Everyone at Shorter AME Church knew her as Mother Ira E. Slack, its poised and impeccably attired matriarch. Slack died Sept. 11 at age 96.
“She was the mother of our church,” said longtime friend Cordelia Ann Jackson.
At Shorter AME, seniority carries considerable weight. Church members routinely describe themselves in terms of their span at Shorter. Jackson puts this in perspective when she says she has “only been a member there for 16 years.”
Ira Slack attended Shorter AME for more than 50 years. Scores of Shorter’s younger members, including former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, remember her as the superintendent of the church Sunday school and organizer of its Vacation Bible School and preschool program.
Ira Slack attended Shorter AME when it still offered two services each Sunday. She helped in the 1980s when the congregation moved from the church’s old building on Park Avenue, now home to Cleo Parker Robinson’s dance company, to its sleek new campus on Colorado Boulevard.
Along with pastor J. Langston Boyd Jr. and others in Shorter’s congregation, Slack worked to rename 32nd Street as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. She also helped in the campaign to change a length of Jackson Street, adjacent to the church property, to Richard Allen Court, after the founder of the AME church.
Though she bore no children of her own, Slack took a maternal interest in the congregation’s children.
“All of the children I have worked with are mine,” Slack wrote in a note for her own memorial program.
When Webb was a boy, he knew to mind his manners and his decorum when Mother Slack was in church. She was there every Sunday, dressed in outfits she meant to please the Lord and raise the sartorial bar for other churchgoers.
Distressed when comfort replaced bandwagon standards in recent years, Slack held on to her fastidiousness as well as her tongue.
“When she worked with the children as the YPD director – the Young People’s Department – she’d see that they were dressed in jackets and gloves, and then things changed so drastically,” Jackson said. “The way kids dress today! Why, she just loved dressing up, and always thought you should look your best and do your best while you can.
“When we changed to just one service on Sundays, she must’ve gotten up at 4 or 5 a.m. to be ready. She dressed herself, and she dressed to the nines.”
Slack served as the director of Shorter’s missionary group, which changed its name to the Ira E. Slack Missionary Society in the early 1990s, and served on civic boards, including the Girls and Boys Club, Denver Public Schools and women’s organizations.
“Yes, she saw a lot, and over the years she said she wondered about it all,” Jackson said. “I’m sure there were things she didn’t approve of, but all she said was, ‘Keep a prayer on your lips.”‘
Her husband predeceased her.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
