Many years of fighting against injustice win local man honors from municipal leaders
Michael Arges
EAST WINDSOR — Before the Montgomery bus strikes, and before Martin Luther King had made headlines, Archie Richmond was striking an early blow for racial justice when he refused to move his congregation from its picnic in the whites-only section of a southwestern Virginia state park.
“I guess that was pretty early to be doing a demonstration like that,” the Rev. Richmond says of the Aug. 22, 1955, incident. “That triggered a whole area of new beginnings” for race relations in southwestern Virginia, he adds.
Now a resident of Dutch Neck Road in East Windsor, the Rev. Richmond was singled out for special recognition as part of East Windsor’s celebration of African-American history month in February. After his historic stand in the Virginia park, the Rev. Richmond went on to be a pioneer in the Boy Scouts of America, helping to make Scouting more relevant to African-American, inner city and low-income youth.
“I felt lonely taking a stand like that, and I didn’t know if the support was out there,” the Rev. Richmond recalls.
Arrested when he refused to move his congregation from the white area of the park, the Rev. Richmond was jailed and initially was fired from his job as principal of the at Friends Elementary School, then the school for black children in Christianburg, Va. Intervention from a NAACP lawyer led to the restoration of his job.
“The white pastors came to my aid and rescue,” he recalls, and it was “just the beginning” of a wave of race relations progress in the area, as “pastors and churches began to work together for desegregation of facilities.” The Rev. Richmond adds that “all the small communities in that part of southeastern Virginia formed community action groups which led to talks with community organizations and businesses about desegregation.”
Black and white churches “had Easter services and Thanksgiving services together,” he adds. This was a remarkable development at a time when Southern blacks often had to come to the backdoor to get service in a restaurant and there was segregation of facilities such as drinking fountains and bus station waiting rooms.
One of a generation of immensely energetic and influential African-American pastors, the Rev. Richmond went from the principal’s job in 1959 to become area director of the Boy Scouts in a 14-county area of southeastern Virginia. Under his leadership that area tripled membership of Scouts and doubled rank advancement during a five-year period. All the while (1952-1963) he was also serving as pastor of St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Blacksburg, where he led the congregation as it doubled church membership, tripled the financial income of the church, created new programs for the Youth Department and renovated both the church and parsonage.
The Rev. Richmond saw his move to Boy Scout work as reflecting a call similar to that of his call to the pastoral ministry.
“I never doubted my calling to ministry when I was real young in 1950,” he says, “but I also feel that my work with the Boy Scouts of America was a definite calling too, because in those days I was able to help so many minorities.”
When he first got involved in Boy Scouts, the Rev. Richmond says, “Scouting was not too accessible to a lot of minorities.” For example, many of the necessary facilities were segregated. To be an Eagle Scout, a boy had to qualify in swimming, but there were not many swimming pools where blacks were allowed. As the Rev. Richmond helped bring African-American youth into Scouting, there was an opportunity for black and white kids to interact in the Boy Scouts, especially at larger Scouting meetings that brought together many different local troops. This interracial interaction was rare at a time when the schools were segregated.
In 1963 the Rev. Richmond migrated north to be Boy Scouts field director in north Philadelphia. Later, in 1967, he became a member of the Boy Scouts national staff, then located in New Brunswick. That was when the Rev. Richmond moved to his present residence in East Windsor. During his service with the Boy Scouts he has seen many strides to encourage minority and inner-city membership. In inner city Philadelphia, for example, there was the introduction of “Block Scouting.” A Boy Scout troop recruits only from one block, so boys will not have to cross the territory of rival gangs to go to Scout meetings.
New editions of the Boy Scout manual are more accessible to ethnic minorities. In 1984, when the Boy Scouts national headquarters moved to Dallas-Fort Worth, the Rev. Richmond returned to church employment, as pastor of a church in Atlantic Highlands and, at present, as Presiding Elder of the Newark District, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Rev. Richmond has enjoyed his years East Windsor, where he once served as president of the local homeowners’ association. He recalls with special fondness the “hospitality” of people in the neighborhood when he first moved here. It was like “one big community family,” the Rev. Richmond says. One special memory was a Christmas and Hanukkah party he put on with neighbor Lou Zack, a member of Beth El Synagogue.
Even in such a happy community, the Rev. Richmond’s family is not beyond the reach of racism. When they first moved to the neighborhood, people from outside the community would drive through and “call our daughters names” as they walked on the sidewalk. About two years ago the Rev. Richmond was getting some work done outside and a plastic bag blew across his yard. He chased after the bag across a neighbor’s yard, the neighbor saw him, and “and in three minutes three police arrived here in my back yard,” here calls. “When they came I was very calm and showed them my ID,” the Rev. Richmond says. “They laughed about it, but that was a very biased thing. And it made me angry — but they never did know I was angry.
“Had a white person been going across my lawn, I wouldn’t have thought anything about it,” the Rev. Richmond says. He notes that the incident “wouldn’t have happened when I first lived here, because everybody in this community knew everybody, all up and down the block.”
He muses that perhaps the episode was partly his fault; perhaps he should have been more intentional about introducing himself as new neighbors moved in.