Former Wesley Community Center participants in front of old Wesley Community Center gym
Old news clipping of young Dank Hawkins
Janet Kelly, Harold Jackson Jr., and Jeffery and Ernest “Junebug” Gilbert, from left
George Autry, Dank Hawkins and Melvin Stewart, from left
Tana Walker, left, and Randolph “Rudy” Ware
Outside of old Wesley Community Center gym
Outside of old Wesley Community Center gym
Outside of old Wesley Community Center gym
News-Free Press clipping of Viola Gregg Liuzzo’s 1965 death
Sixty years ago this March 25, Chattanoogans learned that one of the most successful marches in American civil rights history had been completed on a third attempt from Selma, Al., to Montgomery to demand fairer voting rights laws.
It was considered one of the feel-good moments of the 1960s in America’s attempt to live up to its creed that all men are created equal, to paraphrase civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
However, amid that positive news for supporters of civil rights, locals learned that a white woman named Viola Gregg Liuzzo from Michigan had tragically been shot and killed by alleged Klansmen while she transported marchers back toward their homes after the march.
Some hustling reporting by the Chattanooga News-Free Press the next day revealed that Ms.
Liuzzo had also spent some time in Chattanooga in the 1930s and 1940s and that her parents in 1965 lived in Fort Oglethorpe. And a look in city directories from the World War II era shows that her mother had once worked for several years for the daycare and nursery unit at the Wesley Community Center, a United Methodist-affiliated facility located by Main and Polk streets for several decades.
One can easily wonder in hindsight if a young Viola had a seed planted to aid the underprivileged through her mother’s experience at the Wesley Community Center here.
I have also since learned that Wesley Community Center about the time of the Selma march and for a decade or more afterward was a high point for primarily the black community in that part of Chattanooga.
As Dank Hawkins, one of the Chattanoogans who benefited from the center, told me recently, “Besides where I grew up at Madison Street and Jefferson Street, this really put me in a position of being disciplined. We had outstanding programs here at the Wesley Center. The United Methodist folks really took care of us.”
And he was not alone in appreciating the center. After he had mentioned his connection in a prior interview regarding his career that included being a star former softball and basketball player, and I asked if I could meet him near the old site recently to get some memories due to the Selma connection anniversary, he invited eight other people to join us. All had been touched by the center either as participants in the activities or as employees.
As George Autry said, “Wesley Center was our home. We had our leader here (administrator Harold Jackson). He took care of us. He was a good man.”
Janet Kelly, meanwhile, remembered taking part in activities like the Girl Scouts. “Just having somewhere to go after school, it meant a lot,” she said.
I enjoyed hearing all nine of the brief reminiscences and have included excerpts from all of them at the bottom of this story.
Whether one is interviewing former patrons or looking at old historical news clippings or city directories, the same theme seems to come out – this place rarely mentioned today was a beacon of light and hope for many, just as many other faith-based or non-profit facilities in Chattanooga have been.
Today all that remains of the Wesley Community Center is the gym, and construction is taking place all around it on several tracts of land in projects highlighted in recent years in the newspaper as this part of town has become popular for dense residential construction. I did not investigate what the plans are for that site, but the gym remains as a lone memorial to a special time for many.
Some old news clippings say the center started about the end of World War I by some local Methodist women before the church was known as the United Methodist Church, with Mrs. W.B. Speer serving as the first president. Mrs. Miriam Brock was also an early leader and had reportedly help come up with some of the early ideas while leading a Bible study at Phillips Memorial Church.
Some houses were part of the facility initially, and in the late 1930s Eva Wilson Gregg came to work there as a teacher in the nursery or daycare. She was married to Heber Ernest Gregg, who also did some sales work and reportedly also had some kind of physical disability. Their daughter, Viola, was a graduate of East Side Junior High in the late 1930s.
I had interviewed a couple of Viola’s daughters a few years ago, and one said she thought her mother had also gone to St. Mary’s School, likely the former girls school associated with what is now St. Andrews-Sewanee. A recent check with their alumni office found no records of her, although official Stephen Brehm said their records are not complete.
