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How Donnie McClurkin Overcame Rape, Sexual Abuse And Leukemia Scare To Become A Gospel Music Star
Ebony, August, 2001 by Glenn Jeffers
Tell me, what do you give When you've given your all and Seems like you can't make it through? You just stand When there's nothing left to do.(*)
AT 8, Donnie McClurkin was raped by a relative. At 13, he was raped by another relative. At 31, he was diagnosed with leukemia.
But at 36, with church, music and an unyielding faith, McClurkin hit gold with his self-tiffed debut gospel album and changed his life.
And now, after triumphing over traumatic events that would have destroyed a lesser man, McClurkin has decided to tell the true story of how he overcame sexual abuse, family drug addiction, alcoholism, and a life-threatening disease, and found peace and salvation as a gospel singer and minister.
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McClurkin had been telling this story for years to the congregation at Perfecting Church in Detroit. And each time he related how he had been abused and how God had delivered him, he watched people's eyes light up with hope. Finally, after a number of people asked him to share his story with a larger audience, McClurkin went back home to Amityville, N.Y., to ask his mother for permission to write a book, knowing it would mean exposing the frailties of a church-going, God-loving family. But Frances McClurkin, a former preacher herself, agreed, and McClurkin spent the next 18 months writing the newbook, Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor.
No longer a victim, in full control of his life, the 41-year-old gospel singer/songwriter/minister says he decided to tell the truth about his life not to air his family's dirty laundry, but because he is a teacher, and "a teacher has to lend' himself to the message" because "other people need to find it and realize that they're not alone in what they've gone through."
The story of how Donnie McClurkin realized that he was not alone started in Amityville, in Long Island, New York, where he was born on November 9, 1959, to Frances and Donald Sr. As a child, McClurkin would lead his nine other siblings in their nightly rendition of their original arrangement, "Good Night, Good Night To You ..."
No one knew then that the 8-year-old was trying to understand a shocking event in his life. Unknown to his siblings, he had been sexually molested by a male relative and was trying to understand why. "An eight-year-old mind can't handle such levels of perversion," McClurkin says.
McClurkin found an answer of sorts a year later on Sunday, July 14, 1969, at Amityville Gospel Tabernacle, when the minister told the congregation that Christ died "because he loves us." The idea was one that was intriguing to young McClurkin, who had heard about God from his mother. Could God help him?
The answer was yes, for after he answered the call and gave his life to Jesus, his world changed. The church, he writes in his book, became "my world, a place where I felt at peace and felt like I belonged."
If church helped McClurkin find peace, meeting renowned gospel singer Andrae Crouch changed his musical horizons. After the gospel singer appeared at Bethel Tabernacle in Jamaica, N.Y., he befriended the young man and urged him to develop his musical talents. In the days and weeks that followed, McClurkin fell in love with music, with the way it filled him with joy and replaced the pain. "What I couldn't verbalize," he says, "I could express musically. It was an escape. When you sang, you left everything. You entered a place that was literally divine."
But, unhappily, there was still a lot of the non-divine in McClurkin's world, as he discovered when he was sexually violated by another male relative. A pattern was developing, but the young man struggled against it, prayed over it and refused to accept it or resign himself to it.
His home life, he says, didn't help. By this time, his family was experiencing severe drug- and alcohol-abuse problems. Overwhelmed temporarily, McClurkin became shy and reclusive and avoided people, pouring all his energy, all his hurt into church and music.
By this time, he had mastered the piano and was playing for the youth choir and forming musical groups, including the McClurkin Singers and a choir which rented a PA system and sang on street corners in the worst section of town.
In 1983, while working with the choir, McClurkin met the Rev. Marvin L. Winans. Impressed by McClurkin's performance at a gospel workshop seminar, Winans invited McClurkin to Detroit to help start a ministry. Six years later, in 1989, McClurkin moved to Detroit, became an associate minister at Perfecting Church and began touring and singing at different churches across the country.
Life once again slowed to normal, and then suddenly, in 1991, a sharp pain and swelling, followed by internal bleeding, led, he says, to a diagnosis of leukemia. The doctor suggested immediate treatment, but McClurkin, who was then 31, decided to take another path. Looking back now, McClurkin concedes that he was afraid but says that he had to take his own advice. "I tell people to believe that God will save you," he says, "[and] I had to turn around and practice the very thing that I preached."
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