Now, 50 years later, times have changed. On a Sunday afternoon in January, the couple could scarcely find a place to sit in their Pontiac, Mich., church. Fortunately, seats down front were reserved for the Craigs and three other longtime African American members: Malissa Brice, Reatha Williams, and David Williams. In fact, it was their stories that 450 people came to hear.

The event was “Voices of the Saints,” a small taste of a three-year effort to tape, record and transcribe the life experiences of church members who lived through and helped craft historic changes in the church and community. Interspersed with specially arranged music by The Jackson Chorale, readers recited short vignettes of the lives of the five members.

All Saints’ member Jim Lewis, a foreign language teacher for 35 years, was one of the project’s principal proponents. It grew out of the church anti-racism committee’s work, as a small number of members shared their first memories of racial differences, he said. Lewis heard for the first time stories of fellow members of the church, and the framework of “Voices of the Saints” was born.

“We wanted to record these stories and let them become a lesson for younger people. It is our impression that a lot of young people are not aware of the struggles that went into the Civil Rights Movement,” Lewis said. “The stories just got richer and richer the more they were recorded.”

Family beginnings

One of those stories is that of the Craigs.

Catherine Craig was born in Pittsburgh, and she and three siblings followed her parents at Tuskegee College in Alabama. A fifth brother was one of the Tuskegee Airmen. She returned to Pittsburgh briefly before taking a teaching job at Fort Valley State College in Georgia. There, she met Richard.

Richard Craig grew up in Springfield, Ohio. A gifted athlete, he played on the varsity football team as a freshman and saw his state championship teammates and head coach leave for the University of Wisconsin before him. When it was his turn, the coach advised him to not try to overcome the racism of a new, white Wisconsin football coach and to attend the University of Toledo instead.

At Toledo, he was mentored by the football coach and even lived above his office, where the coach kept a close eye on the promising student athlete. After graduating, he taught for two years in Orangeburg, S.C., where he acquired experience and a new name that has stayed with him throughout his life: Coach.

After working in a propeller plant during World War II, Coach took a position at Fort Valley State College, where he met Catherine. Three years after they married, and with their son on the way, Catherine Craig declared that she did not want to raise a child in the South. Coach was less eager to relocate, but in a twist of fortune, he too visualized better opportunities in the North. The year was 1954, and the Supreme Court had rejected the separate but equal foundation in American education.

“At that time, all the black athletes had to go to a black school; they couldn’t go to a white school. So we had the run of the black athletes,” Coach said. But Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education ushered in change and, with it, Coach’s premonition of lean times ahead for his football, basketball and track programs. “I’m in a small school, and with the big University of Georgia sitting [nearby], they would get all the good athletes.”

While Coach might have over-estimated the pace of change in the South, he saw it coming and took a job in Pontiac, Mich. Within a year, his wife, a lifelong Episcopalian, led the young family into All Saints’ Episcopal Church, where George Widdifield was rector from 1953-1974.

“When we first moved to Pontiac, we had to live on the south side of town because that’s where the blacks live,” Catherine Craig explained. “George Widdifield asked one of the parishioners, who was a realtor, ‘If there was a house beside me and I wanted Catherine and Dick to live in that house, would you sell it to them?’ And he said, ‘Definitely not.’

“I was outspoken so I asked him, ‘Why?’” she recounted, “and he said that there was a gentleman’s agreement among the realtors to not do it.

“I was very, very hurt,” she recalled. She considered leaving the church over the attitude. “But that’s all they wanted to do — to have me leave. And of course, if I left, maybe my friends wouldn’t come at all, so I stuck it out.”

Instead of leaving, the Craigs deepened their involvement in the church and some of the pressing issues of the community. “George Widdifield had a meeting with the parishioners concerning open housing,” Catherine Craig said. “He wanted to have open housing, and he stressed that. We lost a lot of parishioners over that, including that realtor.”

Widdifield encouraged Coach to run for the vestry in the mid-1960s. On his second attempt, he was elected the first black person on the All Saints’ vestry. His wife also later served on the vestry.

A sense of history

Unveiling the oral history project telling the stories of the Craigs and others before a packed church on Jan. 16 accomplished several things, Lewis said. The event allowed the church to recapture a sense of its own history and to honor some of the members who had a significant role in that history.

“I think a lot of people were surprised to realize that All Saints’ had been a guiding light in [the open housing movement] and they lost a lot of people. But our congregation became stronger because people who were committed to doing what was right stayed,” said Lewis.

There also was an element of a “truth and reconciliation” experience similar to what led to some reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, Lewis said. Many black residents of Pontiac were well aware of the stories that marked a turbulent time, but they had not heard a church community step forward and examine those times. Many of the 450 people who attended the presentation were not parishioners.

“These five people represented only the tip of the iceberg; there are a lot of stories to be told — here and everywhere,” said Bob Hart, rector at All Saints’. “These were stories that needed to be told and that could have been lost had we not done this project.”