“I was very angry with God for keeping me here, but now I realize it was a blessing.”
The biggest blessing, according to his parishioners, has been for the church itself.
“I think Norman L. Townsel is the best minister I ever sat before,” said Deacon William Burns, who has been going to Pilgrim Baptist for 38 years.
“He’s a wonderful person and a good teacher, too,” said Marie Rowe, who was a member of the church when Townsel arrived from his previous post in Glendale. “He loves the congregation, especially the children and the seniors.”
In person, Townsel has a soft-spoken, easy manner, but it’s a different story when he’s in the pulpit, Burns said.
“He’ll give it to you as it’s written,” he said. “He’s going to read you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. He don’t take no short cuts.”
Townsel said that he’s considered retiring, but doesn’t know what he would do then.
“I could write,” he mused. “I have copies of every sermon I’ve written over 53 years, except for the first one. I don’t know what happened to it. But I could work on those.”
But being from a long-lived family, he scoffs at the idea of being a pastor “for the duration.”
“My father lived to 93 and my mother to 96,” he said. “I don’t even want to approach that.”
But he plans to stay there for a while anyway.
“I’m healthy and most days I think I’m in my right mind,” he said. “I’ve had nothing to slow me down yet.
“I believe there’s something yet to do. What it is, I don’t know.”
Pilgrim Baptist’s Rev. Townsel 'kept down’ the turmoil of the civil rights era
Although the Rev. Norman L. Townsel says the congregation at Pilgrim Baptist Church welcomed him with open arms when he first preached there 45 years ago, the city was not a comfortable place to live.
“The city was not very good to what we called black folks at that time,” he said. “The parameters were drawn. Not one black family lived across the river. Most of the folk could walk to church at that time. It was a very segregated city. Garfield (High School) was the school for blacks and poor whites. We were confined to one elementary school.”
In 1965, the nation was embroiled in a bitter battle for civil rights, but Townsel was a calming voice both in Hamilton and at Princeton High School, where he taught until he retired 20 years ago.
“The city benefitted because he kept down most of the turmoil,” said deacon and long-time friend William Burns. “He was vigilant and kept the young people on the right track at Princeton and he brought that to the city of Hamilton, too.”
But that doesn’t mean he didn’t participate in the Civil Rights Movement.
“We fought the racism,” Townsel said. “We had boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, all kinds of things that were popular back then.
“We were resisted. Some of us got labeled as 'agitators’ and the labels stuck.”
His family was the second black family to move to the West Side of Hamilton, he said, and since then, Hamilton has slowly changed, the racism not so deep or divisive.
“Racism never dies because of what it is,” he said. “Racism is a faith and passed along from generation to generation. Children are taught it at home.”
But, he said, children are also the best resource when it comes to breaking the cycle of racism.
“I have three children and five college degrees among them,” he said.
Townsel grew up in Bradenton, Fla., where he was the sixth of seven children. His father also was a pastor in a climate that was even worse than what he experienced when he first came to Hamilton.
In 1951, he was a junior in college when he accepted the call to the pulpit and went to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., which he said was one of the first colleges to integrate its classrooms.
“There were no black students there, so I was sent in to be the Jackie Robinson,” he said. “I met some great people, men who had never sat at a table with a black man, but I saw very limited evidence of racism among the 900 men there.
“One black minister had graduated before me. He wasn’t allowed inside the classroom, so he sat outside the door in the hallway to get his Ph.D.”
Townsel believes that while the church is an effective battleground against racism — “If it’s not done in the church, it’s not going to be done,” he said — it is also a perpetuator.
“Scientists tried to prove there was something wrong with us,” he said, “that there was something wrong with our hair, there was something wrong with our noses, that our lips were too thick.
“So they go to the Bible and the church provides them with documentation that we are cursed,” he said. “It’s brainwashing. You have to learn how to be a slave, and we keep the slave mentality.
“But we’ve come a long way, or we wouldn’t have (President Barack) Obama sitting in the White House.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
About the Author