On a recent weekend, 40 people were shot and four killed across Chicago.
That’s not unusual. The city’s homicide rates—especially on the West and South Sides—have been raising red flags since 2020. That’s when riots, the pandemic, and politics kicked off a streak of violence combined with a streak of resignations and retirements from the Chicago police force.
But the problems on the South Side go back farther than that. Already in the 1950s and 1960s, the area was in sharp decline, moving from stable property values to white flight, from middle-class to one of the city’s worst areas for poverty and high school dropout rates, from peaceful to the near-constant violence of gangs running drugs.
You can see it in the neighborhoods—there’s trash in the yards and broken blinds on the windows. The doors of homes and stores are barred with iron, and litter gathers in the uncut weeds along abandoned lots.
But if you turn onto 113th Street in the Roseland community, things look different.
113th Street in Chicago / Photo by Madison Ramsey
Thirty years ago, this street had five drug houses on it. Today, there’s new construction—a brick day care with good landscaping and a well-tended lawn, a coffee shop with flowers and rocking chairs on the front porch, and several homes for single moms that look newer, fresher, more cared-for. It’s not unusual to see a police car parked out front of the coffee shop—not because officers are arresting anyone but because they’re inside drinking coffee and talking to residents.
Former Illinois governor Pat Quinn’s chief of staff called it “an oasis.”
You don’t have to wonder long about who’s doing this. There are signs—on the Good News Community Coffee House, it says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps. 127:1). Next door on the Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care, the sign reads, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6).
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to connect the external change with the internal change in one woman.
“God is so good,” said Pearlene Willis. Thirty years ago, her life looked as hopeless as her old neighborhood—she was a single mom of three children with different fathers, had neither a job nor a high school degree, and was mired in 18 years of constant drug and alcohol use.
“I have not seen a salvation story like hers since,” said Cru staffer Cynthia Massie, who helped lead Pearl to the Lord. “She’s like the woman at the well who met Jesus, and she never came down from the high.”
When Pearl Met Jesus
When Pearl was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, her parents loved the Lord and worried about protecting their 13 kids. “They pretty much kept us isolated in the house,” she said. “When we went out, we were going out with my parents. When we were coming back, we were with my parents.”
That worked until Pearl got to high school. Curious, she went looking for what her parents were protecting her from. Friends taught her how to mix Kool-Aid and white port wine—some days, she’d go to school drunk. Another friend taught her how to skip class to catch the subway, then the Greyhound bus. She ran away so often she was sent to a school for runaways, and then she ran away again.
Pearlene Willis / Courtesy of Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care
Within two years, Pearl’s life had disintegrated. Her best friend betrayed her, leaving her alone to be drugged and gang-raped. Sick with the memories, Pearl took up drugs.
When she was 16, she found out she was pregnant with her first child. That’s when she knew she wasn’t going to heaven. “I knew God would never forgive me—back then, it was the ultimate sin to have sex and have a baby,” she said. “I knew I blew it.”
She was well aware of her sin but had no hope of grace. “You made your bed, you lie in it,” she often heard. Taking care of her child, she thought, was her punishment for having him.
Things went from bad to worse. “For 18 years, I don’t remember being sober,” Pearl said. Her first boyfriend beat her. She married his best friend, who ended up drugging her with the hopes of selling her to his friends for sex. (She was 17.) Her next boyfriend locked her in the house while he was gone. She gave birth to three children, all with different last names.
Since she spent her welfare checks on drugs and alcohol, she had to sell her body to feed her children. She dragged them around the streets with her. And after 15 or so years of near-constant alcohol use, Pearl’s life was a fog: “People started telling me I did stuff I didn’t even remember.”
From Law to Grace
One day, when Pearl’s oldest was about 14 years old, he and his sisters asked if they could go to church with their grandparents. Pearl’s dad said yes and began sending the church bus for them every Sunday morning.
“[The kids] would come home from church, and I’d be lying in my vomit,” Pearl said. “They’d pick me up and wipe my mouth and say, ‘Mama, Jesus could fix you.’”
