Sunday Interview with Pastor Rudy Allen Sr.: ‘Lord, if you’re crazy enough to want me, I'm crazy enough to do it’

Retired Columbus pastor Rudy Allen Sr. is knocking on the door of 80.

And it has been quite a journey to get there. A Columbus native, he graduated from segregated Spencer High School in 1954 and answered the call to the ministry when he was 19, saying “Lord, if you’re crazy enough to want me, I’m crazy enough to do it.”

Allen was a leader in the black community during the integration of the lunch counters in the early 1960s and the racial strife of the 1970s.

Five of his seven children followed him into the ministry.

Recently, he sat down with Ledger-Enquirer senior reporter Chuck Williams and chief photographer Mike Haskey to talk about his life.

Here are excerpts of that interview, edited for length and clarity.

Q: How’s your golf game these days?

A: It’s better than it should be for a man my age.

Q: You play a lot, don’t you?

A: I try to play every day, Monday through Friday, every morning from 8:30 until we finish. We only play nine holes.

Q: You play from the short tees?

A: Oh yeah, old man tees, definitely. The gold tees. Everybody who plays with me plays from the gold tees. That means my two sons — or my three sons when Marlon plays with us — I allow them to play it. Marlon is what, 40 years old? I allow him to play from the gold tees and usually I beat them all.

Q: You had a really serious health scare a while back, didn’t you?

A: In October 2013, I had a heart attack.

Q: How did the heart attack change you, or did it?

A: More than anything, it changed my eating habits. ... I just have to eat most of the time chicken, turkey and fish. ... I eat a lot of fruit now.

Q: You’ve lived a long and, some would say, prosperous life. What do you credit with your longevity, with your success, with your family?

A: The Lord. He has been a tremendous blessing to me and my family. I think you know that out of my seven children, five are pastors.

Q: Which two aren’t?

A: Kathy and Tonya are not, but they are church workers. Kathy is one of the church administrators at Revelation (Missionary Baptist Church). Tonya attends the church with her husband down in Cusseta, Ga., and she’s very active in that church. All of my kids have always been active.

Q: Did you encourage them to do that, or did it kind of happen?

A: I think it more just happened. I think they knew what we expected of them when they were growing up. I boast about never having to make my children get up to go to church. They always knew that we expected them to go, and we never had to push them. They just grew up that way. I was a pastor and they knew that church was a part of the family life.

Q: Do you go to their services on Sundays?

A: Sure, I still attend Revelation. Valerie is the pastor there.

Q: How did you get the call?

A: It was a tremendous urge. I was in Illinois. I was 19 years old, already married, had one child. All of a sudden … when I say all of a sudden, well, it just began to happen that I had this urge to be in the ministry. I didn’t sleep much because of the floatings around my mind. I ate very little during that period. I really said to the Lord, “Lord, if you’re crazy enough to want me, I’m crazy enough to do it because I’m tired of not sleeping. I’m tired of not eating. I’m ready when you are.” I think He calls us — me and my kids or whomever — more to preparation.

Q: You’ve done it for 60 years. If it were not a calling, could you do it?

A: No. It requires too much to just be out there and do it as a vocation rather than a calling.

Q: Is that because you’re under the microscope?

A: No. That never bothered me about people watching. I was going to try to do the best I could in terms of my moral life, in terms of my working life. I think it’s simply because I knew that I was called by God and I was not here doing this for me or my family, as a vocation, but I was doing it because I felt called. It’s hard to really explain what the call is other than a tremendous urging, a spiritual urging.

Q: Let’s change gears a little bit. Tell me about the Columbus, Ga., you grew up in during the 1940s and ’50s.

A: I don’t remember too much of the ’40s. I was born in ’36. I remember a little bit. I can recall vividly the segregation in Columbus. I guess I was always aware of the fact that I was thought not to be as much as someone else — I was aware of that.

Q: Aware in what way?

A: I was aware that this was happening, segregation existed.

Q: Spencer High School …

A: Spencer High School was segregated. The law to desegregate was passed in ’54, I think. That was my senior year.

