In a 1942 basketball game between the All-County Athletic League and Berkeley High, the one Black player for ACAL, a wing named Howard Bryant, kept getting fouled by a small Berkeley guard. The Berkeley guard finally kneed Bryant below the belt, and Bryant hit him. "And that was Billy Martin," the New York Yankee infielder and irascible Oakland A's manager, Bryant later told Presbyterian Historical Society archivist David Staniunas. Decking Martin was a familiar feeling: "My father was a boxer, and I got a scholarship in boxing to San Jose State." The young man's calling though would be elsewhere.
In late January, PHS visited Rev. Bryant, now 97 years old, at his home near Newark, learning about his long and peripatetic career, and preserving his personal records for the national archives of the PC(USA).
Bryant was born in 1928 in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. He and his family moved to California's Bay Area in 1942 seeking work in the area's shipyards. As a teenager he held a variety of jobs, as a ship-fitter, busboy, cannery worker, dishwasher, fry cook, clerk, saxophonist, and pianist. Emma Maiden married him in 1950, and that December he was drafted into the United States Army, serving in Korea. Initially serving in the mess of an Army base stateside, he offended a superior officer and was within 72 hours shipped to Korea, serving the last six months of the war.
Returning stateside, he found work as a USPS postal clerk in 1954 and joined the postal workers' union. By 1959 he served as personnel assistant and would co-chair his local's legislative committee. This work put him in touch with national political figures, meeting congressman Pete McCloskey and senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the same time, Bryant was called to the ministry and began preaching at Baptist churches in San Francisco. He organized Second Baptist Church (Daly City, Calif.) in 1963, part of the National Baptist Convention. Initially meeting in a garage, the church acquired a disused city building; Bryant rehabbed the building himself. In 1964, Bryant got into local politics, advocating for fair housing in Daly City and proposing and eventually running a Great Society anti-poverty program, the Daly City Referral Center.
In 1969 Bryant enrolled at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He was installed at Elmhurst Presbyterian Church (Oakland, Calif.) in 1971. At Elmhurst, Bryant was in close relationship and proximity to the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale was an occasional worshipper there. The church gathered funds for the Panthers, and Bryant alleges he was surveilled by the FBI for his neighborhood connection to the Panthers. During this period, Bryant and other East Oakland ministers successfully advocated for the creation of the Black Studies program at San Francisco State College and protested the $10-million-dollar initial state allocation for what would become the Oakland Coliseum.
He was recruited to come east in 1973 to undertake the pastorate of Roseville Presbyterian Church in Newark -- a congregation transformed by white flight into being majority African American. His background in personnel management brought him into the national level of the church, and in 1976 he joined the UPCUSA Council on Administrative Services as a trainer of mid council leaders and an affirmative action / equal employment officer. In 1985 he joined the Board of Pensions as Eastern Area Representative, serving for seven years. From the 1980s through the 2010s, he served a succession of interim pastorates in the Presbytery of New York and the Presbytery of Newark. In January 1993, he accompanied a group from San Francisco Theological Seminary on travels in Egypt, Palestine, and Israel. His travel journal extensively records the trip, including reflections on seeing Israeli military checkpoints and Palestinian refugee camps, for people displaced in the 1967 war.
Howard is a multi-instrumentalist -- one of his many gigs as a young person was as alto saxophone in a jazz combo -- and in 2007, he recorded a short set of spiritual music and original compositions called Rescue Me. On our visit, he played part of his own song, "Trust Him So," on his living room electric piano.
PHS is grateful to Rev. Bryant for entrusting us with his personal records. To learn more about how we support documentation of Black Presbyterianism, visit African American Leaders and Congregations.
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