Brooks, Walter H.

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Walter H. Brooks
1851–1945

Minister, religious reformer, orator, poet

One of the most widely known clergymen of his era, Reverend Walter Henderson Brooks was an eloquent orator, poet, missionary, journalist, and reformer. Brooks provided leadership and service to one of the most important African American churches and denominations. A man of letters, Brooks was a published theologian and a scholar of Black Baptist Church history, as well as a poet and composer of hymns. He made great efforts to promote education and Christian morals as a means to improve the quality of life for African Americans.

Walter Henderson Brooks was born on August 30, 1851, in Richmond, Virginia, the fifth of nine surviving children of Albert Royal and Lucy Goode Brooks. He was born a slave, his parents belonging to different masters. His father, Albert R. Brooks, worked hard to earn enough money to purchase Brooks' mother for $800 and two of the younger children. His father was able to purchase the oldest son, but his oldest daughter was sold to traders and taken to Tennessee where she died in bondage. Walter Brooks often recalled in his sermons the sale of his sister on a Richmond auction block.

In the summer of 1865 Walter attended his first school, Cheeseman's in Richmond. In the fall of 1865 he entered the Wilberforce Institute at Carolina Mills, Rhode Island. He entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1866. He joined the Ashmun Presbyterian Church in 1868, while a student at Lincoln University. He and Archibald H. Grimké served as church elders when the church was organized in 1868. Completing the course for a B.A. degree in 1872, Brooks spent an additional year at Lincoln University in the theological course, earning a B.D. degree in 1873. It was his intention to enter the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, but in the spring of 1873 he changed his mind on the subject of baptism.

Receives Calling to the Church

Returning to Richmond, Walter Brooks was baptized in November 1873 at his mother's church, the Richmond Baptist Church, later the First African Baptist Church. He worked for the Richmond post office as a mail clerk from 1873 to 1874. On April 21, 1874, Brooks married Eva Holmes, the daughter of the minister who had baptized him. He worked for the American Baptist Publication Society of Philadelphia and as Sunday School missionary for the State of Virginia. For the years 1874 to 1876, Brooks supplied homes, churches, and schools with Christian literature. He also held Sunday school institutes, teaching Christian workers. In May 1875 at a meeting of the Northern Baptists in Philadelphia, Brooks presented a speech entitled "Facts from the Field," at the request of the Publication Society. According to Adam Biggs in American National Biography Online, his speech "sparked controversy when he 'drew a picture of the drinking habits of preachers' in an effort to illustrate the critical need for temperance." He swept his audience, but the newspaper reports made him enemies, white and black, in his native state.

On December 24, 1876, Brooks was ordained a Baptist minister. Brooks was the pastor of the Second African Baptist Church of Richmond from 1877 through 1880. He was successful in paying off the entire debt of the church. In 1880, he attended a meeting of the white Baptists at their annual convention in Petersburg, Virginia, the first African American received by that body.

His activities as a temperance worker were noted from the beginning of his ministry. In 1875, he began his service as chaplain to the Anti-Saloon League in Washington, D.C. He was a delegate from this body to the convention that formed the American National Anti-Saloon League. In 1881, he attended the Annual Convention of Northern Baptists at Indianapolis, Indiana, where he made an address and greatly enlarged his reputation. From 1880 to 1882, at the request of the American Baptist Publication Society, he worked in New Orleans, Louisiana; however, his wife's failing health caused his return to Richmond.

In 1882, Brooks became pastor of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C, where he remained until his death. During his tenure, the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church grew in stature, membership, and toward an ideal of a model congregation. The church was $5,600 in debt when he took charge. In four years that debt was erased and the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church began to buy more land and spent some $30,000 to repair the building, becoming one of the finest churches in Washington, D.C.

Reverend Brooks played an important role in efforts to build and maintain a national black Baptist convention. He was chairman of the American National Baptist Convention's Bureau of Education, a black organization founded in 1886, and he continuously mediated relationships with national white Baptist conventions. Difficulties between white and black Baptist conventions led to the creation of the National Baptist Convention in 1895, with which the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church was affiliated.