Q: It took a long time for it to happen in the Deep South. …

A: Yeah. I think my son Rudy was probably one of the first to integrate schools in that way when he went to Rothschild the first year Rothschild opened. He said that’s where he wanted to go to school, so I said, “OK, let’s go.” I signed him up. He did the same thing with Little League baseball. He used to play Little League baseball in Columbus. He said, “Dad, I want to play baseball.” I went to Eastern Little League and told them I wanted to sign up. The guy that was there turned the table over.

... I think he went to see the president and the president told him, “Sign him up.” This guy was president of Cole Foundry. I can’t remember his name now. Rudy was drafted by Paul Cox, who was a sportswriter here at the Ledger, and that’s who he played for.

Q: He was a pretty good player too, wasn’t he?

A: Yeah, he could hit the ball. He suffered from racism. I’d say he was at least the third-best player in the league, and he didn’t make all-stars because they said — the coaches — they said that nobody else would have one.

Q: Is it hard for kids today, and parents today, to understand what that was like?

A: I think so. I think it’s very hard for younger parents to understand what it was like because they haven’t experienced it. You have to experience it to know what it’s like.

Q: What did you tell 12-year-old Rudy when he didn’t make the all-star team?

A: “That’s the way it is. Sorry about it, but that’s the way it is. You’ve got to learn how to cope with that.”

Q: He obviously did. He went on to be a great player at Kendrick High School. He was the second black quarterback at Georgia Tech. Obviously, he was an elite athlete as a kid. Did you think not making that all-star team made him work harder?

A: I don’t know whether it made him work harder or not, but I know it hurt him. He was very hurt because of that. He only said to me, “Dad, if I didn’t deserve it I could understand it, but I deserved it.”

Q: If your grandson, today, came to you with a similar predicament — said, “You know I wasn’t chosen,” or “I wasn’t selected for something, and I think it’s because of the color of my skin” — what would you tell him?

A: I would tell him, “Let’s go and talk to the persons who select the all-star team.” We’re going together, and they’re going to tell us why they didn’t select you. I had another son that played Little League. He led the league in batting and the first round he was not selected because Vince was a little different than Rudy. ... I was an officer in Little League then. Every coach had to vote for you to be on that. If one coach did not vote for you, you were not on the all-star team. This one guy said that he was not going to vote for Vince — until the rest of them said, “Are you crazy?”

I would go and talk to them. I would talk to him, too. I would let him know, today, that this is very unusual. It’s very unusual. Things happen but this would be very unusual today for that to happen because of race.

Q: Do you think that what you did as a parent, and what Rudy and Vince did as Little League baseball players, paved the way for Frank Thomas?

A: I don’t know whether it paved the way or not. I think this was going to happen anyway — whether it was me or whoever did it, it was going to eventually happen. I just happen to be the father who took his son by there because he said, “Daddy, I want to play baseball over there.” I said, “OK, let’s go.” That was it. Same thing when he went to Rothschild. He said, “Daddy, that’s where I want to go to school.” He discovered he was the only black in that school. Can you imagine some of the things he went through?

Q: Give me an example.

A: They called him the N-word, and “little blackbird” or whatever. The thing that brought Rudy through was he was an athlete. He played basketball and he was the best basketball player on the team. What helped him, a lot of the kids that played Little League baseball with him went to Rothschild.

Q: Is it easier to dispel racism if the person is a talented athlete or musician?

A: Yeah, it is. You will probably be subjected to racism more so if you are “a nobody” than if you were a somebody.

Q: As you were coming up as a pastor and as a parent, racism was real and overt. How did you teach life lessons to those you pastored and to your kids?

A: ... I think you know I was very much involved.

Q: We’re going to get to that.

A: I would always let them know that they were No. 1. They were never second class, they were always No. 1. They needed to live their lives as if they were No. 1 — no matter what the circumstances were, no matter what happened in their life, they were still as good as anybody else.

Q: As Columbus dealt with the racial issues of the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, as a pastor you were heavily involved in that, weren’t you?

A: In fact, I was involved before I became a pastor.

Q: How?

A: When I was a student at American Baptist, I got involved in the sit-in there. We were arrested three times there and …

Q: Lunch counter sit-ins?

