By Karen F. Brown Dunlap (more by author)
Dean of the Faculty
My father’s name is etched in stone in Nashville.
It’s set in the cornerstone of Roger Heights Baptist Church.
I barely remember a frame church, back in the late 1950s, surrendering to age, the elements, and encroaching birds. My father, a young minister, led the congregation in building a brick edifice that stands today.
His name is etched in gold letters on glass near downtown Nashville. It’s over the entry of the state Baptist headquarters, where he was executive director. If you pause in front of the office at 9th and Jefferson, you can see his name: Charles H. Fitzgerald. You can see his picture on the wall inside.
He came a long way in life. Born to a 15-year-old from Toledo, Ohio, he knew only his father’s name and location: Emmett Harris of Mandeville, La. His father was never there to guide him. Maybe that’s why my father was always there for my mother, my sister, and me.
That’s not to say he and I were always in sync. As I grew, I thought I’d never get through hearing his voice. I heard his baritone at church on Sunday, morning, afternoon, and evening. I heard it at home. I heard it when I visited the American Baptist College, a few blocks from our house, where he was a teacher and dean. I heard it when he wasn’t talking.
He was a two-newspaper kind of man, a subscriber to both the Nashville Banner and the Tennessean. And that wasn’t enough.
He also subscribed to Look, Life, Ebony, Time, and Reader’s Digest. You got the impression that he wanted you to know something about the world.
Sometimes it was fun to hear him talk. He told about his hustles as a boy growing up in Toledo, about shining shoes and doing odd jobs, about hanging out near a club to hear the singer Ella Fitzgerald (no relation). He told of being hit by a truck when he was 12 years old, and being told he’d never walk again. But he did. He spoke of longing for the things rich folks had, like ham on rye.
I never understood the big deal about that last one. Just go to the store and get some ham and rye bread, I’d think. He told about train rides, and one time he gave my sister and me a sample of a delicacy a porter had given him on a train. It was coffee with butter in it. That probably explains why I’ve never been coffee drinker.
Something about young Charles impressed the people at Third Baptist Church in Toledo. They scraped together funds to send him to Morehouse College in Atlanta. His classmates included Martin Luther King Jr., and other relatively well-off young men, but Chuck was a poor boy, and worked his way through school. While washing windows at a dorm of Atlanta University he was taken by a picture that he saw inside on a dresser. It was of a young woman. She became his wife.
By the time I was in high school, I had to get away from hearing him. He had been a sergeant in the Army, serving in a segregated unit in Europe during World War II. To my mind, he had never stopped giving orders.
My heart was in attending Fisk University, but it was only a few blocks from his office, so I gladly accepted a scholarship to Michigan State University. Without telling me, my father canceled my application, deciding that was too far from home. Then my mother had a talk with him, and he changed his mind. He let me go, even driving the two of us from Nashville to East Lansing with a stop in Toledo to re-connect with relatives.
Next month will mark 25 years since his death from cancer at age 60. He’s buried in a veteran’s cemetery in Nashville, along with my mother. His name is etched in the tombstone: Charles H. Fitzgerald. One of my sons carries his name and has his Army uniform. My father was always there for me, and he lives on in me. On days like this, I’d love to hear his voice.
