THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 4, 1996 TAG: 9605030015
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Patrick Lackey
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Samuel D. Proctor was born 74 years ago in a house his grandfather built in Norfolk.
Today, he will receive an honorary doctorate from Old Dominion University and deliver the commencement address to some 2,200 ODU graduates. He will talk about hope, responsibility and about sharing - since all people are not similarly blessed.
In the beginning, Proctor's family didn't have much - few did during the Great Depression, black families least of all. He'd just as soon not reflect on the menial jobs he held growing up. ``Don't remind me of that,'' he said, half laughing, ``or I'll bring you to tears talking about the work I did.''
In those days, he said, white people ``looked at us like we were telephone poles or cocker spaniels.''
Still, Proctor was tremendously lucky in one regard: Education was valued in his home. His grandmother was a freed slave whose former owners paid her way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, now Hampton University. She graduated in 1882. In the Proctors' household, books mattered. Degrees mattered.
When Proctor graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, he was barred because of his race from attending the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary, now Old Dominion University. ``We weren't allowed to go on that campus,'' he said, ``for anything but to pick up the trash.''
Proctor studied two years at Virginia State College in Petersburg, then transferred to Virginia Union College in Richmond, where he went broke.
Out of nowhere, a benefactor paid his tuition. ``I was never given his name,'' Proctor said, ``because they knew I would ask for more money.''
Proctor went on to become president of Virginia Union. One day a white Baptist from New Hampshire called to ask if he was the same Samuel Proctor he'd helped at the school in the '40s. Proctor said he must be, and the man asked if there was another student who needed help.
As chance would have it, a married military vet with two children was in Proctor's office shedding tears of lost hope. The man, Charles Cummings, had no money to continue his education. The benefactor ended up paying Cummings' way clear through medical school. Today Dr. Cummings is a prominent physician in Richmond, and Proctor says that call was ``the greatest miracle I ever saw in my life.''
Proctor's resume mentions no miracles, but it's impressive.
He earned a doctorate in theology from Boston University and was president of two universities. He served in various administrative positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and taught at Duke, Vanderbilt and Yale, among others. Today he is professor emeritus of Rutgers University and pastor emeritus of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Over more than 40 years of preaching and teaching, he's written several books, the most recent being The Substance of Things Hoped for: A Memoir of African-American Faith.
Proctor believes he was born into this world with blessings he neither earned nor deserved, especially good parents and grandparents.
``If I received all of this just by a stroke of good fortune,'' he said, ``don't I owe something to other persons who inherited deficits they did not deserve?''
The obvious answer, which he'll share with ODU graduates, is yes. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
SAMUEL D. PROCTOR
by CNB