A: Yeah, lunch counter. We went to Birmingham. I went back to Nashville to get another group of students to come to Birmingham on a freedom ride after the bus was burned in Anderson. I was getting ready to step on that bus, and then I said, “No, I’m going home to get something started.” I came to Columbus and organized a group of college students.

Q: What year was that?

A: It was in 1960 … had to be ’61, ’62.

Q: What was the racial climate in the early 1960s in Columbus?

A: We were segregated, naturally, but I guess most black people accepted it because that’s the way it was. When I came here from Nashville that summer to begin that movement, I discovered that (the) Rev. (Edward) Bryson had already been down to the city council talking about bus desegregation. I talked to him about it and asked him and said, “Look, we’re getting ready to ride the buses in a desegregated manner. We want you to go to the city council and ask them to desegregate the buses.”

We didn’t know at the time that Roy Martin, of the Martin Theater Company, owned the buses. The city didn’t own the buses. We told him, “We want you to call us if they say, ‘We’re taking it under advisement,’ or whatever their answer is. If it’s not politic, you call us and then within an hour we’re going to be riding.” The climate was … well, they put everybody in jail that day but me, the group that rode the bus with me. They didn’t put me in jail.

Q: Why didn’t they put you in jail?

A: I don’t know, but I know that a detective got on the bus that I was riding on. He walked straight to me and said, “You’re in charge of this s---.” That’s what he said. I said, “Man, I’m not in charge of anything. I’m just going downtown to buy me a pair of pants.” I remember that vividly. He said, “Well, what are you doing sitting here?” I said, “Well, the seat was vacant. I don’t see why I should walk all the way back in the back when this seat is vacant. Nobody sitting there, so I sat on it.” At that time they had the seats going this way, and then they had one on each side, two along the seats on each side, and three in front. That’s where I sat. He told the driver to put an “out of service” sign and take it downtown. ...

We got on the bus going back downtown. ... When we got down to ... Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, we got off the bus. We said, “Well, we’re going to announce that the bus is integrated because we rode twice.” Therefore we got to a barber shop there, we heard on the radio that the other kids had been arrested. We got back on the bus, rode back downtown and back, and they still did not arrest the group I was with, but they did the second time.

Q: When something clearly is not right, is it your obligation to do civil disobedience?

A: It’s my obligation to try to right what I feel is wrong in the community. I think this is what Jesus did. He saw injustices in the community, and he sought to right those injustices.

Q: If you look at Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Albany, Macon, why did the level of protest in Columbus never rise to (that) level?

A: You know what I believe? Fort Benning. Fort Benning had a great bearing on the actions and reactions of the white community in Columbus, Georgia.

Q: Please explain that.

A: More than anything else, it’s dollars and cents — economics. I guess about everything ends up being dollars and cents. They didn’t want to lose Fort Benning.

Q: Did white leadership acquiesce, or did black leadership negotiate, or was it a combination?

A: It was a combination. After we discovered that Roy Martin owned all the buses, we went to him and he said, “OK, I’m going to...” No real problem. I think we had maybe one or two meetings. He said, “OK, we’re going to do what you’re asking but if the white folk don’t ride the bus, we expect you all to fill them up.” What he said: “I can’t afford to lose any money. I don’t want to lose any money.” That was part of it, and then with the theaters, and the lunch counters. The only place we had problems was with Kirven’s and Buck’s Barbecue.

Q: What barbecue?

A: Buck’s Barbecue. It was at the end of Martin Luther King and Buena Vista.

Q: What kind of problems did you have with Kirven’s?

A: Old man Kirven wouldn’t open his restaurant. He decided that he would close it rather than integrate it, desegregate it. Bob Wright and I talked to him.

Man, I’ve never seen a man ... he was on crutches ... I thought he was going to have a heart attack when we told him what we wanted. He said, “Never, never, never.” They had a restaurant there, on the second floor, I think. He closed the restaurant rather than desegregate it. We picketed Kirven’s for, I don’t know, a couple years. No problems with the theaters. In fact, there were whites … I know Dr. (Robert) Flowers … he and his wife and me and my wife went to the Georgia Theater together and that was the first time that … we did this kind of testing. We did a couple like that, and then after that it was just open. Most of it was negotiation, we talked about it and decided what we were going to do.

