Proctor, Henry Hugh

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Proctor, Henry Hugh

December 8, 1868
May 12, 1933

The clergyman and civil rights activist Henry Hugh Proctor was born near Fayetteville, Tennessee, to former slaves Richard and Hannah (Murray) Proctor. After attending public school in Fayetteville, he became a teacher in Pea Ridge, Tennessee, and then teacher and principal of the Fayetteville public school. He attended Central Tennessee College in Nashville from 1884 to 1885 and then studied at Fisk University, where he became friendly with W. E. B. Du Bois (1869–1963), a fellow student, and finally received his B.A. in 1891. In 1894 Proctor graduated from Yale Divinity School and was ordained a Congregational minister. He became pastor of the elite First Congregational Church in Atlanta, Georgia, a black church built and funded by the American Missionary Association (AMA), whose congregation formed, in one commentator's words, the "black Atlantan social register." He served there until 1920.

In 1903 Proctor cofounded and became first president of the National Convention of Congregational Workers Among Colored People, which was designed to make Southern black Congregational churches self-sufficient, as well as to improve theology departments and promote black hiring in AMA colleges. In 1904 the National Council of Churches named him to the largely symbolic post of assistant moderator. That same year, he obtained his Doctor of Divinity Degree from Atlanta's Clark University.

In 1906, in the aftermath of the notorious riot in Atlanta, Proctor joined with white attorney Charles T. Hopkins to form the Interracial Committee of Atlanta, which was mildly successful in reducing racial tension. The two men recruited forty blacks and whites to draw up plans for reducing racial tensions. Proctor decried the lack of recreational facilities for black youth, and he made the First Congregational Church into an institutional church, providing sports, schools, and employment counseling, as well as a kindergarten, library, girl's home, and model kitchen. Proctor designed an auditorium that seated one thousand, and in 1910 he organized the Atlanta Colored Music Festival. He regarded the spiritual as a powerful weapon of black pride. His pastoral service and musical work were so popular that the membership of the First Congregational rose from one hundred in 1900 to one thousand when he left in 1920.

Proctor was an expert orator, best known for his speech "The Burden of the Negro," which he delivered hundreds of times. In it, Proctor preached self-help and discipline. He counseled elite blacks to devote themselves to aiding the black masses while retaining their "social reserve" against interclass mixing. Proctor was influenced by Du Bois and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), both of whom were his personal friends. Although conservative on many political issues, he fought black disenfranchisement and supported civil rights efforts. He also wrote religious articles and two books, Sermons in Melody (1916) and Between Black and White (1925).

In 1919 Proctor spoke to African-American troops in Europe. When he returned to the United States the following year, he assumed the pastorate of the Nazarene Congregational Church in Brooklyn, and in 1926 he became moderator of the New York City Congregational Church Association, an organization of black clergymen. Proctor died in New York.