“What do you mean?” she’d ask, offended. “Do I look broken to you?”
But she knew she wasn’t doing well. And one Sunday, Pearl surprised everyone by climbing on the bus with her kids.
“I got to the church, and it was like, ‘Oh, no, what have I done?’” she said. The other women were clean and pretty, wearing dresses and big hats. They looked like good women, good mothers, good Christians. Pearl was none of those things. She wanted to run away.
Mama, Jesus could fix you.
“But I realized I couldn’t go home until the bus was ready,” she said. So she went downstairs and ended up in a Sunday school class for the homeless led by Cru staffer Milton Massie. They were talking about sin, and Milton told the class that God forgives us when we repent.
That’s ridiculous, Pearl thought. She knew her sins were too big to ever be forgiven. She called him out in front of the class: “He’s a liar!”
Massie knows an opening when he sees one. He talked with her, then asked her to talk to his wife, Cynthia.
“She shared the gospel with me,” Pearl said, and this still makes her cry. “We had not been brought up on forgiveness and grace and mercy, you know. We hadn’t been brought up on that. So you just feel like you blew it.”
Pearl thought about God’s forgiveness the whole bus ride home. She was starting to feel sick—it was the first time in years she’d gone this long without drugs or alcohol—and as soon as she could, she ran to the fridge for a fifth of liquor.
“As I grabbed that door, I fell on my knees and I said, ‘If what they said is true, Lord—if you just take the pain away in my body, I won’t get high anymore,’” she said. “He didn’t take the pain away. But for some reason, I felt like a newborn baby. All the load of sin was just taken away. The rape was gone. I had been scrubbing myself for years, sometimes two to three times a day, trying to get clean. And right there on that kitchen floor he cleaned me up.
“Nobody had told me it was cleansing on the inside, not the outside.”
A Changed Life
“I’ve always felt like if God saved me, he could do anything,” Pearl said. “I was drowning, and I felt him reach down and grab me. If he hadn’t sought me out, I would’ve been dead. And so after he saved me, I found myself hiding in the house for weeks because I feared going out of the house. I had already ruined everything, and unless he led me, where was I to go? What was I to do?”
She went to church, read her Bible, went to church, talked with the Massies, and waited on the Lord. And sure enough, he made it clear what she should do.
Unless he led me, where was I go to? What was I to do?
Pearl quit drugs and alcohol cold turkey. She spent a month bouncing in and out of the hospital, shaking and sick. Afterward, she told her boyfriend she couldn’t sleep with him anymore. She moved out of his place and closer to her church and her family.
Following God wasn’t smooth or easy. Several times, Pearl fell back in with her ex-boyfriend, then broke up with him again. She struggled with her GED test, taking it five times before passing. She wrestled with how to parent her children, who didn’t like her new rules about not running around whenever and wherever they pleased.
“She’d have needs or slip-ups, and we loved her through it,” said Cynthia, who would come over to Pearl’s to study the Bible or deliver a meal. “She was so hungry for the Word.”
Pearl’s situation didn’t faze Cynthia. “When Milton’s family moved to Roseland in 1969, both husbands and wives were in the home,” she said. Ten years later, “most of the parents were divorced.”
That wasn’t just a Chicago trend. Across America, the number of African American children born to single mothers climbed from around 20 percent in 1955 to around 70 percent in the 1990s. By 2020, 79 percent of black births in Illinois were to single moms. In Chicago, it was 82 percent.
By 2020, 79 percent of black births in Illinois were to single moms. In Chicago, it was 82 percent.
“We saw a lot of kids raised by grandparents because mom was on drugs and dad was in jail,” Cynthia said.
A bunch of them—friends of Pearl’s kids—started going over to Pearl’s house after school. Pearl didn’t exactly love children. In fact, she said, “I kinda hated them because there were so many of us kids growing up.” But she was starting to look and act more and more like Jesus, and soon her small apartment was crowded with 35 to 40 kids each afternoon.
