Decades Before King Unveiled His Dream, Another Pastor Spoke of His Own at Arts High

This weekend marks the 50th Anniversary of the famous “March on Washington.” The event was a high point of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, when hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to call for an end to racial hatred and discrimination against African-Americans. It was an iconic moment set in front of the marble icon of the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” rang out to those gathered there, and to billions more on video since then. The world wasn’t quite the same after that. Jim Crowism wasn’t dead yet, but its days were numbered. 

But the Modern Civil Rights Movement started much, much earlier, far away from the D.C. nexus of National Power and Authority. Teachers dispute over where it began, and all of their arguments are interesting and valid ones. Some teach that the 20th century movement emerged from the brutal Mississippi murder of Chicago teen Emmet Till. Other educators point back a bit beforehand, to the Second World War. In that global struggle, African-Americans like the Tuskegee Airmen proved themselves as accomplished warriors in the skies over Europe in battles with the German Luftwaffe. But being a local historian and Arts High teacher, I like to look much closer for events in Newark. And one gathering in particular stands out not only for where it occurred – in 1938 in the Arts High School Auditorium – but because of the stark, innovative and honest message of the primary speaker involved – Chicago’s Dr. J.C. Austin.

Like King, who would emerge politically decades later, Austin was a Christian preacher that promoted civil rights. But the Chicago pastor embraced the equally important link between civil rights and the human condition. In the late 1930’s, Austin had more or less lost faith in any government’s ability to raise living and educational standards for African-Americans. Instead, like Malcolm X would in the early 1960’s, he preached a dramatic form of black self-reliance. And on October 13, 1938 he preached to a packed audience in Newark’s newest Art Deco Masterpiece, Arts High School, to promote his principles.

The 1930’s had not been kind of the Brick City. Newark was heavily industrialized during this era, and had experienced massive unemployment coupled with several waves of bank failures. Though FDR’s “New Deal” had been operational for a few years by 1938, its benefits had touched the city unevenly. For some, the new Federal programs such as Social Security and public works had eased their poverty. But for Newark’s large black population at the time these programs were of limited help, and like today, the black unemployment rate was higher than the national average. Racial discrimination, though less outright in the North than in the Jim Crow South, was taking its disproportionate economic and social toll on the African-American community. As the Great Depression wore on, and even worsened after 1937, Austin’s thunderous message of racial economic self-reliance gained more and more listeners.

In his opening remarks, the pastor provided himself as a tangible example of one who actively practiced what he preached. He announced to the audience that his fine clothing had been bought in shops he had carefully researched as ones that employed African-Americans, and that others should follow.

Austin told the audience that he blamed slavery for the overall condition of African-Americans, but not for the reason that most people thought. Slavery had in fact divided African-Americans into competing sub-classes that competed and discriminated against each other. So from the slave past emerged an equally great peril that threatened to keep the African-American community in a near-permanent state of poverty: fragmentation. This had to be countered with a working unity of purpose, with the end-goals of widespread, meaningful economic prosperity and self-respect.

The churchman then explained how these goals could be accomplished. First, African-Americans had to organize, socially and economically. They had to patronize their own businesses. Affluent black professionals like dentists and lawyers needed to spend their money buying products sold by stores that didn’t discriminate in their hiring practices. Black-owned businesses required support as well. The community needed to stick together and remain socially aware, even in times of economic turmoil like workers’ strikes. “No Negro should walk past a picket line where his race is trying to win job opportunities…he should willingly get in the line and help win the fight.”

Austin was aware that there would be resistance from the white majority…and that this resistance could manifest itself in many forms, violent or otherwise. But he told the crammed audience that day at Arts High not to give into fear. “We don’t rise by accident, but by our own efforts…nervous and fearful people will not rise. Don’t be a coward. In order for the race to succeed in the fight for more jobs, they must adhere to the law that governs man.”

To make the core concept of his speech a reality (racial self-reliance), Austin told his captivated listeners that the black race wouldn’t prosper before the liberation of the Black Mind. Outside forces such as sympathetic white politicians or otherwise could not be counted on. “We hope for our redemption to come by the way of some emancipator, but it will only come by our own efforts.”

Yes, King had a dream, but so did Austin. Whose dream was more valid, more workable, more realistic? History, I believe, has made room for both. Minority populations should organize and promote their own interests…it only makes sense to, especially during eras of open discrimination and hatred. So in this sense, Austin was right. Even in 1938 Newark had long been home to a wide variety of ethnic and religious self-help societies. But King’s triumph decades later needs to be acknowledged as well. King’s (somewhat) successful efforts to convince the majority of Americans that African-Americans were people entitled to equality and a decent life of opportunity and education should never be discounted. It was a white-majority Congress in the 1960’s that passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and help to amend the Constitution to bar poll taxes.  

It gave me a great sense of pride to find this story in the pages of the now-digitized Pittsburgh Courier. Every morning when I pull up to Arts High and walk through its beautiful, marble-plated masterpiece of a lobby, I cannot help but admire the finery of its civic architecture. But the building’s historic legacy isn’t just in brick and mortar. It’s in the stirring events and decades of learning contained within. It’s in the people, who have passed through its halls over the past two centuries…pastors, activists, and of course, teachers and students. Thankfully that legacy of progress and intellectual vibrancy continue within its walls to this day.