Q: Who was at the table? Who was at the table on the white side? Who was at the table on the black side?

A: I’ll tell you who was at the table. We developed a group and we had about 25 black leaders. A.J. (McClung) was there. (Gordon) Kitchen was there. (Charles) Huff Sr. and (John L.) Sconiers from the funeral homes, and several preachers, (Thomas) Blue was one of them. Most of them were businessmen. Some of them were managers at insurance companies like Mose Jackson and I guess (Fred) Franklin. Mose was president of NAACP for a long time.

Q: Who were the leaders on the white side?

A: I don’t know because we didn’t talk to a group like that, as far as I know.

Q: As you near 80, and you look back at that time in your life, are you proud of what you did?

A: I don’t know whether I’m proud of what I did — I just felt it was something necessary. …As a man of God, I felt this was something I had to do. It wasn’t a choice. I might be proud if I thought it was a choice, but to me it wasn’t a choice. It was a mandate, it was a spiritual mandate.

Q: Let’s talk about Columbus today.

A: (Laughter) Yeah. I chuckle because, Chuck, I really don’t know too much about Columbus today, seriously.

Q: You look at what’s happening in the community. We had a story that Columbus has more African Americans making $100,000 than …

A: Yeah, I saw that.

Q: Is that a result of what you all did?

A: I guess that’s the result of the whole, of what everybody’s done in America. When we first started, it was hard to find a black man, other than in a black business, doing anything downtown but being a porter or at a bank cleaning or something like that. Black men just didn’t do it. I remember two salespersons who were working for white companies. Tom Rivers, who worked for Bentley Sports Shop, was selling basically to football teams, African-American football teams. I worked at the sewing machine shop selling sewing machines for George Dorman, who was later a councilman here.

Q: How would you describe the racial climate in Columbus today?

A: That’s kind of tough. It’s a lot better than it has been, probably better than it has maybe ever been, and yet I think there’s a lot of things still could be done here in Columbus. I think our biggest problem is the divide, Macon Road — that divide? Bill Turner and I did a speech ... I was asked what did I think would be a remedy for Columbus. I said, “Get half of the folk in north Columbus to move south, and the other half to move north, and let’s see how it works out.” I don’t know whether that would’ve made much of a difference, but at the time they were making a lot over the fact that Macon Road was the dividing line of north and south.

Q: When you look in Columbus now, there are a lot of African-American males that are incarcerated.

A: Right.

Q: There’s been a disintegration of family, both black and white, but it’s more obvious ...

A: ... In the black community? Yeah.

Q: What are the causes of those social ills?

A: Some of it is a lack of commitment to the Lord. I think some of it is economics. Black men still have a real problem getting good jobs here in town. I wonder sometimes whether we are really sincere in our efforts to make what they used to call “One Columbus.” You don’t hear that anymore.

Q: Is it one Columbus?

A: No. It’s definitely not. It’s not even one Columbus with y’all, ...

Q: When you see the high percentage of black-on-black crime in Columbus …

A: ... Yeah, that’s a problem.

Q: How do you deal with that problem?

A: It’s the toughest thing, Chuck, that I’ve ever tried to confront. It’s just tough. I don’t know what to do about it. I’ll tell you what, a lot of young black youth are angry, man. The sad thing about it, and I don’t want them to take their anger out on nobody else, but the sad thing about it, our anger is channeled toward each other. A lot of it is drugs. A lot of it is drug-related. If anything takes us down … that could take us down as a nation, that could take us down. We are not handling that well at all, from any level.

Q: Is that the plague of our generation?

A: I think it is. I think it is, and I don’t think we have really learned how to deal with it. We are not dealing with it. As far as I’m concerned, we are not dealing with the plague, as you call it, as we should. … I’ll be the first to say I really don’t have an answer, but it’s devastating in so many different ways. The families are deteriorating because of it, families are broken because of it, children are separated from families because of it, people are jailed because of it. It seems to be more of a problem, to me now, than economics.

Q: That’s a strong statement.

