On the kitchen wall in Charles P. Stokes Sr.’s rowhouse is a photograph from 1987, one he views now with decidedly mixed feelings. On the left is Pope John Paul II, reaching to clasp the hands of Stokes’ daughter Thomasine, who was visiting Rome with the choir at St. Edward Catholic Church.
And just beyond them, beaming at the camera, is the Rev. Maurice Blackwell, then pastor of St. Edward and a rising star of African-American Catholicism in Baltimore.
At the time, Charles Stokes’ 11-year-old grandson, too, seemed to be thriving at St. Edward, joining youth groups and attending Bible classes. Dontee P. Stokes looked up to Blackwell. The priest seemed to pay special attention to the boy.
“It seemed like he was grooming Dontee for something,” recalls Thomasine Wells, his aunt. After the teen became president of the Catholic Youth Organization at St. Edward, “Dontee even started talking like him.”
No one in the Stokes family objected. Blackwell seemed an ideal role model – an eloquent spiritual leader who melded the stately rituals of Catholicism with the fervent preaching traditional in the black community.
“He walked on water in my house,” says Charles Stokes Sr., 64, the patriarch of a proud Catholic clan: 12 children, 47 grandchildren, five great-grandchildren. “He ate at my table. He baptized my grandchildren,” Dontee included.
Then, six years after the photo was taken, Dontee began to falter in school. Pressed by a school counselor and then a doctor, he said Blackwell had been sexually molesting him for three years.
Prosecutors declined to charge Blackwell, clearing the way for Archbishop William H. Keeler to restore the priest to his parish after three months of therapy. His congregation joyously welcomed him back, Dontee and his relatives left the church, and the archdiocese apparently considered the matter resolved.
But for Dontee Stokes, the pain did not end – not even after 1998, when Blackwell had to go on leave after admitting to sexual involvement with another youth. Stokes tried suicide, drank to blot the pain, withdrew to sleep or silence, his family says. It might have been hard for him to forget Blackwell: They lived a few blocks apart in Reservoir Hill, where all the neighbors recognize Blackwell’s SUV with its “PRIEST” vanity plates.
Finally, Monday night, police say, Stokes confronted Blackwell, demanded an apology he did not get, and shot the priest three times with a .357 Magnum revolver.
Stokes, now 26, who is in jail and is scheduled for a bail hearing this afternoon, bought the gun illegally a month ago from a stranger, a law enforcement official said yesterday. He told police he bought it for protection against robbers, not with any thought of using it on his alleged abuser, the official said.
Blackwell, 56, remained in fair condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center last night. Neither he nor his relatives have been willing to comment on the case.
He is expected to recover and is likely to be the key witness at any future trial of Stokes. But if he appears on the witness stand, he might face public questioning for the first time about the alleged abuse.
The tragedy has engulfed two large West Baltimore families that share deep Catholic roots.
A cousin of Dontee Stokes still works for the archdiocese as a secretary. Dontee’s uncle, Milton Stokes, was in seminary preparing for the priesthood when he was fatally shot in West Baltimore while walking home from church in 1979.
Charles Stokes, a retired statistical analyst for the postal service, jokes that he was “Baltimore’s first black millionaire,” because he was appointed in the 1970s to a small board that controlled the property of St. Bernardine Catholic Church.
It was to St. Bernardine’s, on Edmondson Avenue, that Maurice Blackwell was assigned in 1974 after becoming one of the first two African-Americans to be ordained as priests in the Baltimore archdiocese.
He was already a minor celebrity. Saying he wanted to study Latin, he had talked his way into Towson Catholic High School, becoming its first black student. In 1964, at 17, he won the coveted national title of “Outstanding Catholic Youth of the Year,” the first youth of any race from the Baltimore Archdiocese to be so honored.
Glowing reports in The Sun and Catholic publications marveled at his talents and leadership abilities. The archdiocesan youth director said that while Blackwell “has had his share of the myriad discriminations his race has suffered … he never stopped trying nor soured.”
