H. Calvin Austin, III
Civil Rights

Pastor H. Calvin Austin, III was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. His mother was a school teacher and his father was a pastor. He grew up in Allendale in the late `50's, a community that was predominantly Italian, but where there was no racism, they all played and ate at each other's houses, like family. When he was eleven he started selling the Shreveport Sun downtown on Texas for a dime and made a nickel on each one he sold. He remembers a time when Mr. Levy and Mr. Selber gave him the advice that for every dollar he made, he should save a quarter. He realized at that time that he was selling the papers but not reading them, so he began reading about the NAACP, joined the youth chapter and began attending the meetings. That is when he first heard about discrimination and racism in Shreveport. His daddy was a Baptist and his mother was a Methodist and he grew up around Jews, so he studied the Torah, went to Mass at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament and attended both Baptist and Methodist churches. Calvin has never "tagged" himself as an African-American because he did not come from Africa. He realized that education was a necessity in order to improve a person's economic status. When he was young, he attended Lee's Private school then went to Central, J. S. Clark and then to Booker T. Washington. He was really deep into the NAACP and was at Galilee Baptist Church when Martin Luther King came to speak. When he was thirteen, he was in Galilee Baptist Church when the members were attacked for gathering to pray for the four little girls from Birmingham, Alabama who were killed in a church bombing. He remembers the Commissioner of Public Safety, George D'Artois coming in to the church and hitting Reverend Blake with a billy club. The next day, the students decided to leave school and go downtown but the police came and took eighteen students to jail. He was identified by a black police officer as the leader and he was put in jail for forty-five days while the others were taken to juvenile hall and released. When he tried to return to school, he learned that he had been expelled. At seventeen, his parents sent him to New Orleans where he attended L. B. Landry High School. Whe he graduated he was offered a full scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder, all expenses paid. He said he left Shreveport in 1963, a mad black young man, not mad just at white people, mad at the world. He did not return to Shreveport until 1998. In 2004, the Caddo Parish School Board apologized for banning him from the system and awarded him his diploma. Pastor Austin feels that integration of schools was not a good thing. He prefers neighborhood schools with teachers and students of like culture so they can understand and relate to one another. He thinks that civil rights opened up the people to the issues but that Shreveport is still racially divided and racism goes both ways. He also thinks that the black vote is the controlling voting block but fifty-five years after they were given the right to vote, "they just don't go and vote". Because people died for the right to vote, both black and white, voting is very important. He supports candidates based on what they bring to the table, not the color of their skin. If he could change anything in the world, he would change the mindset of people and how they judge one another. Lastly, he has a vision of bringing together all denominations, all faiths, all people, and pack a place like Independence Stadium on an Easter morning and worship God together.