Feisty Father John Powis

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

There’s no slowing down John Powis.


Although he officially “retired” last February at age 71, Father John Powis, who cut his activist teeth battling the old Board of Education and the teachers union 40 years ago, is still fighting. Now, it’s greedy landlords and the city’s “unresponsiveness” to helping the poor get decent housing.


Father Powis – the Energizer Bunny of the Catholic Church – is not your run-of-the-mill Pat O’Brien or Bing Crosby kind of priest.


The feisty father openly disagrees with Rome on pedophile priests and celibacy for priests: He says priests who molest should be immediately dumped, and clergymen should be allowed to marry. And he thinks the church is wrong to tell parishioners to vote against any politician who is “pro-choice.”


“Abortion is wrong,” he says, sitting in an office in his old church, St. Barbara’s on Bleecker Street in the heart of Bushwick. “But there must be other issues, too. What about poverty, and homelessness, and capital punishment?”


Fighting for the underdog is nothing new for John Powis. He started some 50 years ago when, while studying for the priesthood, he landed a job selling hot dogs at Ebbets Field and rooting for the luckless Brooklyn Dodgers.


Being a Dodger fan gave him losing side consciousness. The clerical collar brought a career in ministering to the poorest of the poor. His primary battlegrounds have been education and housing – always taking up the unpopular cause – and he has presided at far too many funerals for the victims of AIDS and gunshots.


Retirement has brought the blessed end of administrative duties, but not the ministering to the flock.


He went sleepless on a recent night to be with a family whose 7-month-old son was born with eight holes in his heart and has never been outside a hospital. The boy’s father just lost his job – in part because of astronomical medical bills – and the family of six is on the verge of homelessness.


“This is a family that is as good as they get,” he says, a worried look creeping across his normally smiling round face, which is topped with a few wisps of gray hair. “They can’t afford $1,000 or $1,200 or $1,500 for an apartment. What are they going to do? We can’t let them end up in a shelter.”


Instead of playing golf or puttering around a garden, Father Powis spends his days cajoling developers to build affordable housing and helping people facing eviction in Housing Court apply for “Jiggetts” money. This is a little-known state program that provides extra rent money for some people on public assistance – if they know about it and are willing to jump through hoops to get it.


Housing is just the latest cause for Father Powis, who spent 16 years at St. Barbara’s and 25 years before that at Our Lady of Presentation in Brownsville.


He started out in the 1960s as an activist in the controversial and much hated busing movement to integrate the city’s public schools. Brownsville’s schools were packed and on a half-day schedule, while schools in Bensonhurst and Borough Park were under capacity.


“So we started busing and it was just awful,” he says. “These poor kids got pelted with eggs and tomatoes and everything else.”


Then, Father Powis and other community leaders founded the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, created in the late 1960s to try to give the predominantly black community local control.


Another unpopular cause – and another disaster.


“The idea was to try to form a small district with its own superintendent, principal, and what have you,” he says. “It seemed so promising and full of hope, like everything else in the ’60s.”


But, Father Powis says – more clouds creeping across his face – there was constant friction between the new local board and the teachers union. It erupted in May 1968,near the end of the district’s first – and basically only – school year when the predominantly black board, of which Father Powis was a member, tried to fire 18 white teachers.


“The union went bananas,” he says. “It was mean. It was bad.” The union threatened not to come back in September, so the community placed newspaper ads for nonunion teachers and got an overwhelming response.


The union went on strike, shutting down all city schools – except the nonunion ones in Ocean Hill-Brownsville – for two months.


“Teachers would come every day on buses and picket and throw eggs,” he says. Community leaders accused the teachers of racism; the teachers accused activists of anti-Semitism. “There was a lot of name-calling on both sides,” he admits. “It was ugly.”


In the end, the teachers won, the experiment failed, and Father Powis – who has the distinction of being robbed by fugitive killer JoAnne Chesimard and living to tell about it – looked for other ways to change the schools, and began focusing on other issues, like housing.


These days, he works with the East Brooklyn Congregations – a multi-denominational coalition that raises money to fund three small high schools and build apartment complexes called Nehemiah housing. They get 23,000 applications for just 600 units.


He’s also involved with the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, which provides money to help people in up to 600 rent-stabilized buildings in the neighborhood.


“Housing is the new frontier,” he says. “Bushwick is the next Williamsburg: gentrification. People are being forced out. Sure, it’s nice to have property fixed up and have new people come in, but what happens to the poor? Where on earth do they go?”


The New York Sun

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