Pearl helped them with their homework. She taught them the Bible. She fed them, kept them overnight if their parents weren’t around, and washed clothes so they could be clean for church on Sunday. Eventually, so many kids were coming that she had to move operations into the church basement. On Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings, she’d teach around 130 kids about Jesus.
Sharing the Good News: Law and Grace
In the evenings, Pearl hosted a Bible study with Cynthia. One night, one of the women called, scared and lost. Unable to read, she didn’t know which bus to catch.
“I had a hard time getting her back home, because she was too ashamed to ask for directions,” Pearl wrote in her autobiography. “Out of anger that night, I stood up and said, ‘If you go back to school, I’ll day care your children.’”
Pearl felt the Lord telling her to call her new venture The Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care, and it’s been open ever since. Her fees are low (moms in high school pay nothing, older moms pay as little as $50 a month), but she’ll only accept kids whose moms agree to attend her weekly Bible study. Unlike Pearl, most of them didn’t grow up in a Christian home or culture.
Children at Ms. Pearl’s day care / Courtesy of Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care
“Most of the moms I work with find themselves at churches where people are prophesying,” she said. “The moms like to hear, ‘You’re going to have this or have that.’ They’re not told they are sinners who need to be saved, and that if something lines up with God’s will for your life, then he’ll give to you according to what you need.”
Many of the moms, then, blame outside factors for their difficulties.
“They feel really bad about their lives,” she said. “Most of them feel they could make it if they didn’t have kids. Kids are often considered a mistake.”
When Pearl teaches the gospel, she has to explain both sin and forgiveness: You are a sinner. You are saved by grace. You are a new creation.
“I tell them God is able to change their name,” said the woman whose own identity has shifted drastically, from prostitute to Ms. Pearl. “It doesn’t have to be ‘fresh meat’ or ‘whore.’ He will rename you and make your life to fit what he names you.”
Children at Ms. Pearl’s day care / Photo by Madison Ramsey
Pearl had another reason for choosing the name “Good News” for her day care—the news in her neighborhood was going from bad to worse. Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, the streets were flooded with drugs and automatic weapons. Correspondingly, the number of homicides leaped up, especially among young black males on the South Side.
“Something’s happening here, and I’m not sure what it is. The upsurge of violence is just crazy,” tactical police officer Frank Kovac told the Chicago Tribune in 1991. “Kids used to have bats and knives. Now they’re equipped with better guns than we have.”
Among news reports of a 7-year-old killed in gang crossfire on his way to school and a serial killer who strangled or smothered five different women, Pearl started a neighborhood newsletter. She shared news of a child’s good report card or freshly planted flowers in a yard.
In the vast darkness of Chicago, Pearl was shining the tiniest light.
Moving to 113th Street
Pearl’s day care was in her home, and with about 100 pregnant teens in the local high school, she quickly needed more room. One day, while taking her kids to school, she felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to stop in front of an abandoned house. The siding had been torn off, and when Pearl and Cynthia later climbed in a window to look around, they discovered that a furnace, both toilets, and the sinks had also been stolen. The copper had been pulled out of the walls, and there was no running water. But the roof was new, and the staircase was strong.
With her small savings, donations from church members, and a foundation gift, Pearl scrounged up the $13,000 she needed to buy the building. Friends helped her slowly rehab it, but everybody warned her 113th Street was not like 111th. “All that Jesus stuff” wasn’t going to work there, they said.
113th Street / Photo by Madison Ramsey
“We had five drug houses on this block when I moved in,” Pearl said. “When I saw how bad it was, I called a block meeting. I was going to tell the neighbors, ‘Let’s clean up the drugs and make this place safe for kids.’”
But when the time for the meeting came, Pearl’s house filled up with 18- to 24-year-olds.
“Where are your parents?” she asked them.
“We are the parents,” they told her. “We run this block. What do you want?”