Chronology

1851: Born in Richmond, Virginia on August 30
1866: Enters Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
1872: Earns B.A. degree from Lincoln University
1873: Earns B.D. degree from Lincoln University; baptized at The Richmond Baptist Church
1876: Ordained a Baptist minister
1877–80: Serves as pastor of the Second African Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia
1882–1945: Serves as pastor of the Nineteenth Street Baptist in Washington, D.C.
1895: Creates the National Baptist Convention
1922: Publishes histories of black Baptist churches in The Journal of Negro History
1929: Receives LL.D. degree from Lincoln University
1944: Receives the D.D. degree from Howard University, Washington, D.C.
1945: Publishes The Pastor's Voice: A Collection of Poems
1945: Dies in Washington, D.C. on July 6

Along with his church work, Brooks was a member of the Board of Trustees of Nannie H. Burrough's National Training School for Women and Girls, the Stoddard Baptist Home for the Elderly, Virginia Seminary and College of Lynchburg, the United Society of Christian Endeavor, and the National Baptist Foreign Missionary Board of Philadelphia. Brooks received the LL.D. degree from Lincoln University in 1929, a D.D. degree from Howard University, Washington, D.C. in 1944, and other honors from Roger Williams University, Tennessee, and from Straight College (later Simmons Memorial College) in Louisville, Kentucky. Always active in civic affairs, Brooks served as vice-president of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association under Phi Beta Kappa educator John Wesley Cromwell. On November 2, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter of congratulations to Reverend Brooks on the occasion of completing fifty-six years as pastor of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church.

Brooks dignified the pulpit and promoted the art of respectability in his congregation, denouncing gambling, fornication, adultery, and even dancing. He preached and practiced the "Social Gospel," emphasizing the reality of collective, societal sin, such as the starvation of children and the denial of human rights, and maintained that Christian repentance of these sins must be followed by concrete actions to rectify injustice and to assist the poor. Martin Luther King Jr. was profoundly influenced by this Social Gospel movement.

A fiery temperance orator, Brooks' sermons on the evils of drunkenness contributed to the sobriety of the congregation. His poems, such as "Christ the Burden-Bear," "Why Jesus Died," and "God So Loved the World," express his religious beliefs and his lifelong commitment to temperance, faith in God, and racial progress. The Sunday School of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church had a library of both religious and secular books. The Sunday School published Reverend Brooks' "Original Poems," a forty-page pamphlet, in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of his service as pastor. A sketch of Brooks' life is included in a forty-eight page publication on the one hundredth anniversary of the church (1839–1939) and the fifty-seventh anniversary of Reverend Walter H. Brooks' pastorate. The National Association of Colored Women was founded in 1896 at a meeting in the Sunday School room of this church.

Walter Brooks and his first wife had ten children. She died June 1912. Reverend Brooks' second marriage was to Florence H. Swann on November 27, 1915, and his third marriage in 1933 was to Viola Washington.

For many years, Brooks was honored by Lincoln University as its oldest living alumnus. He wrote several articles for publication, most notably one of the first scholarly treatments on the history of the Negro Baptist Church and one on the history of the Silver Bluff Church (Aiken County, S.C.), both appearing in the Journal of Negro History in 1922.

Brooks was a member of the American Negro Academy and a lifelong member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, where he worked closely with Carter G. Woodson. He traveled widely in the United States and in England, Scotland, and France. In 1889, Brooks was a delegate to the International Sunday School Convention in London, England. Walter Henderson Brooks died of natural causes on July 6, 1945 in Washington, D.C. Funeral services were at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, and he was interned in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Suitland, Maryland. An obituary was published in the Washington Evening Star on July 8, 1945 and in the Journal of Negro History in October 1945.

REFERENCES

Books

"Brooks, Walter Henderson." In Who's Who in Colored America. Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y: C. E. Burckel, 1950.

Jeter, Henry Norval. "Rev. Walter H. Brooks, D.D." In Pastor Henry N. Jeter's Twenty-five Years Experience with the Shiloh Baptist Church and Her History. Providence, R.I.: Remington Print. Co. 1901.

Logan, Rayford W. "Brooks, Walter Henderson." In Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Eds. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston. New York: Norton, 1982.