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Daughter reconciles conflicting images of famous father
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Published: January 11, 2009
At her father's recent funeral in an Alabama church, Chevara Orrin of Winston-Salem listened to one civil-rights veteran after another praise him.
Her father, the Rev. James Bevel, was an icon of the civil-rights movement who worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to tear down the walls of segregation.
What saddened Orrin was that speakers at the five-hour funeral danced around the fact that Bevel had been convicted just this past spring of molesting one of his daughters in the 1990s. "If you're going to bring it up at all, deal with it in a way that's helpful and healing," she said last week. Orrin said she too was molested by her father when she was a child. It's time for the silence to end, she said, whether the molester is famous or anonymous.
"We continue to cloak and veil child sexual abuse in shame and secrecy. I think the community has not yet figured out what's the proper response to deal with pedophilia," said Orrin, who runs the WhiteSpace Gallery with her husband and is an administrator at Winston-Salem State University.
Orrin, a 40-year-old mother, has spent most of her life trying to reconcile her feelings about her father. "I'm very proud to be the daughter of a man who contributed so much to the world through his civil-rights work," she told The Associated Press on Dec. 19, the day her father died at the age of 72. "I am equally devastated and disgusted by his pedophilia."
Bevel was the brilliant, eccentric visionary who, among other things, helped orchestrate the march from Selma to Montgomery and helped persuade King to voice his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was also the largely absent father, Orrin said, who molested her one night when she was 12. It happened in the Memphis area when she staying with her father while her mother was out of town.
Years later, Orrin said, she asked her mother why they never pressed charges. She said that her mother, who is white, told her that no one would have believed them. They were poor, and Bevel was a civil-rights giant. Social services would have taken custody of Orrin and her siblings if they pressed charges, Orrin said her mother told her. And Orrin said her mother correctly assumed that she would have been afraid to confront her father in court.
As an adult, Orrin asked her father why he had not provided for his children. She said he told her, "I got you the right to vote. I secured political freedoms for you." She said that "his thought process was this worldwide movement was for us."
Bevel had 16 children with nine women. Orrin and several of her siblings finally took action against him four years ago out of concern for his 7-and-a half-year-old daughter. "People don't just wake up one morning and stop being a pedophile," Orrin said.
She and several of her siblings compiled affidavits detailing sexual abuse and confronted their father. Orrin said he made no denials. But her father, who one relative said had been sexually abused as a child himself, refused to get help and give them custody of his daughter, she said.
Some veteran civil-rights activists told her and her siblings not to press charges against Bevel, Orrin said, because the publicity would hurt the legacy of the movement. They should have been helping her father confront his problem, she said.
Bevel pleaded not guilty at his trial in Leesburg, Va. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was free on bond, appealing the conviction, when pancreatic cancer killed him.
Orrin has undergone years of counseling to deal with the abuse she said she suffered from her father. She'd like to see abusers get help as well. "At the end of the day, they're still our fathers, our mothers, our uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters," she said.
"I do love my father," she wrote me in a follow-up e-mail. "I love him for the sacrifices he made that have enabled me to enjoy political freedom and social justice. I love him for his role in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the vote I was able to cast that helped put a man of color in the White House."
"I don't believe he was a monster. Just a man with human frailty perhaps incapable of facing himself in the end."
But she believes that justice must be served, and that the victims have to come first. She wants to help them by starting a monthly support group, WhiteSpace SafeSpace, that will meet at her gallery.
She got inspiration for her cause from her father's funeral, especially from one song that was a civil-rights standard, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round." It includes this line: ‘I'm gonna keep on a-walkin', Lord, keep on a-talking, Lord, marching up to freedom land."
Chevara Orrin's silence has ended.
(For more information about the support group, call Orrin at 722-4671.)
■ John Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at 727-7357 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com.
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