Pastor Donnell Bratton has served the community through his church, Overcomer’s Victory, since 2008. He was able to help meet their needs through the Covid-19 epidemic and the murder of George Floyd. He now sees an “American crisis” and is calling the community to action inspired by the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Bratton was a military kid who moved around to different cities. As an adolescent, his father got addicted to crack and ended up spending years behind bars.
In his early teens Bratton lived in the rough parts of Denver, Colorado. He became heavily involved with gangs and the drug activity that accompanied it. Local police advised his mother to move her sons out of state if she wanted them to survive outside of prison. She moved them to Minnesota where Bratton’s aunt and uncle lived.
“My mother moved me here October 29, 1991,” says Bratton. “On the 31st we had the Halloween blizzard, and I was upset with my mother.”
In the Twin Cities he got involved with drugs, but that changed after joining a church called Free at Last. Bratton was personally impacted by learning about the Poor People’s Campaign and the march for sanitation workers, especially the signs that read “I am a man.”
“He tried to get us to understand that you are a man; you’re not less than a man,” Bratton says. “That’s how I started in regard to wanting to have a positive impact in our community.”
In 2008, he started a church called Overcomer’s Victory. After the murder of George Floyd, his church became a community hub providing resources, from diapers to food.
As he drove around the neighborhoods populated with Black and brown folks, he thought, “This American Dream that has been sold to us…[I’m] not seeing that manifested in our lives, and it bothers me.
“I responded to a call of action,” he said. He now urges the community to heed his call to recognize the fentanyl crisis as a national emergency no less than the Covid pandemic.
“I do know a grandmother that, because she had back problems, ended up being strung out on fentanyl,” he says. “Then her daughter — she was a young mother — ended up being strung out on fentanyl. And now her son, who is 17 or 18 years old, is experiencing the fentanyl crisis.
“The daughter and the son were doing fentanyl together. The son started to overdose,” he explains. “The mother called the police while the son was going into shock and left him there because she didn’t want to go to jail.”
The son survived. This family was Black. There was no public outcry.
Bratton says what would call attention to the crisis is a person in the public sphere losing a loved one. At this point, he says, “it just hasn’t impacted the right family yet.”
This past Christmas Day, St. Paul Police found a toddler unresponsive following a 911 call. The child, who had ingested an unidentified drug, did not survive. Both his parents were arrested.
“Where is the community at?” Bratton asks. King’s response would have been the same as for the sanitation workers, he says: “He would have made it his top priority. He would call it America’s crisis.
“We have to call it what it is. …I believe King would make it a national crisis, and he would have been addressing this like we were addressing Covid.”
Vickie Evans-Nash welcomes reader responses to vnash@spokesan-recorder.com.