On the Road to Black Caucus
In preparation for the 48th gathering of the National Black Presbyterian Caucus, the Presbyterian Historical Society offers stories from the Black Presbyterian Archive. Click here to learn how PHS is collecting records of the Black Presbyterian experience through the African American Leaders and Congregations Initiative.
A Black man took the pulpit at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church in Chicago in the summer of 1970. His sermon was from Acts 26. Paul’s self-defense before Agrippa, and his account of his epiphany on the road to Damascus.
He spoke about a blinding light he had seen the other day, during the General Assembly, where a minister had said to his audience “I love you.” Douglas relays the feeling: “How beautiful is the fellowship! How much do they love the unloved one! How much do they love those with slanted eyes, light skin, kinky hair, stinky bodies.”
Julius Douglas was visiting Chicago as commissioner to the General Assembly, his third time, averring it was his last. He was there when members of the Submarine Church, using “words I hadn’t heard since I was in the Army” stood at the dais and “smoked pot.”
He then recounts the moderator of the Assembly, fellow North Carolinian William R. Laws Jr., putting an arm around one of the young people, “tears streaming down his cheeks,” and saying “I have been trying to understand.” The moderator’s visit and lunch with the Submariners brought Julius Douglas back to his theme:
“This is what I'm talking about, love! Love that goes out of these cloistered walls into the ghetto and into the alleys and wherever you find yourself, that makes a witness for Christ. This is what they did back there who set the world on fire.”
Julius Theodore Douglas Jr. was pastor of St. James Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina from 1946 to 1971. Born 27 September 1903 in Chester, South Carolina, the son of a barber, he was educated in Presbyterian mission schools – Brainerd institute in Chester, and Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta, Georgia. He graduated from Johnson C. Smith University in 1927, and moved to Chicago to attend McCormick Theological Seminary. In 1928 Helen Drayton married him; the couple would have eight children. Throughout his education, Douglas barbered, paying his way through college with his father’s skills.
Ordained by the Presbytery of Chicago in 1930, Douglas went on to serve Calvary Presbyterian Church (Wilson, N.C.), Gibson Chapel (Springfield, Mo.), and Carmel Presbyterian Church (Cincinnati, Ohio). From 1944 to 1946 he served in the United States Army. In 1946 he returned to North Carolina, to St. James.
Greensboro of the mid-20th century was a boomtown. Driven by the Burlington textile mills and the Air Force Overseas Replacement Depot, the city doubled in size between 1940 and 1970. (Black exodus northwards and westwards, and the relocation of white office workers south, in tandem shrank the city’s Black population) Julius Douglas was justly proud of his growing congregation, pointing to the minutes of the General Assembly for proof of his work: 201 members in 1946, 251 in 1950, 324 in 1955, 483 in 1965.
So-called “urban renewal” and the slow and uneven desegregation of Greensboro’s public schools shaped the decades between 1950 and 1970. Greensboro was the first North Carolina city to empanel a redevelopment authority, starting with “blight” clearance in the African American neighborhood of Warnersville. Greensboro is renowned for the invention of the sit-in as a protest tactic – moved by the slow pace of desegregation in the wake of Brown v Board, from February through May 1960 students from North Carolina A&T led sit-ins at lunch counters, eventually bringing to an end the official segregationist policy of Woolworth's. Among the first students was St. James’s Robert Tyrone “Pat” Patterson.
In his ministerial portfolio of 1965-1966 Douglas describes himself as “a moderate on the race issue” and acknowledges “the realities of our housing patterns” as “one of the unhappy paradoxes of our social life.” Douglas's evenhandedness reappears during a story he tells at Lincoln Park. The main political organizer of working-class people in Greensboro at the time was white, and at one point a young Black man, himself a labor organizer, came to Douglas and said he wouldn’t work with the white organizer. "I look with suspicion upon any white person who profess to love Negroes, love Blacks. The experiences of this country and my own personal experiences, prove it again and again.” Douglas responded “I am a Christian and I hope to act like a Christian.”
The Douglas of 1966 would have been divided from the “hippies” on stage in Chicago in 1970 by his attitude towards the American war in Vietnam. In his October 1966 personal statement he notes that his oldest son spent seven years in the United States Air Force, and that his youngest was in officers’ training. “As a loyal American I support the Administration and its concerted effort to reach a negotiated peace.”
Why after a fruitful twenty-year pastorate was Julius Douglas looking for work? St. James had just finished one six-figure capital project and was embarking on a second, the church was self-sustaining, and 20 years together, wrote Douglas, is “not good for either the Church or the Minister.” Besides which, the Minister was in robust health. Ultimately, Douglas would remain at St. James until his retirement in 1971. He died 29 December 1973.
The church he shepherded for a quarter century continues to act with the same ethos of love that Douglas preached in Chicago that summer day in 1970. St. James serves hot meals to their neighbors, partners with a local health center to provide psychiatric services, and much more. The Rev. Diane Givens Moffett, St. James’s pastor for more than a decade, speaking of the church during its 150th anniversary, emphasized love of the other: “We’ve got to work like everything depends on us, pray like everything depends on God.”
Learn more
Julius T. Douglas Jr. sermon at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church (Chicago, Ill.), 1970.
O. Henry magazine, “A Beacon Of Light,” 2017.
United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Synod of Catawba. Argus.
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