By Philip Walzer
The Virginian-Pilot

WINDSOR, N.C. — For 89 years, the Rev. St. Paul Epps has quietly pursued Jesus and justice.

In the 1960s , Epps became the top black person in the hierarchy of the U.S. Presbyterian Church, still shunning the spotlight.

Saturday (October 29, 2005), he won’t be able to avoid it.

Epps will serve as the honorary grand marshal of Norfolk State University’s homecoming parade, waving at the crowds from a convertible.

For Epps, it will be a homecoming, too.

But when he was a student, Norfolk State wasn’t on the streets he’ll be riding down Saturday. It wasn’t even Norfolk State.

Epps was the first person to enroll at the school, originally known as the Norfolk Unit of Virginia Union University. He was among 85 people who started classes at the school in 1935 – and the college’s first student government president.

On Saturday, Epps will pass multistory academic buildings and residence halls serving more than 6,100 students. In his day, classes met in a handful of rooms on the second floor of the Hunton YMCA, then on Brambleton Avenue, near Church Street .

“I expected some growth,” said Epps, now living in Windsor, south of Edenton, “but not the kind that occurred.”

Epps was named not for the early Christian leader and writer of epistles , but for his cherished grandfather St. Paul Langley, a deacon at First Baptist Church.

Epps and his family attended another downtown church, St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal, which further inflamed his passion for religion.

“It was a good place to go,” he said. “People cared about you and encouraged you to lift yourself up and corrected you if you did something wrong.”

He lived in a two-story house on Brambleton near where the Radisson Hotel now sits.

His family’s circumstances were cramped by segregation and the Depression. His mother did laundry for white families in Ghent; his father was a janitor and house painter. They had eight children.

“I have seen my father weep because he could not make provisions for the family that he wanted to make,” Epps recalled. They ate “a lot of cheap cuts of meat and a lot of soup.”

As a teenager, he took odd jobs to help out: He took the laundry to and from the houses in Ghent , he delivered the paper, he shined shoes for a nickel at a market on Brambleton and Church.

After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, he jumped at the chance to attend the new college and helped to recruit other students.

In addition to the student government, Epps joined the debate team and drama club. In class, his favorite subjects were history and English.

The professors were no pushovers. “They didn’t ease up because it was a junior college or off-campus,” he said.

The Norfolk Unit was then a two-year school, so Epps graduated with an associate’s degree in 1937 , just one point shy of the “A” honor roll. “I thought I had made it,” Epps said, “but I guess I played around a little bit.”

He moved on to Knoxville College in Tennessee, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1939. He got a master’s in divinity from Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary in 1942 .

Gentle and soft-spoken, Epps casts a soothing spell. “He’s the most nonjudgmental person I ever met,” said his nephew W. Ross Boone of Suffolk.

“He recognizes all of the things that occur in life,” Boone said, “and yet he keeps his balance and he talks to you in such a gentle and reassuring way that you feel better.”

A good counselor must first be a good listener, Epps said. “I would never be pedantic, telling them ‘This is what you ought to do.’”

His first pastoral job was at a mostly black church in Henderson, N.C., where he met his wife, Kathryn. They left in 1946 to start a new church in the Watts area of Los Angeles.

The church began in his two-car garage. It grew to nearly 800 people.

“When I heard him pray, I felt like God had really called him,” said Phoebe Greer, one of the founding members. “He prayed like he had a personal acquaintance with him.”

Epps moved a year before the Watts riots of 1965. “That was agonizing,” he said, “but predictable. There were times we would go to the City Council and relate problems that were going on in the community, and they would turn a deaf ear.”

Epps left California for New Jersey to become secretary of stewardship and development for the United Presbyterian Church. Church officials, trying to promote integration, realized their upper tier was all-white and asked him to diversify it.

He traveled to the Midwest, leading seminars on fundraising and quietly promoting integration. He was the first black person some had ever seen. A few churches said he could sit in the pews, but not preach. He agreed. The next time he visited, they relented.

In 1970 , he was chosen to direct the church’s new National Committee on the Self-Development of People, which doled out $10 million a year to projects helping poor people worldwide.

Epps retired in 1980. He had wanted to move back to Norfolk, but he got “outvoted” by his wife, whose family had land in Windsor. He has continued to serve as interim pastor at churches, most recently in Rocky Mount, N.C., last year.

Looking back on his life, he said, “On the whole, we’ve made a good bit of progress, but the sincerity of some whites leaves one suspicious. … I’m still a little disappointed that some jobs for blacks don’t come easily and that some of the schools continue to be separated.”

Whites don’t shoulder all the responsibility, Epps added.

“Blacks themselves need to seize some of the opportunities for study and improvement ,” he said. “We’re not free of some of our own prejudices against each other and against whites.”

His greatest achievement, Epps said, is not his work but his family. He and his wife attribute their 62-year marriage to never going to bed angry.

Their oldest son, Braxton, a lawyer, died of a heart attack in 1997 . Their two other children are Frances Wilburn, a retired airline attendant who lives in New Jersey, and Sheldon, a theater and television director in California.

Epps is “a guy you can count on,” Boone said. “If you ever have to go to battle and you want someone to hold your back, you pick St. Paul up.”

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