San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Rev. Claude Black was for S.A. what MLK was for nation.
Minister was pre-eminent advicate for civil rights
The Rev. Claude William Black Jr. was one of the most influential leaders to come out of San Antonio’s African-American community and a pre-eminent civil rights advocate.
“He was always a man who never showed his anger or his temper,” the late Bill Sinkin recalled at the time of Black’s death in 2009. The longtime San Antonio businessman and civic leader had worked with Black on various projects. “He showed his strength.”
Though Black served on the San Antonio City Council from 1973 to 1977 and was its first black mayor pro tem, he never abandoned the pulpit for politics. He was pastor of Mount Zion First Baptist Church, the largest African-American church in the city.
Black, a compelling speaker and gifted orator, used the pulpit as a means of expressing his community’s struggle for justice and equality.
Ministers, Black noted, were the only ones in the African-American community who weren’t dependent on the Anglo economy The task a minister has is to make life better for people whether they are black, white or Hispanic,” he said. “Most of my efforts were designed to address the issues of need that concerned the individual.”
That meant Mount Zion was at the forefront of the fight for equal pay for black teachers, of blacks being treated at tax-supported hospitals, of providing housing for senior citizens and of building a day care center in 1957 for children whose mothers worked at Kelly and Lackland AFBs.
The church also opened a credit union so its members wouldn’t have to pay exorbitant interest to loan sharks.
Along with the late Rabbi David Jacobson, Catholic Archbishop Rob- ert Luceyand Episcopal Bishop Everett Jones,
Black fought against segregation.
Black and the Rev. S.H. James Jr., pastor of Second Baptist Church and the man who would become the city’s first AfricanAmerican elected to the City Council, helped integrate many of San Antonio’s best-known places — such as the lunch counter at Joske’s department store, parks and swimming pools — by setting up picket lines.
“The newspapers called me militant,” Black recalled in a 2001 interview with San Antonio ExpressNews columnist Cary Clack. “You’re talking about constitutional rights. I was no more militant than the people who wrote the Constitution.”
Black recalled a time when San Antonio was no different than any other Southern city.
“You had separate facilities for blacks and whites,” he said. “If you were black, you had to enter the Majestic Theater from a back entrance and you had to sit in the balcony. You rode in the back of the bus, and the schools were segregated.”
Black was born in San Antonio on Nov. 28, 1916, the son of a Pullman porter and a housewife.
After he graduated from then-Douglass High School in 1933, he enrolled at St. Philip’s College. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937 from Morehouse College, an elite black college for men in Atlanta.
He earned a master’s degree in divinity from the Andover Newton Theological Seminary, near Boston, in 1943 and returned to
San Antonio, becoming pastor at Mount Zion in 1949.
Over the years, Black became an associate of Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
He gained national attention in his fight for racial equality and marches he led for civil rights.
“His was the voice of humanity,” Mayor Phil Hardberger recalled.
Black attended the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966 with then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and the White House Conference on Aging in 1995 with President Bill Clinton.
After he retired in 1998, Black continued to preach, to write and to speak out on social issues such as education for blacks, racism and economic development in inner-city neighborhoods.
“His was the voice of humanity,” Mayor Phil Hardberger recalled.
“Rev. Black was to San Antonio what Martin Luther King was for the nation,” Hardberger said. “You can’t overstate his importance.”