A CENTURY OF SUNRISES By John Michael Lockhart In 1913, the life expectancy for an African American male in the United States was 35.6 year. It’s a statistic Dr. Rev. Joe Paul of Port Allen can’t identify with at all. This past Friday, West Baton Rouge’s oldest active minister celebrated his 100th birthday and twice this month the two churches with which Rev. Paul remains affiliated, New Mount Zion Baptist Church and Mount Calvary Baptist Church, have celebrated his birthday and his long affiliation with each respective church. Yesterday afternoon, a birthday party in Rev. Paul’s honor was held at Mount Calvary. That celebration also recognized his 58 years as a pastor at that church. A week earlier, New Mount Zion also celebrated his 100th birthday and his 60 years of services to that congregation. Joe Paul was born on Westover Plantation in West Baton Rouge on Oct. 18, 1913. Westover has a long history in West Baton Rouge. In 1852, Henry Watkins Allen and Col. William Nolan purchased Westover Plantation. The two remained business partners until 1855 when they divided the property. Allen, a native of Virginia who had served in the Mississippi state legislature before moving to West Baton Rouge, established Allendale Plantation with his portion of Westover and Nolan continued to call his plantation Westover after the division of property. Allen was elected to the Louisiana legislature from West Baton Rouge and served as a general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In 1864, he was elected the second and final governor of Confederate Louisiana. After the war, Allen fled to Mexico where he died in 1866. For the next sixteen years, Allendale Plantation changed hands several times, until John and Martin James Kahao purchased the plantation in 1882. The Kahao family successfully operated the sugar plantation and mill for several decades. During the second half of the twentieth century, Westover and Allendale Plantation transitioned from hand labor and mule cultivation to mechanized farming. Like other plantations of the era, Allendale provided its own church for laborers who lived and worked on the plantation. It was at Mount Bethel Baptist Church on Allendale Plantation that Rev. Paul attended church as a boy. Rev. Paul never knew his mother, who died from complications with childbirth exactly 100 years ago today, just three days after his birth. While there is little data on maternal mortality rates in the United States prior to 1915, the U.S. reported the highest rates of maternal mortality of any developed country after 1915 and neither income level nor nutrition were deemed factors. Rev. Paul, and his three older siblings, were raised by their grandparents at Westover, Joe and Mary Green Clark. Rev. Paul says he has fond memories playing ball and shooting marbles with the other children at Westover and Allendale plantations. For African American children in that era, education was not a priority, Rev. Paul explains. “If you didn’t go to school in those days, they didn’t do nothing to you and they didn’t do nothing to your parents,” he says. As a result, Rev. Paul says he quit school at some point during his fourth grade year. “My grandparents were sharecroppers at Westover and our job was cutting cane. When I was little, my job was to get water to the workers in the field. That was a much easier job than cutting cane and the workdays were shorter because you didn’t have to get up as early and you could knock off a half hour before the cane cutters. “I had to pump the water out of the ground by hand and carry out to the field in a mule-drawn wagon,” Rev. Paul says. Rev. Paul’s oldest surviving son, Joe Paul Jr., who turned 79 earlier this month, says he assumed those same duties as a water boy at Westover when he was a child there. In the era of sharecropping, workdays were long and the pay was minimal. Rev. Paul says he received $1 per day, which was paid every two weeks, and the workday was typically 14 to 16 hours long, depending on the time of year. Sharecropping became widespread as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction. Sharecropping was a way for former slaves to work on the land and be paid for it. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant loaned money for food and supplies. At harvest time the sharecropper received a share of the crop (typically from one-third to one-half), which paid off his debt to the merchant. By the late 1860s white farmers also became sharecroppers. The system was distinct from that of the tenant farmer, who rented the land, provided his own tools and mule, and received half the crop. Landowners provided more supervision to sharecroppers, and less or none to tenant farmers. Sharecropping was common on Louisiana sugar and cotton from Reconstruction until the 1950s, among both blacks and whites. The children of sharecroppers and tenant farmers had very little access to a quality education or medical facilities and suffered as a consequence. Louisiana’s stringent voting requirements also worked against poor black and white farmers. When asked if he was either politically active or interested in politics as a young man, Rev. Paul says he wasn’t. “Politics? I didn’t know what that was,” he says without hesitation. His answer is not surprising, given the political climate in Louisiana at the time he was born. In 1896, 17 years prior to his birth, 44.8 percent of Louisiana’s voters were African American. To protect poor white voters while disenfranchising African American voters, Louisiana introduced the innovation of the “grandfather clause.” In 1889, the Louisiana state constitution was amended to provide that all persons would have to meet educational and property requirements unless their fathers or grandfathers were qualified to vote on Jan. 1, 1867. Of course, almost no African Americans met that requirement and by 1890 the number of African American voters in the state shrank to just four percent. Rev. Paul says he found a much higher calling than politics at a very early age. Rev. Paul says he grew up in church and, at the age of 19, he received his calling to become a minister. “I began preaching when I was 19 and about two weeks after I was baptized, the spirit of the Lord came into my head and told me to preach.” Rev. Hawkins, the preacher who baptized Rev. Paul in 1932, was born in 1842 and turned 19 years old when the Civil War broke out in Louisiana. “He was 90 and I was 19,” Rev. Paul notes with a grin. When Rev. Paul told the other congregation members at Mount Bethel that he had been called by God to preach the Gospel, he says they laughed at him. “They told me I didn’t have enough education to become a preacher,” he recalls. But at a regular church service Mount Bethel, Paul met Rev. Harrison, a pastor from Mississippi who was in his sixties, and he provided the education in God’s Word that Paul was lacking. Rev. Paul has now been preaching the word of God for over 80 years and he says it’s what keeps him going. He also has a son, Terry, and a grandson, Jonathon, who are ministers. In addition to beginning his long career as a minister at the age of 19, he married 17-year-old Virginia Carter of Algiers, La. that same year. It was a blessed union that produced ten children and more grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren than he can count, he confesses. Virginia Paul died in 1981 and three of his ten children, including both his youngest and oldest child, have preceded him in death. “She was a good wife; I know I made the right decision when I married her,” he says. While he’s buried his wife and three of their children during his long lifetime, Rev. Paul says he’s been blessed by far more happy days than sad ones. When asked what day was the happiest in his 100 years, Rev. Paul doesn’t have to think long before providing an answer. “The happiest day is when I got religion when I was 19,” he says. In addition to eight decades preaching, Rev. Paul also worked in the sugar mill at Catherine Plantation and for the West Baton Rouge Parish Police Jury maintaining parish roads for 12 years. But his first love has always been preaching the Gospel, he says. “He gave me what I got. There’s something that keeps me going and I say it is the Lord,” he says. According to one of his granddaughters, Robin Paul, Rev. Paul has not had any serious health problems and would still be driving if the family had stopped him. “He never was a person to be sick,” Robin Paul says. Deloris Kibby says Rev. Paul is a man she’s always admired. “He’s known me since I was just a baby. I have always admired him and looked up to him; he preached my mother’s funeral,” she says. While Rev. Paul can’t say for certainty how much time he has left in this life, he says there is one thing that he does know for sure. “You can see the sun rise but it doesn’t mean you’re going to see the sun set,” he says.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 05:58:48 +0000
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