Kester, Howard

KESTER, HOWARD (1904–1977). Presbyterian and Congregational minister, early organizer of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), and secretary of the Committee on Economic and Racial Justice, Howard Kester was also secretary of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and a participant in several important investigations by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Born into a segregated community to a father who, although opposed to slavery, was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Howard Kester, commonly known as “Buck,” sought throughout his life to promote interracial unity and to place the problems of the South within a Christian context.

Kester’s own conscience was awakened during a 1923 trip to Europe with the American Pilgrimage of Friendship, a program of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Kester immediately likened the postwar conditions of the Jewish ghettos of Poland to the plight of African Americans in the United States. Returning to Lynchburg College, which he attended on a Presbyterian ministerial scholarship, Kester became active in the YMCA’s European Student Relief Project and formed one of the South’s first interracial intercollegiate organizations. Through his friendship with George Washington Carver, Kester became the first white “fraternal” delegate to a Black YMCA and advocated the desegregation of the YMCA and the Young Women’s Christian Association as a whole.

After a brief stint in 1925, Kester left Princeton Theological Seminary because of the school’s conservatism and enrolled at Vanderbilt’s School of Religion. There, along with Ward Rodgers, Claude Williams, and Don West, he came under the tutelage of Professor Alva Taylor. Taylor’s teachings, which had a formative influence on Kester’s own philosophy, stressed that with modern science and Christianity, mankind could “make the world over into the kingdom of God.”

Dismissed from his position within the YMCA, Kester left Vanderbilt (he did return and completed his degree in 1929) for New York, becoming youth secretary of the pacifist organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Traveling by rail to colleges throughout the South, Kester used the opportunity to defy Jim Crow laws. He also continued to organize interracial conferences and meetings now in the name of the FOR.
In 1931 Kester, as an anonymous agent of the NAACP, investigated the trials of the “Scottsboro Boys” and the lynching of George Smith in Tennessee. That year Kester also met and came under the influence of Socialist Norman Thomas, who he felt understood the needs of the South. Along with five others, Kester founded the Nashville local of the Socialist Party and unsuccessfully ran for Congress under the party’s banner in 1932.

His involvement with the party increased his radicalism and brought him to the Communist-dominated Congress against War in October 1933. It also led to his dismissal from the FOR, which did not conceive of itself as the revolutionary body that Kester envisioned. Declaring that revolution was imminent, and militancy was required, Kester became part of the Revolutionary Policy Committee representing the Socialist Party’s left-wing.

Around this time, the NAACP widely distributed Kester’s report on the brutal lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida. Kester also testified at congressional hearings on the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill, part of an ongoing campaign by Kester against lynching.

At the urging of H.L. Mitchell, Kester became involved in the STFUsoon after its founding in July 1934. Despite his apparent revolutionary zeal, Kester brought moderation to the STFU in his advocacy of nonviolence. Mitchell described him as an “outside contact man and a spokesman for the STFU.” In 1936 Kester wrote the standard work Revolt Among the Sharecroppers, which accurately detailed the plight of the sharecroppers. He also served as a STFU representative in its courtship of big-time labor. In October 1935, at the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Kester met with federation president William Green. Although giving a symbolic endorsement of the STFU, the AFL withheld financial backing. He was also involved in the Delta Cooperative Farm.
In February 1936, Kester, with the assistance of Gardner Jackson, spoke to a group of senators and congressmen. Although Senator Robert La Follette was later to create a subcommittee to investigate violations of free speech and assembly, the committee did not concern itself with agriculture.

Kester also became embroiled in the disputes within the STFU after its merger with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in September 1937. Having witnessed the Trotskyists’ infiltration and debilitation of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, Kester, as well as Mitchell, sought to preserve STFU autonomy. This potentially explosive situation led to the expulsion of Claude Williams and E. B. McKinney from the STFU and to a break between the STFU and UCAPAWA in March 1939. Spurned by established labor, without great financial or numerical support, the STFU lost much of its vigor.

Kester for his part devoted himself to his position as secretary of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, which he found more grounded in Christianity. The organization coordinated southern relief, attempted to create a volunteer interracial army unit, and sought to dispel commonly held myths concerning lynching.

In 1942 during World War II, Kester with his wife Alice, moved to the sea island of St. Helena Island and began his career as an educator, serving as principal at Penn School in Beaufort County, South Carolina, the first Christian school founded during Reconstruction for blacks in the South. In 1948 he moved to the John C. Campbell Folk School and later he became a professor and dean at Montreat Anderson College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. His time as an educator was interrupted by a return, from 1952 to 1963, to the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. From 1952 to 1957 as the South had the opportunity to peacefully accept the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board, Howard Kester and the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen sought to organize white clergy to influence their congregations into helping “their communities embrace the integration of public schools and the dismantling of Jim Crow.” Despite the FSC’s best efforts, white moderates failed to support integration going forward.

On 12 June, 1977, Howard Kester, the “Gene Debs of Dixie,” died.

Burton, Orville Vernon. Penn Center: A History Preserved. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Dunbar, Anthony P. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Martin, Robert F. Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.)

Mitchell, H. L. Mean Things Happening in This Land. Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979.

Slade, Peter “A Misplaced Hope: Howard Kester, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Failed Attempt to Mobilize Moderate Protestants in Support of Desegregation, 1952-1957,” Journal of Southern Religion 20, (2018).

Oral History Interview with Howard Kester, August 25, 1974. Southern Oral History Program. Documenting the American South. https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/B-0007-2/menu.html