Civil rights preacher retires

His preaching days over, the Rev. Sam Mann wants to set the record straight.

Shame, the other way would make a great movie:

White boy grows up in Alabama small town during the civil rights era, his father a hard-drinking racist. The son rejects dad, marches with Martin Luther King Jr. and becomes a hippie preacher.

At a black church in Kansas City, Mo., he spends 40 years doing good deeds for his flock.

All true. But Mann says he can’t let the notion stand that his story is what he did for others, that he was some sort of white savior.

“The black community saved me,” he says. “My own people didn’t want me. I had nowhere to go.”

By 1968, the pony-tailed, motorcycle-riding preacher had essentially been exiled by the white Methodist church around Kansas City. Two congregations ran him off because of his constant harping on civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Then came another chance. A black church on the city’s east side offered a job to a white guy from the heart of Dixie who drawled like George Wallace, and whose father, a traveling salesman, would stay only in motels that guaranteed a “colored person” never had slept in the bed.

But it was at St. Mark Union where the young preacher found a home. For 40 years he served the church as a beloved pastor and advocate for its community. He took that Southern drawl and learned to “whoop” with the best black preachers in town.

That was the easy part, says Mann, 70, the ponytail now gray.

The biggest challenge, he explains, was his “unacknowledged white privilege”: “I had to give it up every day.”

A nebulous term, “unacknowledged white privilege,” but generally considered the societal and institutional benefits of being a white man in a black culture.

The Rev. Nelson “Fuzzy” Thompson says Mann never played that card.

“And that’s what made him so respected in the black community,” says Thompson, who heads the Kansas City chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“He just wanted to serve. I’ve been in the trenches with him. He’s a warrior and a beautiful brother.”

Mann was born in 1940 in Eufaula, Ala., a small town on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, about 90 miles southeast of Montgomery.

He was the oldest of three boys. His father sold clothes and his mother worked in a sock mill. His father drank; his mother, a “long-suffering, saintly woman,” took his abuse.

Mann was on the small side, but captained the high school football team.

“Ought to be a sin how much I like to hit people,” he once told a younger brother.

At age 15, Mann heard his calling and began to preach at the Methodist church in Eufaula. About that same time, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

Sam Mann hardly has sat down since.

To him, preaching meant speaking out for social justice, which he did throughout his years at Birmingham Southern College and later at seminary school at Duke University.

On a day in 1963, Mann returned home to Eufaula on break to work with youth at a local church. He made clear his outrage over Gov. George Wallace’s stand at the University of Alabama’s door to block entry for two African-Americans.

That night his father, having heard of what his son told the Eufaula teens, came home late, drunk, roused him from sleep and accused him of speaking out in favor of mixed marriage.

“That was the beginning of the end for my father and me,” Mann said. “He was embarrassed I was his son.

“It was the end at that church, too. They never invited me back.”

Mann knew he was in trouble when a board member for St. John’s United Methodist Church invited him to lunch. Lobster covered the plate, but a scolding would be the main course that 1966 day at the Carriage Club.

Things had turned rocky since the church had recruited him out of Duke to be an associate pastor. It was a great job for a young minister: nice house, connections.

But the young preacher quickly irritated some in the congregation by speaking out on civil rights, fire hoses in Selma, the military industrial complex and the U.S. escalation in Vietnam.

At the Carriage Club lunch, the church leader told Mann no more politics from the pulpit.

“Nobody but God tells me what to preach,” Mann responded.

Gone.

Next up was a Methodist church in Peculiar, Mo., which Mann thought would be better, as the congregation was more like the working-class people he’d come from.

But then came the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Mann went. And when he got back he gave a talk to the Peculiar Lion’s Club about police brutality against the war protesters.

Gone again.

“I had preached since I was 15, and all of a sudden nobody wanted me,” Mann recalls. “I wept. I thought I would never preach again.”

When Dorice Ramsey worked at Head Start in Kansas City, Kan., she kept hearing about a preacher named Sam Mann and all the good things he’d done along 12th Street.

Finally, she had to see herself.

“I met a man with a spirit unlike any I’d ever come across,” said Ramsey, who recently succeeded Mann as executive director of the St. Mark Children and Family Development Center.

“What he’s done here will never be forgotten. His mark is too deep. He’s touched so many people.”

Indeed, the state-of-the-art child center, completed in 2004 at a cost of more than $5 million, may be Mann’s bricks-and-mortar legacy.

But the lasting image for many will be him marching with other black preachers in protest of perceived slights toward the minority community, war, police brutality and South African apartheid.

For 40 years he worked tirelessly to feed the hungry, house the homeless, train the unskilled and help minority entrepreneurs open businesses. He helped organize the first National Urban Peace and Justice Summit to address gang violence.

He was part of a local effort to raise money to replace black churches burned in the South.

In 1993, when a jury acquitted two Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King beating case, setting off riots across the country, Mann told the Kansas City Star he was amazed at the media frenzy.

“They overlook the daily violence inflicted on people by poverty and racism,” he said. “You don’t see any special reports on that.”

Mann’s rousing oratory for years lifted congregations and audiences to their feet.

“Never dull,” says Laura Hockaday, a former writer for the Star who now serves on the board for the St. Mark Children and Family Development Center.

“He’s never been afraid to speak out, and he’s certainly been worth getting out of bed for on Sunday morning.”

As for the children’s center, she says Mann pushed on when some people said it couldn’t be done because of the cost.

“And now, it’s an oasis on 12th Street,” Hockaday says.

Children there gleefully call him “Rev. Mann!”

“He didn’t quit because he knew how important it was,” says Hockaday. “He always said, ‘And a child shall lead them.’ ”

Mann is a husband, father of three and grandfather. He tries to get back yearly to Alabama, usually in time for fresh lady peas.

He reconnected with his father just before the man died.

“I had dreamed about him a couple of times so I went to see him,” Mann says. “He’d stopped drinking by then. He came into the house, I was sitting there, and he touched my face. He told me he was sorry.

“I was so glad the two of us got to that point.”

His relationship with his brothers has at times been strained, but he stays in touch.

JoAnn Mann, wife of brother Bill Mann, said she just loves her brother-in-law to death.

“He paid me the ultimate compliment – he said I cook like his mother,” she says by telephone from her home in Prattville, Ala.

Sam’s path was difficult for some back home to understand, she says. But not her: “He followed his heart.”

Bill Mann says his view has mellowed over time.

“What he came from and what he did is remarkable,” he says. “Yeah, I’m proud of Sam. And I can tell you for a fact that everyone around Eufaula knows who Sam Mann is.

“Me? I get introduced as Sam Mann’s brother. And I’m the one still down here.”

Mann retired because he thinks St. Mark needs new leadership – someone younger, more detail-oriented and better with new technology.

“I’m pretty sloppy with details, and I can use a cell phone and I can text – that’s about it,” he says.

He has retired, but he is not quitting. “I’ll always be down along 12th Street,” he says.

It’s the place that took him in when no one else would; the street that saved him, and took him home.