New York ‘Became My Parish:’ A Black Chaplain Remembers 9/11

For Dr. Suzan “Sujay” Johnson Cook, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, shattered the confidence New Yorkers carried like a birthright.

“We’re very confident about life, and nobody ever thought the rug would be pulled from under us,” she says. “And it was.”

Twenty-five years later, Johnson Cook, a pastor, theologian and former ambassador, remembers not only the nearly 3,000 people killed, but the first responders, families and emergency operators who carried the trauma of that day long after the phones went silent and the smoke cleared.

LEARN MORE: Black First Responders and Grief That Surfaces Years Later 

Johnson Cook later served as the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom under former President Barack Obama. She is also the founder of the Global Black Women’s Chamber of Commerce, which advocates for and creates opportunities for Black women entrepreneurs worldwide.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, she was the New York Police Department’s first Black woman chaplain — and a New Yorker planning to vote.

‘Another Plane Hit the Towers’

She lived in the Bronx high-rise where she had grown up and was picking up her mother so they could vote together in a local election. The building’s doorman told her a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

Like many others, Johnson Cook assumed a small aircraft had accidentally veered off course. Then she returned from voting.

“Another plane has hit the towers,” the doorman told her.

That was when she knew something unimaginable was happening.

Johnson Cook was also pastor of Bronx Christian Fellowship, where Bahamian preacher Bishop Neil Ellis was scheduled to open a three-night revival. His flight was expected at LaGuardia Airport near the time the second plane struck.

Using her police credentials, Johnson Cook crossed a bridge closed to other traffic. From approximately 12 miles away, she could see the black smoke.

“It looked like dominoes on fire,” she recalls. “It looked like King Kong had hit a building.”

Serving While Driving

The airport had been evacuated. Frightened travelers crowded into taxis, but an elderly Black couple stood alone. They were about 90 and had been removed from the first flight they had ever boarded. They had no luggage and no way to reach their Bronx destination.

Johnson Cook put them in her small car. On the way, she picked up a firefighter who had been called to his command.

“That became my thing,” she says. “I just started driving people.”

She transported grandparents whose adult children were police officers and firefighters ordered to report for duty. She helped them retrieve children from schools after buses and subways stopped running. She drove past people walking miles from lower Manhattan, their clothing covered in gray ash.

Then she returned home and saw her own mother trembling in front of the television.

“Have I been running so fast that I missed my own mother?” Johnson Cook remembers asking herself. “I’ve taken everybody else’s kids. Now I’m a kid to this woman.”

She stopped and sat beside her.

‘They Need You Now’

That evening, she went to her church, unsure whether anyone would attend the scheduled revival, but the sanctuary was packed. Two church members had walked from downtown and arrived covered in ash. Instead of holding a traditional service, the congregation told stories about where they had been and what they had seen.

One man said he ordinarily rode the subway an additional stop through the World Trade Center. That morning, he felt led to get off earlier.

“The Lord uses us amazingly to be comforters,” Johnson Cook says. “As the Holy Spirit is comforting me, I’m comforting them just by the ministry of presence.”

At about 10 that night, NYPD headquarters called.

Exhausted, she telephoned her brother. His answer sent her back out: “If they ever needed you, they need you now.”

At headquarters, relatives of 26 missing police officers waited together while search crews looked for their loved ones. Johnson Cook gravitated toward the only Black family in the room.

“You don’t always have to say something, particularly when you don’t know what to say,” she says. “You just show up.”

After midnight, she went to Ground Zero wearing the sandals and light pantsuit she had put on that beautiful September morning. Ash covered her car and the abandoned fruit stands near the towers. Firefighters and rescue dogs had searched for hours without finding the survivors everyone still hoped were there.

‘Can You Pray for Us?’

Race, gender and denomination briefly lost their power to divide.

“It didn’t matter whether I was a female or male clergy person, White or Black,” she says. “They were like, ‘Can you pray for us?’”

She gathered firefighters into a circle and prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Johnson Cook later described the transformation simply: “New York City became my parish.”

She also mourned fellow chaplain the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who died while ministering at the World Trade Center and was designated the first official casualty of the attacks.

In the days that followed, Johnson Cook was called to the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, where traumatized 911 operators had heard people scream, pray, say goodbye to their families and make the decision to jump from the burning towers.

Some callers pleaded, “Please tell my family that I love them,” Johnson Cook recalled during a program on the 20thanniversary of the tragedy. Others “asked 911 dispatchers to pray … so they could go in peace and be assured that the Lord was with them.”

Johnson Cook prayed with the operators: “If we can get through this together, we can get through it.”

Twenty years later, she produced a short film honoring five Black women who continued serving as 911 operators and dispatchers: Cheryl James, Monique Brown, Darlene Cherebin, Raeann Singleton and Natalie Wilson. Johnson Cook called them “unsung she-roes” who demonstrated “faith, courage, fortitude, brilliance and resilience,” according to The Positive Community⁠.

‘There Was No Relief’

For the next 60 days after the attack, Johnson Cook attended funerals and accompanied families asked to identify body fragments or personal belongings. Neither she nor many other responders had received meaningful trauma training. Eventually, while driving, she pulled over and began to cry.

“There was no relief,” she says. “There was just no therapist for the ones who need therapy.”

Five years later, Hurricane Katrina brought the buried trauma rushing back when the NYPD requested volunteers to help in Louisiana.

“That stuff came back up like vomit,” she says. “It was paralyzing.”

Her work since then — as a pastor, diplomat and advocate for Black women in business and ministry — has continued to cross the boundaries between faith and public life. Yet the lesson Johnson Cook carried from Ground Zero was not about titles or institutions. It was about the power of being present when no easy words or answers exist.

As America marks 25 years since 9/11, Johnson Cook wants the story to include the Black women whose voices kept frightened people from dying alone. She also wants people to remember the responders who kept helping others while their own wounds went untreated.

“There was a whole lot of death,” she says. But even there, among the ash, prayers and unanswered questions, “spirits needed to be resurrected.”

The post New York ‘Became My Parish:’ A Black Chaplain Remembers 9/11 appeared first on Word In Black.