Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957 (Photo
sourced from Nashville Public Library)
Henry County has produced its share of notable figures, but few lived as boldly or as dangerously as Howard "Buck" Kester. Born in Henry County in 1904, Kester spent his life walking straight into the worst situations the Jim Crow South had to offer and walking back out again — sometimes barely.
He grew up just outside of Martinsville before moving as a teen to Beckley, West Virginia, in a household that reflected the tensions of the era. His father, born a Quaker, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan before eventually becoming a respected Presbyterian churchman. His mother was the daughter of a plantation overseer.
Kester absorbed the conservative religious convictions of that upbringing and then, through his own experiences, turned most of them inside out.
His transformation began in earnest during a summer pastorate in the coal mining town of Thurmond, West Virginia, where he watched miners suffer under the unrestrained policies of mine ownership while church leadership looked the other way. Kester sided with the miners. His superiors in the church did not approve, and he never held another Presbyterian appointment.
He went on to Princeton Theological Seminary but left within a year, convinced the institution cared more about dogma than the actual human beings Christianity was supposed to serve. He landed at Vanderbilt University, where his efforts to organize interracial fellowship meetings cost him his job and very nearly his financial footing — just three weeks after his marriage to Alice Harris of Decatur, Georgia.
None of it slowed him down. By the early 1930s Kester had joined the Socialist Party, run for Congress on the Socialist ticket, and become one of the most well-connected activists in the South. He worked with striking miners, helped organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and published a book in 1936 called Revolt Among the Sharecroppers that brought national attention to the plight of rural poor across the region.
His most harrowing work came as an investigator for the NAACP. In 1934, he traveled to Marianna, Florida, to investigate the lynching of Claude Neal, interviewing terrified members of the Black community and members of the mob itself, who passed around photos and souvenirs from what they had done. When word got out that he was asking questions, he had to flee. "My nerves were frayed," he wrote. "I was warned to get out before it was too late." His friend and mentor George Washington Carver had advised him, before he went, to carry a cyanide capsule in case he was captured. The NAACP published his report anonymously to protect his life.
A biographer later wrote that it would be difficult to name any white Southerner of the era with more contacts across racial lines than Kester, or a clearer understanding of what segregation cost everyone it touched. His friend, the preacher Will Campbell, called him a tragic figure in a way; not because he was defeated, but because the world was not ready for him. "He never won a battle," Campbell said. One could also argue that the battles he did fight and won were never seen in his lifetime.
Kester spent his later years in education and campus ministry, eventually retiring to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he died in July 1977. He is buried at Mountain View Memorial Park there.
Henry County is a community that takes its history seriously. “Buck” Kester is part of that history; a man who left Martinsville and spent the rest of his life doing work that most people did not have the nerve to even think about.
Jarred Marlowe is a local resident and historian. He is a member of the Col. George Waller Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Blue & Gray Education Society, and Committee Chair for the Martinsville-Henry County 250 Committee. He may be reached at [email protected].
Howard Kester, pictured with Martin Luther King, Jr. at Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957 (Photo sourced from Nashville Public Library)
