The Reverend Dinah Tatman vividly recalls when she decided to become involved in the protests following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown Jr. by then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
Following a prayer vigil called by clergy outside the Ferguson Police Department, protestors taunted clergy members for leaving.
“So y’all are leaving us, huh?” one young man shouted. “You’re leaving us, too?”
“I heard the pain of a hurt, abandoned child,” Tatman said. “It was as if he was speaking directly to me.”’
She stayed to speak with him, and the young man invited her to a prayer vigil that night at the Canfield Green Apartment complex where Brown was killed on August 9.
That was August 10. Tatman went home in nearby Bellefontaine Neighbors, put on sweat pants and tennis shoes to go with her clergy collar, and showed up at the prayer vigil. In a sense, she never left.
She remained on the street for daily protests that continued well into December. She worked behind the scenes to form coalitions for change. She helped to bring in visitors from Cincinnati and New York City. Most importantly, she stood by the frustrated youth crying out for understanding and action.
Until she was called away to care for her father, who was badly injured in a car accident that killed her mother on December 12, Tatman walked the streets of Ferguson. Wherever she walked, she prayed – doing, she said, “what God told me:” bring hope to the people.
Tatman could not help but notice that few clergy walked with her.
“All of a sudden, I felt out of place with the clergy,” she said. “I heard the chants and taunts of the protestors, and I felt more comfortable with them.”
A trained pastoral counselor, Tatman is experienced in prison and street ministry to the homeless. “There is no reason for homelessness in our cities,” she said. “St. Louis should be ashamed that its people cannot find decent housing and, when they do, they cannot afford it because they don’t have a decent wage.”
Early in Ferguson, she provided tents and sleeping bags pulled from her basement for protestors who remained overnight. She offered both food and spiritual sustenance.
“Either they or someone they knew had experienced harsh treatment or been injured or killed by the police,” she said.
Justina Cramer, known in the Ferguson movement as “Tina the Activist,” knows Tatman’s passion first-hand. A Ferguson resident with a 14-year-old son, Cramer lives around the corner from Canfield Green, where many years ago she obtained her first apartment. She was called to the streets by the reality that “Michael Brown could have been and was anybody’s son.”
“She was always praying and walking in her robe,” Cramer said of Tatman. “She was always there. She didn’t look down on people. She stayed when nobody was there. She wasn’t trying to be on camera. When someone was wrong, she told them in a loving way.”
State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal was another constant presence in Ferguson during the early and most volatile days. Like Tatman, she is childless – and felt that the youngest protestors needed a mothering influence in support of their protests.
“My mother allowed me to express myself as a young person, and it made a difference,” Chappelle-Nadal said.
Bishop Derrick Robinson, another front-line protest supporter and organizer, saw Tatman’s impact.
“She wanted them to see how important they were and how the word of God could be relevant to the streets,” Robinson said. “We talked about how we can protect young people, and she said, ‘I am out here to serve our young people.’ And she did that.”
Tatman abandoned her everyday life, where she had been focused on the goal of building a transitional housing center for women and children through her outreach ministry, Greater New Visions Ministries, Inc. Her husband Marvin, a deacon at New Sunny Mount Missionary Baptist Church in North St. Louis, drove her to and from protests daily.
“I know that she is serious about it and has to do it, because she is doing God’s will,” he said.
Doing God’s work got her arrested by those enforcing man’s laws.
“I got arrested trying to protect a young girl standing on the corner where there was a tank pointed at her,” Tatman said. “When I grabbed her, trying to cover her with my body, I was immediately snatched up in the air.”
She said the police officer inflicted severe pain as he “manhandled” her.
“God was allowing me to see and feel what these young people, especially our young men, go through on a daily basis,” she said. “The way they treated me, I could feel and personally know how they provoked those youth. I was a nobody to him, just like our children are.”
