Audio File
Transcript
My name is Reverend Evelina McFarland. I grew up in the Hill District. I grew up on Wooster St. Wooster, and Wylie, and I was always active in the Hill District. Many of the shops at the Barber shops and everybody they knew me from the Hill because the original Good Samaritan Church was on Wooster St. and my mother and they used to sell chicken dinners and rib dinners and I used to be the runner and I used to run up and down Center and Wylie Ave. collect the money and delivering dinners, so everybody knew me in the Hill District and then I used to work for the N double ACP. I know Tim Stevens. I knew him when he had a singing group. My cousin used to sing with him before he became a politician. I knew Lena Horne. When she lived on top of the Crawford Grill. When I was a young girl, around 11 years old. Georgie Benson knew all of them. I was quite familiar with the Hill District. The Hill used to be booming. The Hill was the main vein. You had to come from East Liberty, the North Side and everything. Everybody used to come to the Hill cause we had the Crawford Grille. We had the new Granada theater, we had the Roosevelt Theater, we had all the supermarkets, we had the jazz clubs, the Roosevelt. Everybody used to come there and sing because we had all the stores, just about. Coming here that lived in the Hill District there, a lot of people didn’t know about. We had Miss Lovett, that opened up the new YMCA. We had K. Leroy Irvis. They got the high rise. In the Hill District used to be live, we had so many restaurants. Chicken places, fried fish places, the Hill used to have it going on. The movie theaters was only a quarter. You didn’t have to go anywhere off the Hill. We had Gordon shoe store, Wolf shoe store, everything was good until the riots. Until Martin Luther King got killed and then that’s when things changed. They started looting and rioting and burning up places, burning up the stores and the supermarkets, and we didn’t have anywhere to go. We had to go outside our community then and it just never, never been the same since then.
Right now, I’m a reverend at a church and I’m a candidate to be a pastor of a church. So right now I just go to different churches who call me to come and bring the word. So that’s what I do now, my job is ministering to the lost, winning souls for Christ. I’ve been through so much, my family has been through so much and I just love that scripture. It fills my heart, it blesses my heart. I will bless him at all times because you can’t stop praising God for everything that he has done and when you look back over your life and see where he has brought you from, it’s just such a blessing.
My father died on Easter 1984, I had asked him to babysit my son while I was going to church and I left home. I left my son with my father and when I came back home, my father had passed away and my son, he was only 5, so he didn’t know. He was just running around. He thought Granddad would sleep. And then four years later, my brother was murdered in my mother’s house and me and my son found him in my mother’s house dead. Right after that my mother passed away. She threw a blood clot in the middle of the night and took her out of here. Then, in 2005, my son was shot five times and wasn’t expected to live, but he pulled through. God is good. He was in a coma for three months and they said he wouldn’t make it, but he made it. He pulled through and then myself in 2012, I slipped into a diabetic coma and I was in intensive care for a month and they didn’t think I was going to make it, but God is good. I’m here today. I’ve been through many obstacles. Prayer is the key. Keep praying.
Be virtuous women, be women with respect. Having good morals, stay in school the more you learn, the more you earn, remember that, it’s all about the money. There’s nice places, but if you can’t afford it, you can’t live there. Go to college and you could do great things because we have great minds and let nobody tell you can’t do nothing because you see we had a black president and a black first lady and you could be anything that you want to be but you got to push yourself and above all, get to know the Lord because he will help you when all else fails, he’ll never leave you nor forsake you. He’ll always be with you.