Minister worked to desegregate schools

NORTH AUGUSTA - The Rev. Nathaniel Irvin Sr. remembers the bus driver waving a pistol in his face like it was yesterday instead of 60 years gone.

• Photos

He also remembers the sudden calm he felt when a divine voice told him what to do.

"God spoke to me," said the Rev. Irvin, 75, who has been the pastor of the historic Old Storm Branch Baptist Church for a quarter-century. "'Turn your back to him. If he shoots you, let him shoot you in the back.' I said, 'Thank you, Lord.' I put my back to him, this black boy, unafraid to die for his rights."

The year was 1945. The Rev. Irvin was a ninth-grader at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, the all-black education center in Augusta that is now a high school named for its founder, Lucy C. Laney. He was riding a crowded bus between Ninth and 12th streets, part of his daily commute between the school and his home in the Boggy Branch hamlet just south of North Augusta. The driver ordered him and other black passengers to the back of the bus, tossing a racial epithet the Rev. Irvin doesn't care to repeat.

In protest, the Rev. Irvin grabbed the two signal chords that ran above the windows of the bus and yanked them hard. The driver snapped his head around.

"I said: 'You drive that bus. Get your eyes off us. That's your job,'" the Rev. Irvin said.

A short, wiry man, the Rev. Irvin laughs at the memory of teenage audacity.

"I always talked back to white folks," he said. "When I came into the world, I came into the world without fear."

This was a handy, if dangerous, attribute in the South of the mid-1940s. For those of the Rev. Irvin's generation, born at the height of Jim Crow and unsure whether segregation would ever end, courage and perseverance were necessary character traits.

It served them well in the civil rights strife of the 1960s and the struggle to integrate schools and public facilities in the '70s.

As pastor of the Greater Mount Canaan Baptist Church in Augusta and an officer in organizations such as the Augusta Ministerial Alliance, the Rev. Irvin was an active player in major issues such as school desegregation on both sides of the Savannah River, said Frank Roberson, the associate superintendent for education for the Aiken County school district.

"He was in the trenches, where it made the most difference," said Dr. Roberson, who is the author of the Rev. Irvin's biography, Up From Boggy Branch. "Those heroes who were sung about would not have been had he not been so active on the grass-roots level."

While a pastor in Augusta, the Rev. Irvin also served as an educator in Aiken County. For 14 years, he was a teacher and assistant principal at Jefferson High School, one of the county's all-black schools. For nine years, he was a guidance counselor at the old Langley-Bath-Clearwater High School, helping integrate it.

His years as an educator gave him the experience to serve on school desegregation committees in Augusta and North Augusta.

"He was right on the front row of school desegregation," said state Rep. Henry Howard, of Augusta.

His work on school desegregation was also an extension of his role as a pastor, said former state Rep. Ben Allen, a Democrat who counted the Rev. Irvin as one of his political supporters.

"He thought the proper role of a minister and the proper role of a church was not only to feed the souls of people, but to make sure justice was a cornerstone of government," Mr. Allen said.

The former Democratic legislator also admires the Rev. Irvin for deciding to take over Old Storm Branch Baptist in August 1980, not long after its pastor died - not an easy decision after spending 21 years at Greater Mount Canaan Baptist. Old Storm Branch was founded in 1772 by white planters who wanted to give their slaves religious instruction.

"It took guts to do what he did," Mr. Allen said.

The Rev. Irvin says he had no choice. That divine voice woke him up in the middle of the night and told him to take over a church a mile or two from Boggy Branch. It was the church where he was baptized in September 1943.

"It was a call to come home and build up the walls of Old Storm Branch," he said.

Reach Jim Nesbitt at (706) 828-3904 or jim.nesbitt@augustachronicle.com.

Age: 75

Born: March 23, 1929, Boggy Branch community, near North Augusta

Occupation: Pastor, Old Storm Branch Baptist Church, North Augusta, 1980-present; pastor, Greater Mount Canaan Baptist Church, Augusta, 1959-1980. Teacher, guidance counselor and principal, Aiken County school district, 1956-1979.

Education: Bachelor of arts, South Carolina State Teachers College, 1956; master's degree in education, South Carolina State Teachers College, 1956; attended American Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, Tenn.