wfn.org | Charles Cobb, racial justice advocate, dies

[BARBARA_POWELL.parti@ecunet.org (BARBARA POWELL)]

Dec. 30, 1998
Office of Communication
United Church of Christ
Arthur Cribbs, press contact
(216) 736-2201
cribbsa@ucc.org
On the Web: <http://www.ucc.org>

Charles Cobb, racial justice advocate, dies

by Arthur Lawrence Cribbs Jr.

     CLEVELAND   Charles Earl Cobb, civil rights
advocate and first executive director of the United Church of
Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, died Sunday, Dec. 27,
1998, at Georgetown
University Hospital in Washington, D.C.  He was 82.
     Cobb served as executive director of the Commission for
Racial Justice from 1966 to 1985.  He and the Commission gained
worldwide attention during a campaign to free the Wilmington Ten,
a group of religious and community leaders imprisoned in 1972
during the Civil Rights era in North Carolina.  Among the
defendants was the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., later Cobb's
successor as executive director of the Commission for Racial
Justice, and  now a leader in the Nation of Islam who is known as
Minister Benjamin F. Muhammad.
     Cobb sent Muhammad to Wilmington, N.C., as staff from
the Commission for Racial Justice field office to work with Black
students who had been integrated into a formerly all-white high
school.   "Our relationship was more than an employee-employer
relationship," Muhammad says.  "It was bonded by our belief in
God and Jesus Christ and the eternal struggle for justice for all
people.  His life epitomized what it means to be a leader for all
people."
     Muhammad and the other defendants spent nearly 10
years in prison before the Fourth
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., overturned their
convictions in 1980,
ruling that their Constitutional rights had been violated in the trial.
     "The success of the Wilmington Ten case was because of
Dr. Cobb.  I would not be where I am today if it were not for his
hand that guided me along the way," Muhammad says. 
     The Rev. Dr. Joseph Evans, the first Black person elected
as an officer of the United Church of Christ and became its first
and only African-American president, remembers the significant
role Cobb played in bringing the Wilmington Ten case to the
attention of the church.
     "He almost single-handedly forced the Executive Council
to become interested and then
stay with them.  He kept challenging the folk and just hung in
there," Evans says.  "He was persistent for right, justice and
equality.  He was responsible for making our church own up to
what it said it believed," he says.  "The Wilmington Ten would
never have been in the record if it had not been for Charlie Cobb."
     In the 1960s, Cobb served as pastor of the St. John's
Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Springfield,
Mass.  While there in 1965, he became the first African American
to run for mayor of that city.  "He was very active in
Massachusetts," says his daughter, Adrienne Brooks of
Washington, D.C.  "He ran for mayor because he was outraged
by what was going on in the school system."

     She says when the family moved to Springfield from
Kentucky, "My father ruffled a lot of feathers.  Teachers were
afraid.  The middle-class, Black community didn't want to make
trouble.  He was outraged by teachers who used Little Black
Sambo to teach kids how to read."
     "I was his fund raiser when he ran for mayor," says Anna
Hatchett, a long-time friend and member of St. John's.  "He knew
there were issues in Springfield that needed to be brought to the
public.  The church supported him but some of the members
thought he shouldn't do it," she recalls.  "He was one of the
forerunners to get people in the Black community to rally around
issues.  That's when he started running for mayor.  Shortly after
that the national  church tapped him to go to New York."
     "Charlie was really the first Black person to get into the
national scene of the UCC," Evans recalls.  "He was on the
Committee for Racial Justice Now," he says.  "He was in there
trying to help us see what was right.  When Charlie Cobb and I
were there alone he was the spear.  He was fearless."
     Cobb was a champion of higher education.  He got his
church in Springfield to buy a bus and used it to take students to
historically-Black colleges in the South.  "He started organizing
teenagers and began a basketball program.  He wanted the kids to
see that there were more opportunities for them," Brooks says. 
As executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice, Cobb
provided financial support to more than 4,000 Black college
students. 
     "He encouraged many youngsters.  He got people into
schools who didn't have money," Hatchett says.  "He knew
presidents at colleges and he would call them and ask them to take
these kids, and they would."
     It was during that same time members of the Nation of
Islam were establishing themselves in the community.  According
to another daughter, Ann Cobb, some ministers and church
leaders wanted nothing to do with the young firebrands, but Cobb
defended their right to sell the Muhammad Speaks newspapers.
     "Malcolm X heard about my father supporting their
efforts," Ann Cobb continues, "and he
came to our home in Springfield and personally thanked my
father."  Cobb had a universal perspective that influenced and
directed his ministry.
     "I think that the significance of Charles Cobb and his
contributions to the United Church of Christ cannot be
overstated," says Bernice Powell Jackson, executive director of
the Commission for Racial Justice.  "He was so often at the heart
of the UCC's commitment to civil rights and the human rights
struggle around the world."
     Jackson remembers one of Cobb's familiar statements
about the church's work in racial and social justice, "The United
Church of Christ has the proclivity to do right when it is pushed." 
     "I often use that quote because of what was true then is
true now," says Jackson.  "Often, we in the United Church of
Christ want to do right but only when we are confronted by the
realities in the world do we step out there and take the positions
that we do.  He saw himself as being the 'pusher' and he was
often in the midst of the controversy in the 1960s."
     Evans agrees.  "When the history of the UCC is written,
the period from 1966 to the '80s, Charlie Cobb had a lot to do
with pointing the UCC in the right direction.  He was not only
fearless, he was a fighter," Evans says.
     "His leadership in the United Church of Christ was and is
unprecedented as he raised his
deep, strong voice for the poor as an advocate," says
Muhammad.

