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Biography
from American National Biography (2004)
Published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies
and Oxford University Press 2004 Oxford University Press
Proctor, Henry
Hugh
Congregational clergyman, was born and grew up on
a farm near Fayetteville, Tennessee, the son of former slaves, Richard Proctor and Hannah Wetherley (or Murray). He studied at
rural schools outside of Fayetteville and the public schools of
Fayetteville. Before continuing his education, Proctor
taught school at Pea Ridge and Fayetteville. In 1884 he entered Central
Tennessee College at Nashville, but he transferred to Fisk University after
one term. Proctor completed preparatory studies at
Fisk and graduated with an A.B. degree in 1891 and then studied at Yale
Divinity School, where he graduated with a B.D. degree in 1894. In 1893 he
married a Fisk student, Adeline L. Davis, of Nashville; they became the
parents of six children.
On 1 July 1894 Proctor was
ordained and became pastor of Atlanta's First Congregational Church. The
first African-American pastor of this biracial mission, which was founded
by white missionaries during Reconstruction and remained closely affiliated
with Atlanta University, he increased its membership from 100 to 400 within
four years and put it on a self-supporting financial basis. On a trip
south, the Outlook's Ernest Hamlin Abbott declared that "without
exception, white or black," Proctor's
"was the most progressive and best organized church I saw in the
South"; it was more influential than some congregations five or six
times its size. In 1901 Proctor helped defeat
efforts to disfranchise black Georgians. A year later the Atlanta
Constitution took note of his sermons, which crusaded against crime and
vice along Decatur Street. By 1904 Proctor's work
was winning him wider recognition; Clark University awarded him an honorary
doctor of divinity degree, and he was elected as assistant moderator of the
National Council of Congregational Churches.
In September 1906, stirred by the racist rhetoric
of a bitter political campaign, white mobs swept from Decatur Street across
Atlanta, indiscriminately attacking black people wherever they were found.
During a lull in the rioting, white leaders of the city, including attorney
Charles Hopkins, conferred about how to contain the violence. As it
subsided, they contacted Proctor, who helped to
arrange a meeting of twenty leading white men and twenty leading black men
at the courthouse. Their committee to restore order in the city led to
continued discussions between leaders of both races. Hopkins organized the
Atlanta Civic League of two thousand white members, while Proctor
secured fifteen hundred members for a parallel Coloured Cooperative Civic
League. Executive committees of the two leagues met regularly to discuss
and plan concerted action on issues that irritated local race relations.
Black radicals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, dismissed the effort as
"gotten up primarily for advertizing purposes," but Atlanta's
plan for dialogue between parallel structures of racial leadership was a model
for southern racial liberalism's idea of "interracial
cooperation" in the first half of the twentieth century.
Impelled by the crisis created by the Atlanta
riot, Proctor mounted a campaign to build an
institutional church, one that would be equipped to meet the community's
broader social needs. He raised money for it from the local black and white
communities before turning to northern philanthropists to finish paying for
it. Booker T. Washington spoke at the ground breaking for the new building
in January 1908. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft inspected its
Sunday school rooms, library, model kitchen, gymnasium, showers,
lavatories, auditorium, offices, ladies' parlor, and galleries. The church
offered a counseling service, an employment bureau, a home for working
women, a kindergarten, a prison mission, and a music festival. Northern
white pastors, including Washington Gladden and Russell Conwell, and
popular novelist Bruce Barton praised its potential. First Congregational
Church was, said Barton, "The Church That Saved a City." By 1920,
when Proctor left Atlanta, First Congregational
Church comprised 1,000 African-American members who worshipped in the
handsome new building, the first institutional church in the Afro-American
South.
During the spring and summer of 1919 Proctor toured France for the War Work Council,
addressing more than 100,000 African-American soldiers. In 1920 he became
pastor of Brooklyn's Nazarene Congregational Church. In his thirteen years
there he increased church membership from 160 to more than 1,000 and
established another institutional church. In 1926 he was elected moderator
of the New York City Congregational Association. He also served as vice
president of the Brooklyn Urban League and the Lincoln Settlement
Association. He died in Brooklyn of blood poisoning and was buried in
Atlanta's Southview Cemetery.
A lifelong Republican and an ardent advocate of
the civil rights of African Americans, Proctor was
nonetheless instinctively a conservative who supported the suppression of
vice and believed in law and order. Within the African-American community
he valued the friendship and the wisdom of both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker
T. Washington. Proctor was "a magnificent
specimen of a man, six feet two or three inches, and finely proportioned,
with the dignity and self-command of the true orator; it is easy to
understand the hold he maintains over [his] large congregation," said
Washington Gladden. "At a glance, I should have thought him a Methodist,"
Lura Beam wrote. "He lacked entirely the Congregational austerity, the
Emersonian residue. He came singing transcendentalism, and the vigor of his
natural endowment gave him social acceptance from both races."
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