“Called to serve.”
A colorful mosaic in memory of a beloved street minister and anti-gun-violence advocate bears those words next to the red double doors where he was shot and killed one year ago Monday.
On July 27, 2019, the Rev. Sheldon “Sarge” Stoudemire, 57, was working an overnight shift at the Northside Common Ministries men’s homeless shelter when at 3:20 a.m., a 19-year-old who had been denied entry shot through the front door, striking Rev. Stoudemire in the chest.
“A good man lost his life doing something that he loved to do,” said the Rev. Darrell Robinson, of Word on the Street Ministries. “That’s the way I want to go out. I want to go out preaching the Gospel. You know, men die, but their legacies can live forever.”
A small crowd of about 30 joined for the memorial unveiling, including Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, who used be neighbors with Rev. Stoudemire in Braddock.
“It’s a true honor to have us here to celebrate our friend, our neighbor and somebody who I view in solidarity in just trying to make the world a little bit better wherever he went,” Mr. Fetterman said on the steps of the Brighton Road nonprofit community organization that also offers a food pantry, GED classes and other services.
Rev. Stoudemire had worked at the shelter three nights a week for about two years as a shelter monitor, providing support and guidance to the 25 to 30 men who stayed there each night.
But the Army Ranger veteran and accomplished boxer is often most remembered for his street preaching and “firm, fearless and friendly” conversations with at-risk young Black men who had nowhere to turn.
Rev. Stoudemire went where “people who are faint of heart don’t go to, unless you live there,” said George Spencer, president of the Greater Pittsburgh Area MAD DADS, a neighborhood street patrol program. The group’s acronym stands for Men Against Destruction Defending Against Drugs and Social Disorder; Rev. Stoudemire joined the group in 2006 and worked in Wilkinsburg and Clairton, among other places.
He practiced a “sweaty, tactile religion,” said Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman, who read for the crowd his writings recalling a ride-along with the street preacher through Homewood in 2006. The young men on the corners whom society had labeled “superpredators” Rev. Stoudemire “expressed his love for them as human beings,” Mr. Norman recited from his column.
The crowd was led through one more verse of “Amazing Grace” to close out the ceremony; music from car windows and the sounds of Port Authority buses rolled on by the somber gathering on the busy California-Kirkbride neighborhood road.
But Karol Stoudemire, the reverend’s widow, stepped in front of the bright mosaic by artist Amy Burke to say one more thing.
“My husband has marched and walked these streets. All he wanted to do was win souls for Christ. He bled that; he breathed that. When you see this here art, look at the message behind it. If you all are part of this mission that my husband had, the baton will be passed on. ... His dying was not in vain. OK?” she said. “Let’s do it. What’s next?”
Ashley Murray: amurray@post-gazette.com
First Published: July 27, 2020, 11:16 p.m.
