Pastor urges calm after Gesner Street fatal fire
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The Rev. Napoleon Divine says negotiation, not confrontation, is what is needed now
The charred wreckage has been removed from the street and what remains of the houses are boarded up, but this week there was still a pile of teddy bears and other stuffed animals stacked up on the corner, commemorating the lives of four children who died in the Gesner Street rowhouse fire.
As the large Liberian community in Southwest Philadelphia works to recover from the tragedy that sparked street protests, a neighborhood pastor urged residents to rebuild through negotiation rather than confrontation.
“We need to sit down and engage in constructive dialogue,” said the Rev. Napoleon Divine, pastor of Christ International Baptist Church at 65th and Gesner streets, a few yards from where eight row houses burned in the early hours of July 5. The fire claimed the lives of three 4-year-olds and an infant boy, and drove 42 survivors from their homes.
“We want to find how we can help these people rebuild their lives. This will not come as a result of a protest and anger,” he said.
Divine, who has played a leading role in the community’s efforts to recover, said the protests — in the neighborhood and later outside City Hall — were the work of a “minority” of local residents, not all of whom had been directly affected by the fire, and who did not represent the community as a whole.
“I am unhappy about this, and I have shared this with them,” he said in an interview at the church on Sunday. “Even if you have a concern that you may claim is legitimate, this is not the right course. You sit down across the table and air out your grievances, and await a response.
“If the response is, in your judgment, not appropriate, you decide what course to take, but never this, because if you protest and stand in the way of a fire engine leaving the station to save lives then that really is not wise,” he said, referring to a July 7 demonstration in which several people reportedly lay down in front of a fire truck trying to leave the firehouse at 65th and Woodland, a few yards from Gesner Street. “That’s not how intelligent people behave,” he added.
He rejected some accusations that Mayor Michael Nutter had ignored the tragedy, noting that Nutter came to the neighborhood and talked with the residents on the afternoon of July 5, and he argued that the community continues to seek a good relationship with the city.
“We have cultivated a relationship with the city,” he said. “They know us and we know them. They trust us and we trust them and we’re not going to second guess.”
Divine also accused some local media outlets of exaggerating the extent of the July 7 protest by covering it and not the talks between community leaders that were going on in the church building at the same time.
But he said the protesters, many of them younger people, have been willing to listen to his and other voices urging moderation, noting that even the City Hall demonstration on July 10 was peaceful, unlike the one outside the firehouse.
“We see now that people are more accepting of what has happened and now they are acting more responsibly, especially the younger people,” he said.
He attributed the calmer tone to a respect for older voices that persists in the Liberian community. “They are listening to their elders,” said Divine, who emigrated from Liberia to the U.S. in 1981. “It’s part of our culture. We come from a culture where the younger generation respects the older generation.”
He warned that Liberians who were unaccustomed in their West African homeland to living as close together as they do on Gesner Street may not recognize the risks — such as a fire engulfing adjoining houses — that come with living in row homes.
Meanwhile, he acknowledged that the protests may have been fueled by other grievances including a perceived anti-immigrant bias on the part of police, and protesters’ belief that they have been victims of racial profiling.
If the fire has become a focus for other issues in the community, it may be an opportunity to resolve some of those problems through negotiation, he said.
“There’s a lot that we can do as a result of this crisis,” he said. “If there is legitimacy to some of these claims, I’m sure that the authorities will be willing to work with us.”
In the wake of the fire, he said many in the neighborhood have accepted that the Fire Department did respond quickly to the 911 calls, the first of which it received as the report of a rubbish fire at 2:44 a.m., prompting the arrival of a fire crew at 2:48 a.m. followed by three more groups of firefighters, in a rapidly growing response over the following four minutes.
The sequence was released by the Fire Department on July 8 in an attempt to defend its response to the blaze, following a staunch defense of the department’s conduct by Mayor Nutter. Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison, speaking alongside Fire Commissioner Derrick Sawyer, dismissed reports that firefighters took 30 minutes after the first 911 call to arrive on the scene.
As of press time, officials have declined to say what caused the fire, amid widespread neighborhood rumors that it was the result of a live firecracker from a July 4 celebration landing on a couch on a porch.
As anger begins to fade, the community — which also includes African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants from other African countries — is in a better position to focus on helping the victims.
The volume of donations, from across the city and as far away as New Jersey and Delaware, was so great, Divine said, that on the first morning after the fire, he had trouble opening the door to his church because of the many gifts of clothing, toys and food blocking it.
Now, donated clothes are stacked on multiple folding tables in the church’s basement, while other tables are piled with canned and packaged food.
“No more clothes,” read a handwritten sign on the church door. “We are only accepting nonperishable food and personal-hygiene items.” Another sign with bank-deposit details welcomed anyone wanting to donate money.
“We’ve had all this emotional outpouring of love,” he said. “If we can show them that we care, that may help them, to some extent, absorb this great tragedy in their lives, losing everything.”
Asked whether the community’s anger might turn on anyone found to be setting off fireworks, if they are determined to have caused the fire, Divine once again urged a measured response.
“We will caution our community members, especially the younger ones, that whatever the investigation leads to, we want you to exercise calm,” he said.
