Saving More Than Souls

Facts about Mel Floyd:

* He drives a black van decorated with a torso, a coffin and the words “Take dope and end up a dummy.”

* He says he has saved 16,317 souls since 1981.

* Fellow police officers named him one of the “10 Best Policemen in the World” in 1969.

* He lectures on 325 subjects, including “Seven Things That a Black Woman Should Never Do To Her Man,” “Devilish Dating, Devastating Bed and Destroyed Relationships” and “13 Ways Mothers Ruin Their Sons.”

* He isn’t crazy.

*

Floyd is a 61-year old, bang-the-Bible, say-amen preacher bent on bringing people to the Lord through a personal knowledge of hell.

As a teen, he carried zip guns and knives, fighting for his gang. He later spent more than 12 years walking the city’s toughest streets as a decorated police officer.

Floyd now believes the same techniques he learned for saving lives will save the inner cities.

*

Be you a drug dealer, a lousy dad, a thief or a wandering son, the Rev. Melvin Floyd has ways to reach you. He may not heal the world, but he has been bandaging Philadelphia for 30 years.

Floyd’s latest triage efforts have taken him from the drug dealers’ corners to an underground chapel where he teaches the nature of love and marriage to standing-room-only crowds.

He believes stronger families mean stronger communities and strong communities mean less crime. “If I stop the failure of relationships, we can produce healthy young people who don’t want to do the bad that is killing us,” Floyd says.

*

The night was bitterly cold and the intersection in front of the Agape Christian Chapel had just caved in. Flashing yellow lights warned people to stay away.

They filed right on in.

Black women, big and strong, stripped off their bulky winter coats. Wide-eyed men, looking a little shy, surveyed the powder-blue walls and the steel chairs.

One by one they filled first the seats facing front, then the ones along the side, moving toward the choir box and finally dropping their purses and scarves along the walls and standing.

Up front was the Rev. Floyd. Crisp white shirt. Gray pants with creases sharp as knives. He was, as always, waiting for his moment.

*

‘He has become an icon,” said Michael C. Harris of the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network. “He’s a man that stands for truth, for righteousness.”

Harris has watched Floyd lecture high school students in the afternoon, preach about love in the evening and scare the daylight out of street thugs in between.

Somehow he gets to all of them. They look into his eyes, rich brown and as soft as velvet. They see his smile and hear his laughs.

When he comes close to them, they feel his breath, as if he’s whispering to them and only them.

*

The evening started slowly. The reverend stumbled over the words, reciting definitions for rejection. Soon he put down his typewritten text. He walked out toward the people and they enlivened him.

“Jealousy can get you killed,” he said. “Jealousy will cause people to slip into your house and cut up every piece of clothes you have. And then get a match and some gasoline and burn ‘em on up, child. Cutting them up is not enough! Do you here me? Make a girl go to an empty lot and get a brick and break every car window. Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Somebody is laughing pretty hard back there, but I won’t go there.”

The laughing stopped.

Floyd was preaching. Everyone was listening.

*

God was discovered outside a movie theater. A young Floyd stood there for more than two hours and listened to a man in a suit make him memorize the words of John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

“That next day, that very Sunday, I joined a church,” Floyd said.

*

After a stint in the Army, he joined the police force. During those 12 1/2 years of beat work, he found the courage to face the drug dealers, thieves and criminals killing the neighborhood.

“I found myself walking in some dark alley, with God knows what gangsters and who knows what else there. I can’t be saying I’m not going in there. I can’t do that.

“So I asked God to give me the boldness and the courage.”

In the summer of 1968, Floyd found himself in the middle of a deadly gang war.

“Eight killings in one week. Un-heaaaard-of in the city. Everybody was shocked to the rafters.

“My wife said, ‘Melvin what are you going to do about it?’ What can I do about this thing? Whah? Huh? Two weeks went by and that woman stayed on my case: ‘You got to do something. These kids are killing each other; it isn’t right.’ ”

So, on his own time, Floyd went from street corner to street corner and talked to the kids with the guns and knives.

“Remember, they kill each other like flies out there. So I prayed. I said, ‘Lord, now you got to give me the right method how to reach them.’ And a voice--like the heavens opened up--the voice said, ‘Touch ‘em. Put your hands on them and touch them.’

“I remember the first time I went up to a corner to touch a kid. The kid jumped; he went for it [his gun]. ‘What are you doing, mistah?’ You don’t touch these kids. You don’t touch ‘em.

“But I stood there, and slowly I worked my hand, and I put it on a shoulder, and they didn’t jerk it away. I touched these kids and the touching . . . it broke something in them. And I could talk to them.”

Floyd eventually fostered a peace that held. A front-page picture from The Philadelphia Inquirer shows a smiling Floyd, gap tooth and all, between two rival gang leaders--shaking hands.

In the years since Floyd left the police force in 1972 and started Neighborhood Crusades Inc., he has continued to visit those same street corners.

Armed with a small table, a projector and a megaphone, Floyd presents a slide show of blood and guts. He figures if the kids see a gunshot wound, a knife wound, death--they might think twice about selling drugs.

This past summer, his Street Corner Preaching Ministry, as he calls it, began visiting Philadelphia suburbs and even drove out to Ohio for a meeting.

“They need it, too,” Floyd said.

He has been teaching his “relationship enrichment courses” to standing-room-only crowds in his basement chapel for several years. Part storytelling, part preaching, part comic stand-up routine, the classes are one more way for Floyd to try to affect what he sees as crime grows around him.

Laverne Hardin, 25, dragged in her boyfriend, Donald Bullock, 30, six weeks ago and the couple are now regulars on Thursday nights.

“He enlightens you,” Hardin said. “A lot of things I thought were right aren’t nowhere near right. He makes it real and that’s what brings people back.”

Floyd explains the need for his classes by quoting a statistic: Seven of 10 black homes in the city are led by a single woman.

“These classes . . . it affects those I teach. And if I only reach the burglar, he won’t steal no more. And if I only reach the holdup man, he won’t take no more. And if I only keep at this thing, maybe things can get better.”

*

The Rev. Floyd waits for laughter to subside from his last witticism. It’s time to throw some religion into this get-together.

“Rejection by someone else is not as bad as rejection of oneself,” he said. “Now is the time to get to know yourself, read your scriptures, your psalms.”

And then the reverend said, “Someone say ‘Amen.’ ” Everyone did.