by Marianne Arbogast

One of the hardest things Pat Clark ever did was to visit an African American woman who had been lynched by a Klan group, to ask her to request that the state not pursue the death penalty for her son’s killers. Dispatched on the errand by the Southern Poverty Law Center – which had just won a civil suit on behalf of the victim’s mother – Clark considered the disproportionate number of African Americans on death row, and the unlikelihood of white victims’ families being asked to forgive them.

Bracing herself for a difficult conversation, she was amazed to find that the woman already shared her own abhorrence of the death penalty.

"Her reason was powerful and simple," Clark recalls. "She said she never wanted another mother to experience the agony she had experienced in losing a child."

Clark – now the National Criminal Justice Representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – is committed to fostering the kind of human connections that can build resistance to vengeance-oriented Right-wing criminal justice agendas.

"You can’t kill folks who have mothers and brothers who love them – you can only kill them if you consider them to be monsters," Clark says. "We encourage people to write or visit folks on death row. When people are able to put human faces on inmates, it is much more difficult for them to advocate killing."

Clark, who recently developed a set of radio public service announcements entitled, "Stop the Politics of Fear," says that the Service Committee is "mounting a public media campaign to try to address the rhetoric that focuses on more harsh, punitive measures for people who are incarcerated."

The ads – featuring the level, commonsense voice of actress Peg Phillips (Ruth Anne of Northern Exposure) – attempt to counter uninformed support of measures such as "three-strikes-and-you’re-out" laws, mandatory minimum sentencing and the death penalty.

Clark’s passionate opposition to the death penalty began in her childhood, when an uncle and a first cousin were murdered in separate incidents six months apart. Her grandmother – while mourning her youngest son and oldest grandchild – taught her that "it was not for us to seek vengeance, that only God could make judgment on the situation. We’re all children of God. Who has the right to say who lives or dies?

"I became aware of the need to create a better understanding of what community is," Clark says. "I grew up in a very close faith community, and I really took to heart the social gospel. If we viewed our communities as our families, that would serve to address a lot of issues."

Clark’s expansive understanding of family drew her to Zaire to work with Habitat for Humanity, to the Alabama Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to anti-death-penalty organizing in California, then back to the Northeast and her current AFSC position.

For Clark, to fight the death penalty is to confront the taproot of community-denying policies.

"When a society can kill its citizens, then it is free to do anything it wants to the people who comprise it," she explains. "If we can make everyone feel that killing is immoral, whether by state or the individual – if we can begin to agree that life is valuable ad we all have a contribution to make – that would affect how we go about providing educational opportunities and how we think about welfare."

Clark has a deeply personal motivation for her work. She is raising two nephews and a niece, ages 8, 9 and 12, in a household that also includes her mother, a sister and the sister’s two children.

"When I see statistics on how many young black males have come under the criminal justice web, and how difficult it is for young black men to stay alive in this culture, I know I have to try to create a society that will allow them to function as the total human beings they are," she explains.

For Clark, taking in her sister’s children seemed the natural outcome of her life’s commitments.

"I can’t work on social justice issues and not be responsive to a family crisis," she says. "You can’t do social justice work in a vacuum. My kids and my mom have provided me with a lot of insights. I’ve experienced what it means to adjust me desires and my needs to what’s best for all involved. And they’re a lot of fun, too – they’re incredibly witty and bright."

When Clark is home, she spends much of her time at school meetings, basketball games or church activities. Her mother cares for the children during her frequent speaking tours on the death penalty and other criminal justice issues.

Despite the growing outcry for capital punishment, Clark believes that "support for the death penalty is a mile wide and an inch deep" – a gut reaction based on false assumptions, such as the belief that families of victims want eye-for-an-eye justice.

"People just assume that the families of victims are drawn to the harshest punishment possible, but many come to the conclusion that they don’t want to lose their sense of humanity, or project that kind of rage and bitterness."

Though it is necessary to confront false assumptions and Right-wing rhetoric, it is even more vital to move liberal Christians from talk to action, Clark believes.

"As horrified as I am to hear religious groups on the right state that the death penalty is all right, I am even more horrified by all the denominations which say it is immoral but are afraid of lifting their voices and challenging it in a much more unified way," she says. "Many mainline denominations have made very powerful statements of condemnation, but are not engaged in communicating the message to their constituency."

She is currently enlisting church leaders around the country to organize death penalty study groups, based on a study guide funded by the Presbyterian Church. Suing questionnaires which participants fill out before and after the series, Clark and others will then analyze what it takes to change people’s minds. A national conference of religious anti-death penalty organizers is planned for November, 1997.

"We are hoping to create unified, active opposition from the faith-based community," Clark explains.

"We also want to help religious groups form networks of support for family members of victims. I know a deeply spiritual Roman Catholic woman in California whose husband was murdered. She was opposed to the death penalty, but when she went to talk to the prosecutor, she was told she didn’t have any choice in the matter. She was already traumatized, and faced the further traumatization of adding several more deaths to the tragedy. In that situation, where was the church?"

Clark is now working to ensure that her niece and nephews will grow up in a strong community of family and faith. "One of the many reasons I moved back to New Jersey was that I wanted my kids to be close to extended family,’ she says.

She would like them to learn that family extends far beyond the narrow boundaries that too often confine it today.

"I get infuriated when I hear folks espouse family values, who then turn around and want to cut welfare or don’t want to provide educational opportunities or put out services to immigrant families. It makes me question how they define family. And whose family? That’s not my notion of the support and love and compassion that family entails."

Reprinted with permission from The Witness. Please visit our Web site at: http://www.thewitness.org