especially since this particular Salvation Army gets a great deal of its funding from the city of Chicago,” charged Gray.

“I have been given an ultimatum which I think is unfair. I was born in Chicago, and I should not be forced to leave because the city of Chicago has some sort of agenda that I happened to fall into,” he said.

With his “Speak Up Campaign,” Rev. Gray is using that to “address the physical, economic and psychological violence that is being perpetrated on our communities as well as on our people.” Gray believes there is an alleged plot to move poor blacks from the city of Chicago.

“If the city has the wherewithal to move me out of the city, they can use those same resources to help me while I’m still in the city to stay in the same neighborhood where my family, my most valuable possession, will be safe and my children will be able to continue their education.”

Salvation Army officials did not return calls; however, Tod Lending, producer/director of the “In This Room” documentary who interviewed Rev. Gray and Salvation Army officials, said, “The assignment was to focus on the issue of homelessness among CPS students. There are 16,000 homeless CPS students. We met him (Gray) by selecting his children, Malachi and Lamont.”

Lending said shelter officials reportedly told him that the Gray family is a ‘high function impact family “that represents a new homeless cohort that we’re starting to see as a result of the struggling economy. It doesn’t fit the stereotype of families like drug addiction.”  Gray said that is what shelter officials told him as well. Tod Lending’s documentary will air some time in March on Al Jazeera TV.

Chinta Strausberg is a Journalist of more than 33-years, a former political reporter and a current PCC Network talk show host. You can e-mail Strausberg at: Chintabernie@aol.com.