Citation:

Hargrove, Claude. "Hawkins, Edler Garnett." African American National Biography, edited by Henry LouisGates Jr.. ,

edited by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Oxford African American Studies Center,

http://www.oxfordaasc.com/article/opr/t0001/e4791 (accessed Wed Apr 13 17:28:40 EDT 2011).

Hawkins, Edler Garnett

By: Hargrove, Claude

(13 June 1908–19 Dec. 1977),

Presbyterian minister and civil rights advocate, was born on 13 June 1908 to Albert and Annie Lee Hawkins in the

Bronx, New York. He attended public schools in New York and, after graduating from high school around 1935,

Hawkins enrolled in Bloomfield College in New Jersey, an affiliate of the northern Presbyterian Church. The

Presbyterian Church founded Bloomfield College in Newark in 1868 as a German Theological Seminary for German-

speaking ministers. The College moved to Bloomfield in 1872 and by 1923 became a four-year college with

approximately 1,300 full-time students. Hawkins graduated magna cum laude from Bloomfield with a Bachelor of Arts

degree in 1936. At age thirty-five, in 1938, Hawkins earned a Bachelor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in

New York City. Presbyterians had founded Union Theological Seminary in 1836 and admitted students from a wide

range of Protestant sects. Since 1910, the Seminary collaborated with Columbia University becoming a seat for

liberal, or, in the terminology of the time, neo-orthodox Protestant faith. Edler Hawkins's theological education shaped

his response to the problem of the oppressed in the South Bronx and elsewhere. His liberal theology was evident in

his secular or humanistic orientation, favoring the “feeding and clothing of the poor,” rather than comforting the

spiritually hungry or fretful. He saw the “kingdom of God” as earth bound in which all men would be brothers and not

as a doctrinal rapture restrictive to the “saints” in a sense; it was a Social Gospel that Hawkins embraced. On 30

January 1944 Hawkins married Thelma Burnett. Their marriage produced two daughters.

In 1938, straight out of Seminary, Hawkins was appointed pastor of St. Augustine Presbyterian Church located on

165th Street and Prospect Avenue in the Bronx; he was the church's first Presbyterian minister. When another

denomination, which had been using the church, went elsewhere, it left only nine members in the congregation. At

the time, few African Americans embraced Presbyterianism, but under Hawkins's guidance, St. Augustine

membership grew by leaps and bounds and by 1961 its congregants were predominantly black with a few Puerto

Ricans. Pastor Hawkins was concerned about his Puerto Rican congregants because of their propensity to worship in

family groups, and to leave as families. Although about one hundred Puerto Ricans attended the church, few joined

St Augustine. Hawkins wanted an integrated church, but had to settle for starting a separate Spanish-speaking

ministry under the leadership of Julio Garcia, assistant pastor to Pastor Hawkins. In a generation, Garcia had said,

they might join the mainlanders in an integrated church. The church members did come together as one church on

Maundy Thursday (Holy Thursday) and Easter Sunday. The Puerto Rican churchgoers were theologically evangelical

and socially conservative and did not embrace the liberal theology of Pastor Hawkins. They were Catholics who in

later generations would be called “charismatic” Catholics, espousing many forms of Protestantism.

During Hawkins's early tenure at Saint Augustine, he quickly gravitated to civil rights activism and a range of other

issues associated with a gospel of good works. Since the 1940s a sidewalk “slave market” had existed where black

domestic servants, notably maids, waited for hours in fair and inclement weather to be hired by white employers for

an hour or a day without the regular references and paperwork. Many of those hired were illiterate migrants recently

from the South who feared employment agencies that required the formal process. Hawkins and other blacks

successfully pressured city government agencies to set up two offices in different parts of the city with hosts that

served coffee and tea and retained the informal hiring practices while according black women domestics a degree of

dignity.

The Presbyterian Church was among the first to denounce segregation as an appalling evil. In the 1960s, the

Presbyterian Church called some missionaries from abroad to work on picket lines and inner city Freedom Schools;

they had much experience with working with suppressed and brutalized people and could devote sufficient time to

work on what was now the number one goal of the Church—civil rights and social justice. Hawkins challenged the

white leadership of his denomination in May 1960 with a limited contest between himself and Herman Turner, a white

moderate from Atlanta, Georgia, for the titular leadership of the northern Presbyterians. Turner enjoyed some

prestige with northern and southern Presbyterians with his advocacy of the “Atlanta Manifesto,” which called for

communications between black and white on race relations. Turner squeaked through with a two-vote margin of

victory. He immediately appointed Hawkins as his vice moderator. These were exciting times for good race relations.

The moderator position only lasted a year; Edler Hawkins was eager to try again. By running for moderator of the

3,000,000-member Presbyterian Church, Reverend Hawkins's name and image were etched in the minds of

Presbyterians throughout the northern tier of the United States. In May 1964, Edler Hawkins ran and won the position

as moderator of the Presbyterian Church. Forever after, Hawkins was defined by this singular moment of triumph: the

first black moderator of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Time magazine pondered the wider implications of Hawkins's

victory: “The United Presbyterians have a knack for breaking race barriers without catering to either politics or

sentimentalism.” A church that was 95 percent white was under no pressure to change, but it saw desegregation as a

holy responsibility. Now Hawkins would show a face of color to white Presbyterians throughout the United States and

Europe and reassure his black brethren in Africa of the justice of their church universal. In his one year as moderator,

Hawkins championed ecumenism and civil rights and even slammed Victorian modesty, rejecting many aspects of

sexual language and whatever else was considered profane, as a barrier in reaching young people. Earlier in the

1950s Hawkins had been fully involved in youth work including after school tutoring, youth fellowships, and day

camps and a summer camp; “Bohatam,” a merging of two names of pastors who were good friends and co-founders

of the small camp that did not survive Pastor Hawkins's tenure at Saint Augustine.

After Hawkins's service as moderator, he continued his work as full-time pastor of St. Augustine and made many

appearances on a variety of television and radio programs. In 1970, he gave up his pastorate and crossed the

Hudson River to teach Black Studies and Moral Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. On 18 December

1977, Hawkins died of an apparent heart attack. He was survived by his wife, Thelma, and two daughters, Ellen and

Renee. Within months of his death, his friends established a foundation in his name and renamed a portion of East

165th Street near Prospect Avenue in his honor.

Further Reading

● Cone, James H. For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (1984).

● Graham, W.F. The Constructive Revolutionary (1971).

● Martin, Andrew, ed. An Encyclopedia of African American Christian Heritage (2002).

● Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black and Presbyterian: The Heritage and the Hope (1998).

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