Viola’s mother worked at the Wesley Community Center for several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, while Viola was nearing her mid-to-late teens. Perhaps the outreach work she saw being done there later influenced her sympathetic view toward helping all people.
The family during that era lived at different places not far from the center. As she grew older, Viola worked at Oscar’s Sandwich Shop on McCallie Avenue, Standard-Coosa-Thatcher near Dodds Avenue and Bob Green’s restaurant. She even lived on her own at a young age in a home at 1601 S. Watkins St. near the old S-C-T mill, a structure torn down in recent years as construction began on the residential development in that area.
The family apparently moved to Michigan about the time America became involved in World War II, perhaps for better jobs.
But Viola’s interest in all people, a view perhaps tapped in Chattanooga, continued and led her to want to be in Selma and Montgomery in 1965.
And the Wesley Center continued as well into the post-World War II era.
Some old newspaper clippings say that a major addition to the Wesley Community Center commenced in the early 1950s, with the Harrison Gill firm selected as the architect. Included among the somewhat expansive complex of indoor and outdoor facilities was the still-standing gym, which the former participants say was nice and included a wooden floor.
In 1959 during a surprise ceremony, the building was renamed in honor of Mrs. Brock for her years of dedicated service to the facility. City Commissioner George McInturff during the ceremony praised the good work of the center in being an asset to the larger Chattanooga community.
The wife of Brock Candy Co. founder and previously appointed U.S. Sen. William E. Brock, Miriam Brock was also the daughter of a Baptist minister. Almost mirroring the Gregg family, she also passed along an appreciation for the welfare of all people. That was because her son, William E. Brock Jr. – the father of the late former U.S. Sen. Bill Brock — was instrumental in encouraging area businesses and leaders to support the court-ordered desegregation of the schools in the early 1960s at a volatile time.
In 1967, the Brock Wesley Community Center and the also-Methodist-affiliated Bethlehem Center between St. Elmo and Alton Park merged their boards but both continued separate operations. The Bethlehem Center had been started as the Good Shepherd Fold daycare center by black woman minister the Rev. Sallie Crenshaw in the late 1940s after she noticed a need for children to be taken care of while their parents worked. She later bought a plot of land in St. Elmo, where the modern center would develop.
The operations of the two centers were apparently merged about the mid-1980s and the Wesley Community Center closed. The Bethlehem Center, meanwhile, continues its strong Christian outreach under the United Methodist Church today.
While the Miriam Brock Wesley Community Center is no more, the positive impact it left behind locally and even nationally continues with the stories of its former participants and families of former workers attempting to live worthwhile lives and do what is right.
It is personified today by the nine Wesley Center alumni who stopped by the outside of the facility to reminisce recently. And it apparently was noticeable as well in 1965 when the courageous story of a daughter of a former employee was made known nationally amid an unfortunate tragedy.
As was summed up by Dank Hawkins, the community outreach coordinator for the Hamilton County Parks and Recreation Department and who also remembers Ms. Liuzzo from the “Selma” movie, “They loved us.”
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Below are slightly edited excerpts of the reminiscences of some of those who attended the old Miriam Brock Wesley Community Center or worked there.
Janet Kelly, 1976 Howard High graduate – “When I first started coming to the Wesley Center, I was in the fourth grade, and I was a Girl Scout and went on to be a cadet. We had softball, basketball and we had tournaments where we would go and play against teams from different places. And we would have crafts with the Girl Scouts. I remember Ms. Amelia Kelly, who at the time was the secretary, and Kay Harner, she was also part of our growing up here. Just having somewhere to go after school, it meant a lot. We have all done aged, but we can still remember those days. That was our golden time.”
Ernest “June Bug” Gilbert, 1976 Howard High graduate – “I came to the Wesley Center back in 1969 and the early 1970s. I learned to be a Boy Scout. One of my friend’s father, Harold Jackson, ran the center so many years. It was a nice place to be. We grew up right here. There was basketball, Boy Scouts, and we even took a trip to New York City. We stayed at the YMCA and we went to Madison Square Garden. We had a pretty good time. A lot of successful kids came to this center. We hated for it to leave, but things get old.”