One Catholic magazine, The Sign, reported a poignant moment at Towson Catholic when students were discussing the enrollment of James Meredith as the first black student at the University of Mississippi:
“For 15 minutes, in a classroom in Maryland, Maurice spoke for the colored majority of mankind, about how it feels to be a Negro, about the morality of being what God made him to be. When he finished, every girl was weeping, every boy was cheering.”
The same eloquence helped Blackwell make his mark at St. Bernardine’s, which before 1974 had been a “dumping ground for problem priests,” according to Charles Stokes, who believes it was neglected because it was a black congregation.
“He’s a dynamic speaker,” says Charles Stokes. “When you heard him preach, you thought you were hearing Martin Luther King. That type of elocution binds people to you.”
Five years later Blackwell moved on to St. Edward at West Lafayette Avenue and Poplar Grove Street as pastor – the first black man to serve as spiritual head of a Baltimore parish.
Blackwell oversaw a striking revival, as the church grew from 100 to more than 900 families. A breathless Catholic Review story on his work counted 67 committees and organizations, noting that Blackwell often stressed African-American and African traditions.
One measure of his achievement was the loyalty of most congregants in the face of the accusation of Dontee Stokes – who made his charge at 17, the age when Blackwell had collected his national honor.
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Even after Blackwell’s 1998 admission of sexual involvement with a different minor, many of his parishioners protested his removal. Once, Dontee Stokes’ mother, Tamara Stokes, visited a St. Edward’s prayer meeting to challenge the congregation’s support for the priest. Instead, the parishioners turned on her, her father said.
Since Monday’s shooting, Blackwell’s supporters have been more reticent, while decrying the media storm the case has unleashed.
“He’s an absolutely remarkable man,” said A. Skipp Sanders, Maryland’s deputy superintendent of education and a friend of Blackwell’s for 30 years. In a brief interview, Sanders said he thought distorted media coverage of Blackwell and the abuse scandal in general might be partly to blame for Monday night’s violence.
“I think in part what happened happened because this has been so tabloidized,” Sanders said. Declining to speak at length, he said, “Whose opinion will it change? Those of us who really know him know what kind of person this is. The rest just want to be titillated.”
Others offer support for Blackwell while declining to take a stand on the accusation against him.
“I’ve always known him to be one who was always trying to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord,” said Roger L. Holliman, chairman of the music department at Randallstown High School, who worked beside Blackwell as music director at both St. Bernardine’s and St. Edward’s. “And as for his personal life, well, I don’t know anything about that.”
Holliman says that like many others associated with the two churches, he knows both the extended Blackwell and Stokes families very well and cannot take sides: “We are just praying for them, and we just hope the Lord will bring them all healing.”
And Charles Stokes, while deeply angry at what he believes Blackwell did to his grandson, says he feels sympathy for the priest’s family. The shooting awoke memories of his son’s shooting years ago, he said.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to the Blackwell family,” he said. “I know how much pain they can be in.”
Many in his family, feeling betrayed by the church, have left to join Baptist congregations. But Charles Stokes remains loyal to Catholicism. He welcomes the current wave of exposure of abusive priests, as excruciating as it is for the faithful.
“My thought is, thank God the Lord is cleaning house,” he said. “He’s cleaning house from Boston to Florida and from Baltimore to California.”
Sun staff writers Gail Gibson and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this article.
<!– ART CREDITELIZABETH MALBY : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTCharles Stokes Sr., grandfather of Dontee Stokes, says of the church scandal, "Thank God the Lord is cleaning house."
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITELIZABETH MALBY : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTCharles P. Stokes Sr. says of the Rev. Maurice J. Blackwell, "He walked on water in my house. He ate at my table. He baptized my grandchildren."
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITKARL MERTON FERRON : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTDontee Stokes has told law en forcement authorities he wanted an apology from the clergyman who was shot.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITCOURTESY OF WMAR-TV
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTThe Rev. Maurice J. Blackwell, in undated photo, was famed for melding Catholic and African-American traditions.
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