“God sent me here to tell you about Jesus,” she told them. “This day care is the vehicle he’s going to use to do that.”
The lines were drawn. Before long, Pearl slid into an unspoken agreement with her neighbors: she didn’t call the cops on them, and they left her alone. But that didn’t mean her problems were solved. At night, their arguing and bouncing basketballs kept her awake. During the day, the street was full of the trash they’d dropped.
“I kept asking the Lord to move them,” Pearl said. When she sensed God wanted her to feed them, she resisted. After a few months, she sullenly cooked up some chicken and potatoes.
“I went next door and banged on the door,” she said. “The guy opened the door, and I shoved the container in his arms, and I said, ‘God told me to feed you,’ and then I turned and walked away.”
It wasn’t a warm interaction, but that was all it took. “After that, they began to communicate and talk with me,” she said. “They’d let me know when something was going down so I wouldn’t have to worry about kids getting hurt.”
She could tell they were trying to be quieter at night. When boys got shot or beat up or jailed, she was the one they called. When girls got pregnant, they sent their children to Pearl’s. When she and the day care children picked up the street garbage, they cut down on the litter. “I became ‘mama’ to them,” Pearl said. “It opened the door for me to share with them about Jesus.”
They didn’t all trade in their cocaine and semiautomatics for Bibles and hymnbooks. But they did start to love her.
“Even the dope dealers respect her, and the car thieves, too,” a 27-year-old day care mom told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “Take a look down the street. They’ve stolen everybody’s hubcaps but hers.”
Transforming 113th Street
Eventually, the police came to two of the drug houses for the last time. Even though they took away the young people there, Pearl felt the Holy Spirit leading her to ask one of the young men if she could proceed with buying the houses.
“If it was anybody else, we’d give them hell,” he told her. “But you can have them.”
Pearl lived on the upper level and kept her day care on the first floor. / Courtesy of Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care
This time, Pearl had been around long enough to have plenty of help. A man who had seen her story on Channel 2 gave enough money to buy the houses and tear them down. Willow Creek Community Church connected her with a lawyer and regularly sent young people to do manual labor. The Agape Center introduced her to a builder—Ken Lautenbach—and to church youth groups who would spend time with the day care kids, do repair projects, and hang out with kids on the street.
The help was critical, and Pearl learned early to watch out for any attached strings.
“One time I was offered $200,000, but they did not want me to teach about Jesus,” she said. “I got a phone call about it at the day care. They told me to sleep on it and let them know the next day.”
She hung up and shouted, “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!”
The kids heard her and yelled back, “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!”
Immediately, Pearl felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
“I had to call them back and say, ‘I can’t keep my mouth shut about God,’” she said. She cried, and so did the young women who worked at the day care—they badly needed the money. But they were learning a lesson that would sink in deep.
“Getting money is not my problem,” Pearl says now. “That’s God’s job. My job is to be obedient.”
Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care / Photo by Madison Ramsey
Sure enough, a year and a half later, the Illinois government called with an offer: she could have a $500,000 grant and teach about Jesus, as long as she didn’t turn away any children based on their religion.
Pearl could agree to that. With government money and private donations, she paid for the construction of a new, bigger day care where the drug houses used to be. A few years later, she bought another abandoned drug house on her block. In 2018, her builder asked if she was ready to start construction.
“I was ready, and the Lord said no,” Pearl said. “And he said no again the next year.”
She finally felt it was time in 2020. Then, just a few weeks into the project, the pandemic shut everything down. It seemed like God had missed.
COVID-19
Pearl didn’t have much time to worry about it. She had bigger problems.
“The community started crying out,” she said. Within the first few weeks, African Americans in Chicago were dying at a rate nearly six times that of white residents. (One was Pearl’s sister.) Four in 10 black and Latino households with children were reporting food insecurity. (“In its 41-year history, the Greater Chicago Food Depository has never seen a hunger crisis like the current one,” the charity reported at the end of 2020.) When Chicago Public Schools moved online, only about 60 percent of students turned up for live video classes on Google Meet.