     In a letter sent to leaders of his denomination, the Rev. Dr.
Paul H. Sherry, president of
the United Church of Christ, says Cobb is an "untiring advocate
for justice for all people."  
     "Through his efforts, countless lives were renewed, the
church was transformed, and the vision of a world of peace with
justice renewed," says Sherry, who calls Cobb "a saint of the
church and a faithful witness for a world more akin to God's
desire."
     Cobb's pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church,
United Church of Christ, in Washington, D.C., the Rev. Graylan
S. Hagler, says the life-long civil rights advocate never quit
working for justice.  "He continued to be a very strong voice in the
church and urged us to stay active in the community about justice
issues," says Hagler.
     Powell Jackson refers to Charles Cobb as an "unnamed
hero for many people in the vanguard of the Civil Rights struggle." 
Others call him a giant.  
     "We have lost a giant," says the Rev. James Hargett of
San Diego, Calif., who grew up in North Carolina where Cobb
lived and focused much of his energy and ministry.  "Like many of
us in North Carolina, Charles Cobb was the product of intelligent,
visionary folks who had an expectation among African-Americans
to develop a learned ministry.  They expected clergy to be
educated and Charles Cobb was brilliant."
     Cobb was born Sept. 28, 1916, in Durham, N.C.  "His
roots in North Carolina," says his daughter, Ann, "made him who
he was.  The Black community fought to overcome injustice in
Durham.  His mother was very active in the community and he
went with her," she says.
     "I watched him grow as a minister at St. John's," Hatchett
says.  "I saw him take active roles in the community.   He grew to
be a giant.  He could sit with kings and queens but always stayed
with little people.  He did what he felt needed to be done.  He
wasn't looking for accolades but they came," she remembers.
     "He was one of the giants of the Church who made real
our commitment and was a witness in the world," says the Rev.
Kwami Osei Reed, Associate Conference Minister of the United
Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.  "I got to know Dr. Cobb
when I was living in Mississippi.  He supported students and
brought many of them and other people down there because of the
Civil Rights struggles."
     "I have known Charles Cobb since I was 5 years old,"
recalls Jackson.  "He was a giant of a human being.  I knew him
when he would come to Washington, and he was so supportive of
the Civil Rights Movement and the young people.  He saw the
importance of their role," she says.  "At a time when many young
people were in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and
their parents didn't understand them, he understood what they
were doing and was able to support them."
     "He was a great giant.  In my development as a minister,
he was simply my father in the ministry in all aspects," says
Benjamin Muhammad.  "I am profoundly saddened to learn of his
death.  But I am thankful to Allah that the United Church of Christ
and, particularly, the Commission for Racial Justice, the National
Council of Churches, the whole Christian world, indeed, the
Islamic world have been blessed by Dr. Cobb." 
     "In a sense he was a towering figure, he was not a big man
physically," Evans explains, "but when we struggled with race and
racism, he was in there standing head and shoulders above others.  
He became a towering figure.  He was big of mind and heart and
spirit especially when it came to issues of race, racism, equality
and justice."
     Jackson carries the mantel of Charles Cobb today in her
position at the Commission for Racial Justice.  "Anytime you talk
about work that the UCC is doing about racism or has done,
somehow you can trace it back to Charles Cobb," she says. 
Cobb was involved in efforts to compel the United Church of
Christ to address its own racism as well as racism in society.  He
led the Commission for Racial Justice in issues directly affecting
the poor, and was the first person to connect the dumping of toxic,
hazardous waste and  environmental racism with communities
populated by impoverished people of color.
     When his deputy director, the Rev. Leon White called
Cobb at home one morning at 7 o'clock and said, "I'm going to
get arrested today, boss," Cobb responded, "Go ahead."  White
and Cobb were challenging environmental hazards in Warren
County, N.C., and that meant standing up to the power structure
and going to jail.  He also promoted prison reform, defended the
plight of women in prison and opposed capital punishment.
     Cobb also was arrested in protests against South Africa's
apartheid government.  "It is hard to imagine what it would have
been like without him," comments Jackson.  "He was central to
the formation of so many causes and organizations like the United
Black Christians, Ministers for Racial and Social Justice, and the
Wilmington 10."
     Cobb was a founding member and past president of the
National Conference of Black Christians, one of the oldest Black
ecumenical organizations in the United States.  He was a founding
board member of TransAfrica and the Interreligious Foundation
for Community Organization (IFCO).  Listed in Who's Who In
Black America, Cobb received the Frederick Douglass Citation
for his outstanding achievements in the "Struggle for Black
Liberation."  He also was the recipient of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) award for
community service.       A graduate of North Carolina College, he
received his B.D. degree from Howard University, his M.S.T.
degree from Boston University and a D.D. degree from
Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas.
     After his retirement from the Commission for Racial
Justice, Cobb continued to work for civil and human rights.  His
commitment to racial justice did not wane even after his health
began to fail.  In 1997, he was hospitalized as he began an
extensive period of acute illness.
     "He loved the UCC deeply and cared deeply for the
people in the UCC," says Jackson.  "The sad part is that many of
the same battles that he was fighting, I'm still fighting."
     Dr. Charles Earl Cobb is survived by his wife, Dr. Martha
Cobb; two daughters, Ann of Baltimore, Md., and Adrienne
Brooks of Washington, D.C.; a son, Charles; 14 grandchildren
and four great grandchildren; a host of relatives and friends.
     Funeral services will be held Saturday, Jan. 2, 1999, at 11
a.m., at Plymouth Congregational Church, United Church of
Christ, in Washington, D.C.  A wake for him begins in the church
Saturday morning at 9 a.m. 
     For more information regarding memorial arrangements,
please contact the Rev. Graylan S. Hagler at (202) 723-5330.
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