A Benediction Steeped in Change

Pastor, Home Rule Advocate Walter E. Fauntroy Steps Down

In the end, he will be where he started.

Tomorrow, the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, in his customary royal blue robe, will stride to the pulpit of New Bethel Baptist Church and offer his last sermon. It will end a half-century as pastor, decades in which Fauntroy, 75, was not only at his church but also in the streets, not only preacher but also politician. It will end an era marked by change, especially in the District, and much of that change has been the result of his work.

In an era when black pastors were at the forefront of the civil rights movement and anti-poverty efforts, Fauntroy was at the head of the pack. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, was a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr.'s and helped plan the 1965 march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery. He went on to serve on the D.C. Council, as the District's nonvoting member of Congress and as the city's strongest advocate of home rule, and then he broadened his sights internationally to become a leading foe of apartheid.

But always it was Shaw, whose neighborhood revitalization he helped lead, and New Bethel where he could return to his roots. It was his home and political base.

"Thank God for Walter Fauntroy, thank God for his ministry, thank God for the walls that he built and the barriers that he broke down," former representative William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) told a crowd of local ministers who gathered at the church not long ago to honor Fauntroy.

Fauntroy chose this weekend for his final sermon not only with care but also with cause for celebration. Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the next day Barack Obama will become the nation's first African American president. It seemed liked a good time to be at his home church and say goodbye.

"I did my best to serve God. I expressed it in my work with Martin Luther King Jr.," Fauntroy said. "Dr. King said either we learn to live together as brothers, or we perish together as fools. I also want people to remember me by the work I did with Nelson Mandela. He taught us that when you are mistreated, you need to forgive and then seek reconciliation."

He grew up near the church, the fourth of seven children whose father was a Patent Office clerk. The District was a segregated city, and he saw the signs of racism large and small, such as the white judge who tightened the wheels on his brother's soapbox derby entry to slow the boy down.

After college at Virginia Union University in Richmond, he attended Yale University's divinity school. He had impressed the members of New Bethel as a youth, and they held chicken dinners to help pay for his schooling. After graduation in 1958, he came home to be pastor.

His work at the church, his dynamic speaking and the rakish part in his hair gained him notice from established pastors who in the early 1960s were looking for a fresh face to help lead local civil rights efforts.

"I called to attention this young fellow who had been called at New Bethel. He was fresh, young and ambitious. I thought that he would be an excellent leader," recalled the Rev. Jerry A. Moore, 90, pastor emeritus of the 19th Street Baptist Church.

That launched Fauntroy in the civil rights movement and brought him to the attention of King, who appointed him to head the Washington office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped King with his "I Have a Dream" speech, according to a congressional history of black members of the House of Representatives.