A: We’re moving economically. We’ve come a long way since the stock market went, I call it, belly up. What was that, about eight years ago? We’ve come a long way since then.

Q: What was your role in making the city all it could be?

A: I don’t know whether I played a major role in it. I just did what I thought I needed to do. The strongest I was involved, in Columbus — was that about ’72? — we had a pretty good group. We called it the Ad Hoc Committee.

Q: Was that black or black and white?

A: Black and white. Some big hitters in Columbus.

Q: Like who?

A: Bill Turner. ... Bill Turner and I, and that group was the one that brought the Urban League here to Columbus. That was one of the things we thought would help — remember, there’s the job problem, some job problems — and it did for a while.

Q: What common ground did you and Mr. Turner have?

A: I really believe that Bill genuinely loves this city. I genuinely love this city and I think that was the common ground. That we wanted to see our city the best that it could be without a whole lot of friction, a whole lot of problems. ... He opened up his bank vault to bless the city, and to bring about economic development, to bring about a certain amount of understanding among races. I guess he has done that some. He’s just a philanthropist, I guess. I like Bill, I really do.

Q: Historically, churches have always played a huge component in social justice. Are black churches still carrying most of that weight?

A: I don’t think so now, at this particular time in our history, in Columbus. I don’t know whether we don’t think we need to carry the weight — the weight has been lifted. What I feel we need to do now is to get our people, mostly it’s individuals, to see their worth and to become what they can become or to reach their potentials.

Q: What do you make of what’s happening on the national political scene right now, particularly within the Republican Party?

A: I think it’s crazy. It’s crazy to me. I don’t understand it, but I understand some of it. I understand who (Ted) Cruz is and how he blocked everything Obama tried to do, and I think he’s paying for that. Even his own — who was that, (John) Boehner — called him a demon?

Q: He called him Lucifer.

A: Yeah, Lucifer. He didn’t call him a demon, he called him the devil. I think part of what’s happening in the Republican Party is happening because of the games they have played with the people of America, especially Hispanics and black folk. They ain’t going to never get us to vote for them acting the way they act, doing the things that they do, saying what they are saying.

Q: There are very conservative black people in this community, in this country, right?

A: Very conservative. This is the most conservative town that I’ve ever been associated with. This is the most conservative church town. You don’t have a big black church in Columbus. Go to Savannah, you go to Augusta, and we don’t have a real big black church in Columbus. We don’t have a black church in Columbus with over 1,000 people in church on a Sunday morning. ... I don’t know, it has always been.

Q: What’s your legacy?

A: I don’t know. I don’t think about myself too much. You’ve asked me about what I’ve done. I don’t think I’ve done that much, not nearly as much as I think I should have in terms of my contribution to Columbus.

Q: What do you wish you’d done that you haven’t?

A: I don’t know. That’s hard to answer. … I might have done what I feel I was prompted by the Spirit to do. I don’t think I shied away from too much...

Q: Could you have done what you did if you’d not been a man of faith?

A: No. No, no, no. My family and I have been through some terrible ordeals. It’s tough when folk call your house and say, “We’re the Ku Klux Klan and we’re going to kill your daddy.”

Q: Did that happen?

A: Oh yeah. It happened several times.

Q: What do you say in the face of those threats and that intimidation?

A: Say to whom?

Q: How do you respond to that kind of intimidation?

A: First of all, I think that my first response really is to my family and to my children. As much as you try to protect them, you can’t because of the craziness that goes on in certain times in your community and because of the people who make up this community. ... My children were upset. They expressed it to Rudy, they expressed it to my daughter, they would answer the phone. I don’t know how to say this, my family paid a heck of a price because of my involvement in this and that.

Q: Do you have any regrets for that?

A: No. … I even apologize to them now for not being there when … I think your wife, your children think that you’re married to the church or married to the community rather than married to your wife and then you’re their daddy sometimes. … They accepted it, but now they appreciate what they say I did. … I was just doing what, as far as I’m concerned, was just natural.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 8:49 PM with the headline "Sunday Interview with Pastor Rudy Allen Sr.: ‘Lord, if you’re crazy enough to want me, I'm crazy enough to do it’."