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| "... and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6:8 |
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| "... and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6:8 |
From Civil Liberties In Pinellas, November 2006, Volume 16 No. 1. Photo and article by Jeffrey Harper. Reposted by permission Jim Peterson, Editor and Web Manager, Pinellas County Chapter, American Civil Liberties Union.
Rev. Harold Brockus said, “The end of the Pledge of Allegiance says “with liberty and justice for all.” Liberty and justice are intimately intertwined. The Bill of Rights doesn’t mean anything if you are too poor to speak out or to influence the power elite.” Thus he has spent his life working with traditional communities to hear the voices of marginalized people and to build new structures and programs that support and empower the outcasts among us.
Born in Independence, Missouri, he grew up in a blue collar family. Harold was the first in his family to go to college. He won a scholarship to Yale where he majored in American Studies. While at Yale, he worked in a homeless shelter and helped organize a lecture series that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak on campus just after the Montgomery Boycott.
After Yale, Rev. Brockus worked as a street worker dealing with youth gangs in Kansas City. He lived in the community organizing activities for the youth and interceding on their behalf when they got in trouble. “My goal was to reduce violence and get them opportunities,” he says.
His minister suggested that Harold try seminary and he attended McCormick Seminary in Chicago. Later he received a Doctorate of Ministry from a Presbyterian seminary associated with UC Berkeley.
In the summer of 1962, Rev. Brockus was part of an interracial group that held swim-ins to integrate Chicago beaches. He said, “On a couple of occasions Mayor Daley saved our lives. He didn’t want trouble in his city and the police held the mob back.”
Harold married and started a family. After seminary, he settled in a Presbyterian church in a small town in Iowa where he immediately got in trouble. Working with Mexican farm workers, he organized a clinic, and advised the school board that the federal funds they were receiving required them to accommodate farm workers’ children. Rev. Brockus obtained school board funding for a school, and was condemned as a trouble maker in editorials in the local paper. While in Iowa he organized a Delta Ministry. This nonsectarian ministry brought poor African Americans from Mississippi to Iowa where he had arranged for a local cannery to provide on the job training.
In 1970, the Brockus family moved to Pinellas County to rejuvenate The Good Samaritan Church in Pinellas Park. He organized, with church members, a counter culture center to provide outreach to young people struggling with the bad feelings of those times. The center provided a safe place for counter culture kids to go. Eventually he provided draft counseling as the Vietnam War dragged on.
In 1971 Pinellas County Schools were integrated. Dixie Hollins High School was especially difficult and had to be closed for a few weeks. Rev. Brockus organized an interracial youth group in the interim. Black students were brought to Good Samaritan to meet with white students and build a core group of peacemakers. When the school reopened, Rev. Brockus organized a group of adults to walk the halls to help avoid violence.
About this same time he proposed to the church, and they agreed, to become a Safe Place. They would provide meeting space for activist groups that were unwelcome at other places. Over the years groups that met in the church included Pinellas NOW, a transgendered group, a Chinese fellowship, and Pinellas ACLU.
In 1985 Rev. Brockus got involved with sexual minority youth issues. At the time the crisis hotlines had no place to refer GLBTQ youth. Agencies would not deal with them, so Rev. Brockus organized a support group that provided education and social opportunities in a safe place.
In 1989 he began working with the HIV/AIDS community as Chair of the AIDS Coalition. Rev. Brockus said, “This was the organizational experience of his life.”
In 1995, Rev. Brockus helped organize a PFLAG (Parents and Friends & Family of Lesbians and Gays) chapter. PFLAG wanted the school board to add “sexual orientation” to the board’s anti-harassment and discrimination policy. The night the policy was being considered, David Caton, the gay basher from Tampa, brought in bus loads of his supporters. Harold Brockus had already filled the room with supporters. It passed by one vote.
Rev. Brockus retired from Good Samaritan Church in 2002. Since then he has been active organizing farm workers in Wimauma, serving on the Board of Directors of Bethel Farm Workers. They provide legal assistance, a head start program, housing and a literacy program. Rev. Brockus has served as president of the Pinellas Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State for the past two years, and has been part of the Eckerd College Leadership program for twenty-six years. He has four children and seven grandchildren scattered all over the country.
A life dedicated to justice and liberty. Rev. Harold Brockus exemplifies the spirit of the Gardner Beckett Award.