By Neal Pollack
But the liquor licensees on South Michigan weren’t going down easily. In February, a former CTA clerk named Ralph Bellamy had formed the Greater Roseland Liquor Association, composed of 33 bar and liquor store owners. In his campaign to rid Roseland of liquor stores, Meeks was willing to shut down neighborhood bars as well, and Bellamy’s bar, Ralph’s Place, at 113th and Michigan, was in the way. He was ready to fight to keep it open.
That was hardly good enough for Bellamy, who stood to lose his livelihood. “When I close, it should be because I want to,” he said. “We’re businesspeople and we should be able to stay in business. Look, we’re not about confrontation. We are not the ones that started this.”
From February through April this year, the community policing program of every police district in the city held a vote-dry seminar. The mayor’s office and other city agencies sent out speakers who explained how to run a petition drive. They talked about assembling a poll sheet and assuring that the petition circulator was registered in the precinct.
In October of 1995, Meeks, then the head of the Illinois Rainbow Coalition, wrote black ministers urging them not to support the Million Man March of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. “We who boldly name the name of Jesus should not align ourselves with those who stand boldly against what we believe,” the letter read. Nevertheless, Meeks later called on those Chicago men who had gone on the march to mentor kids in the juvenile justice system. He appeared at a few events to support the congressional candidacy of Jesse Jackson Jr. and was named by Edgar to a panel “to attack the scourge of street gangs,” then dropped out of the headlines for two years.
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In the book, the Reverend Henry Maxwell, pastor of a church in the small midwestern town of Raymond, tries to rid the town of what he considers its main scourge–the saloon that “reared itself…like some deadly viper hissing and coiling, ready to strike its poison into any unguarded part.” Sheldon writes: “Was not the most Christian thing they could do to act as citizens in the matter, fight the saloon at the polls, elect good men to the city offices, and clean the municipality? How much had prayers helped to make Raymond better while votes and actions had really been on the side of the enemies of Jesus? Would not Jesus do this? What disciples could imagine Him refusing to suffer or to take up His cross in this matter?”
Meeks says the book is always on his mind.