Jeffery Gilbert, now 63 years old, and who played basketball at Brainerd High – “We would play basketball until 6. We had to get off the floor at 6. If we got up here early enough, we would play a couple of games. But at 6 o’clock the older guys would come and push us off. And everybody loved the free lunches. We came up here all year long, but in the summer, we came up here a lot. This was the only gym with a wood floor.”
George Autry, a former Howard High basketball player and 1972 alumnus – The Wesley Center was our home. We had our leader (Harold Jackson) here. He took care of us. He was a good man. He kept us from the streets. We had somewhere to come and to learn how to play ball and how to act. And then he took us on to camp. We had to learn Bible verses. He kept us busy. He really did all year-round. All these guys, we were pretty much raised up together in this neighborhood. Most lived within walking distance. We walked every day of the week.”
Tana Walker, former staff member – “I thought we did a lot of great things with the kids. It was like a teaching thing, too. I started coming to the center when I was like in the third grade. It wasn’t hard for me to do the job after coming and knowing all the rules all my life. It was a great job. I worked seven years over here and did it (recreation center) work 35 more years. I came here in 1963 and started working here in 1976. After I left this center, it was just one more year after I left that it closed. And I always thought it was Miriam Brock that was the main sponsor of the program.”
Melvin Stewart, former staff member, and 1967 graduate of and former basketball player for Howard High – I started working here in 1973. That was when we started giving school kids a job. I had about seven or eight kids working, and they didn’t like me calling them janitor because they were cleaning and stuff like that. So I started calling them custodians. To this day, they call me the custodian. I worked for Harold Jackson. He was super nice guy. He cared about the community and the kids around here. He taught a lot of people a lot of stuff.”
Harold Jackson Jr., son of former recreation director and 1974 Kirkman High graduate and former athlete there – “My dad used to run the center. It was great I would visit the guys and work out with them. They taught me how to play basketball. I learned a lot from them, and they are still friends of mine. I did the military for 26 years in the Army. My father was a disciplinarian, and he was in the Army, too. He made sure things ran right. He died in 2015.”
Randolph Ware, member of Kirkman High class of 1974 and uncle of former Red Bank football star Gerald Ware – “I used to come in here. I played in 12 and under, 13-14 and 15-16 and won championships in basketball. I played flag football, too. We played at Warner Park and Lincoln Park. I was one of the better ones to come in here and touch a basketball. They used to call me Mr. Wesley. I could shoot that ball. I scored 65 points once in the 17-18 division in the summer league. I had some good times in there. You had to be able to play to get on that floor down there. If you didn’t play really good, you would be sitting up there in the bleachers. I lived in a neighborhood over on 13th Street.
Dank Hawkins, 1976 Howard graduate – “The United Methodist folks really took care of us. They loved us. They also took care of our families in need. Some of the great memories I have are not only about sports and athletics, but the love we had. We had our own two vans for transportation around the city of Chattanooga. We even went to New York City and stayed for a week back in the day. We had such classes here as arts and crafts. I was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout. This was just a home away from home for most of us on this side of town. I met my first girlfriend here. And we had a clock that went ‘Tick, Tick, Tick.’ I called the owner about it, but I think he is going to keep it.
“The Wesley Center kept us out of trouble and gave us some things we didn’t really have. We had the best recreation center in the city of Chattanooga. I started coming here in the late ‘60s all the way up to my graduating year at Howard in ’76. We had the best facility of all the recreation centers in Chattanooga until they brought up the newer buildings. We didn’t go without anything. And they had roller derby skates and they would let us skate. The gym had a set of bleachers (on the side away from Main Street). Every year during the fall they would shut down the gym and shellack the floors.
“We won the touch football championship when I was 12. We beat Avondale at Warner Park. And Tana Walker was the only director to put me out of the Wesley Center. I could dunk with a volleyball, and he walked in on me in the gym and said, ‘You’ve got to go.’ But we are like brothers to this day.”
Mr. Hawkins also said his uncle, Jimmie Allen; his cousin, Willetta Pearl Simpson Hill; and pastor Steve Underwood also have rich memories of the Wesley Community Center but were unable to make the gathering.
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This article was originally published by a www.chattanoogan.com . Read the Original article here. .