Pearl started praying based on 2 Chronicles 20:12: “Lord, I don’t know what to do, but my eyes are on you.”
Lord, I don’t know what to do, but my eyes are on you.
When the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) asked Pearl if she’d open up for the children of essential workers, she did. She hosted more than 25 school-age kids who needed a place to do their remote learning. And when DCFS asked if they could drop off a couple hundred boxes of food for the community, she agreed.
“I was out in the cold sharing the gospel—you’re going to get this box only after you hear how Jesus loves you enough to die for you,” she said. “We were praying, we were giving out boxes, and people were coming to know the Lord.”
That wasn’t the only blessing of COVID. Eager to find work for their employees, construction companies donated their labor to Pearl’s new building. Not only did that cut costs from $550,000 to $300,000 but it opened the door for her to give food—and the gospel—to the construction workers to take back to their communities.
Police and Residents
Pearl wasn’t building another day care. In February 2021, she opened the doors of a community gathering place, which included a space for kids to do homework after school and a coffee shop for residents and police officers.
The timing couldn’t have been better.
Nine months earlier, the death of George Floyd sparked days of rioting in Chicago. More than 50 people were shot, more than 2,000 businesses were damaged, and more than 700,000 pills were stolen from pharmacies. The 911 center, which normally gets about 15,000 calls a day, received 65,000.
Next to the day care, this building holds a coffee shop, and library, and space for children to do homework after school / Photo by Madison Ramsey
The Chicago police force couldn’t keep up. “The gangs regularly monitor our radio zones and know we had substantial staffing issues,” police commander Stephen Chung reported.
For some, the riots were an opportunity for economic gain. But they also expressed frustration with a police force that has a history of corruption and violence, especially against African Americans. Back in the ’80s, former police commander Jon Burge tortured more than 100 people, primarily black men, into false confessions. As late as the 2000s, Sergeant Ronald Watts framed so many people that more than 200 convictions connected to him were later overturned. And after every shooting—of either a resident or a police officer—the relationship between the two frays a little more.
But at Pearl’s coffee shop—on one of the hardest streets in the city—policemen began to drop in.
“They can use the restroom and get a cup of coffee,” said Rashya Irwin, who studied for her accounting degree in the coffee shop while Pearl watched her children. “Sometimes she’ll cook for them. It’s just unbelievable. . . . The police stop by just about every day.”
They mill around with residents. They give high fives to the day care kids and encouragement to the school kids doing homework in the afternoons. They chat with the other guests, the employees, and Pearl.
“They sit down and share and sometimes cry,” Pearl said. “I do a lot of listening and a lot of praying. . . . The coffee house has far exceeded anything I could ever expect.”
Expanding into the Future
It’s just one block—113th between Princeton and Wentworth—in a city of 20,800 blocks. But since Pearl moved in, she’s torn down seven abandoned houses. In their place, she’s built a day care center for 64 children, a coffee shop, a garden, a playground, and a housing unit for single moms. She’s aiming to add a thrift store and a produce store next.
A volunteer reads to a child at the day care / Courtesy of Roseland Community “Good News” Day Care
Along the way, she’s celebrated the graduation of 75 mothers from high school, 37 from certificate programs, and 49 from college.
“More exciting than all those graduates and certificates is that these moms know Jesus as their Lord and Savior,” Pearl said.
“Every person on that block knows she loves them,” Cynthia said. “She has a passion, a childlike faith, and a tenderness I still see in her from the day she was saved.”
Pearl is clear she’s not the real source of any changes on her block.
“None of this was my plan,” Pearl said. “God had a plan for the people of Roseland, and he invited me to be part of it. I never knew what he was doing, and I made a lot of stupid moves—but even those were part of his plan.”
Pearl never knew what was coming next—she still doesn’t. But she has no doubt about the God she’s following. And she’s not worried about the future, because she’s already seen what God can do.
“If God can save me,” she said, “he can do anything.”
The Gospel Coalition