Rev. Dunbar-Perkins Oral History

Rev. Dunbar-Perkins Oral History

Chaplaincy

This is my third, or technically my fourth career. And I come out of the corporate arena and moved into education and then moved into ministry, but I think it would be helpful to backtrack. I originally [was] born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, one of the children of the Great Migration of the 1930s and '40s. My parents came up from the South, so we have a connected history to that part of our country's history and I'm just old enough to have experienced a lot of issues with segregation and Jim Crow: not being allowed to drink water, not being allowed to sit in certain places, so I have an active history with that. And I bring that experience with me. I brought it through my corporate experience, I brought it through my teaching experience, which was very helpful because I worked in, intentionally worked in schools where the students had been literally kicked out of the mainstream schools, the high school students, and was able to connect them to the history of who they were and to give them a sense of being more than what they were labeled as. And I think that was the beginning of my interest in ministry. At some point, through a series of meeting different people, being involved in different city projects, that I ended up getting involved with the Presbyterian Church and from there I ended up in seminary and most people who end up in seminary don't know how they got there, they just wake up one morning and you're in seminary! So I went to seminary and my intention was to become a minister at a, probably an African American church, which means, and in Minnesota would mean to, to leave Minnesota. There's only one African American church and, a Presbyterian church, and they already had a pastor that I was involved with hiring. Let me see, how can I put this? I was actually the first African American woman or man who was ordained into the Presbyterian Church in Minnesota, and I felt the weight of that. What type of responsibility did that mean? Well, it turned out that I took a residency at this hospital after I graduated from seminary because I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to a church or leaving and my husband and I, my husband liked it here, I don't know why, but he did. [laughs] And I've been here for 30 years so I can't really say I've hated it obviously. But when I came here, I still had, my intention was to be a parish minister. However, in my journey through this hospital, the connections I made with people, I saw around me a parish being created for me to respond to that looked nothing like what I had envisioned. And my first assignment was here in the [Reno?] unit, then my longer assignment as a resident was with the oncology group, and because I have a background in science and did research in sickle cell anemia back in the '70s, what this particular unit, the oncology unit, also works with blood disorders, and there is a population of sickle cell patients. So we're talking about like a 35-year cycle coming to pass where I had this semi-medical background in understanding the disease and then the population, the population is 99% African American and I was being drawn back into people who have been extremely marginalized for whatever reason, just like my students, and came to the realization that anybody that's in the hospital has a sense of being marginalized; no matter how much money you have. I've seen some of the most powerful people in the country here, and people [who are] very rich, people who have nothing, people who are pushed aside because of ethnicity, where, what country they may come from, what type of religion they practice. And I realize as I look back on my own experience of being marginalized, and even my life being in danger sometimes because of my ethnicity, that I could relate to that sense of being disconnected and that's what my true calling was as a chaplain.

Kevin Dowling

Religion Department (Carleton College)

2013

Sound

.mp3 (audio)

C_RevDunbarPerkinsOralHistory.mp3

Minneapolis, MN