Description:
Reverend Harvey Potts talks about growing up in Lawton, Oklahoma and about his career as a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal church.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Harvey Potts
Interviewer: Melba Holt
Interview date: 8/2/07
Interview location: Downtown Library
Transcription Date: 7/20/20
Transcribed By: Alex Hinton
Melba (M): Good afternoon, Reverend Potts. How are you?
Harvey (H): Good afternoon, Sister Holt.
M: I’m just really glad that you were able to take time from your busy schedule to participate in this Oklahoma Voices interview. I wanted you to be one of the first people I interviewed. You are the pastor of my church, as you already know. We have a historical church, being the oldest Black church in the nation and our particular church is named after the founder of our church. So I wanted to interview you about your life as a pastor and the things that lad up to you being in the line of work you’re in, and then I wanted you to have the freedom to talk about the ministry and any other thing the Lord might lead you to in this interview. So, I thank you for coming, and we’re going to start with some basic information. The first thing I’d like you ask you is your name.
H: My name is Reverend Harvey G. Potts Senior.
M: Your birthday?
H: October 4, 1945.
M: Our relationship - how do you know me?
H: Yes, through your father, the Reverend William Holt, who was my pastor in the mid-sixties at Grant Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lawton, Oklahoma. Since moving to Oklahoma City in 1979, I met you personally through Reverend N.C. Irving1 when you had moved back to the Oklahoma City area from Atlanta, Georgia. So, our friendship has flourished since that time.
M: Okay, and where are we located?
H: We’re in the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Downtown Library, a brand-new facility. It’s just beautiful.
M: It is. Where were you born Reverend Potts?
H: I was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, to Nadine Elizabeth and Sal Harvey Potts.
M: Where did you grow up?
H: Most of my life was spent in Lawton, Oklahoma, in the community called Lawton View. I attended Dunbar Elementary School. Mr. Lemuel Harkey was the principal there at that time. I attended junior high school at Central Junior High, eighth and ninth grade. Tenth through the twelve grades, I moved from Central Junior High to Lawton Douglass High School, an outstanding high school in the city of Lawton.
M: That’s good. What was it like being in Lawton? I know that there is a military base there. What was it like growing up there?
H: We interacted a lot with the military and the Lawton-Fort Sill community. The base was named Fort Sill, Oklahoma. We had a collaborative relationship with businesses and those kinds of things. My dad owned a business in downtown Lawton. He served as a bellhop in a local hotel, the Warren Hotel, for approximately thirty years. One of the outstanding things that he did that impresses me, was that my dad saved most of the money he earned as a bellhop, and eventually bought a hotel in downtown Lawton, the Ingram Hotel.
M: That’s wonderful. So you come from someone who was an entrepreneur and a businessperson who worked his way up from the ground. That’s excellent.
H: Yes, and my mom worked as a day laborer in the various homes around town. So, they impressed me with their work ethic.
M: Well, that was really common in the time that we grew up. Many of my relatives did daywork. My mother did private duty nursing and daywork at one point when I was young. What would you say your parents were like? How would you describe them in terms of their temperaments and personalities?
H: My mom was very conscientious, as well as my dad. They were family oriented, and at the time of my dad’s death they had been married for thirty-one years. So, they were a nuclear family. We had one sister, Carolyn, and one brother, Norlyn. Carolyn lives in Oklahoma City, and Norlyn lives in Dallas, Texas. My family was very much family oriented. They had a good, strong work ethic, and they believed in the Lord. They were very conscientious and faithful to their local church.
M: That’s good. Do you remember your grandparents? Did you get to know them?
H: Yes. I sure did. My grandparents on my father’s side of family were from east Texas, Grapeland and Palestine [pronounced ‘Pal-i-steen], Texas. We would go down the country where they resided in the summer months when we were eight, nine, and ten years old. So we bonded very well with our grandparents. They taught us things on the farm: how to churn butter, how to milk the cows, how to call in the cows from the field at the end of the day, and how to draw water from the well. So we had a good solid background with my grandparents in east Texas, and the same thing with my grandparents in Lawton, Oklahoma. Alneida Storey was my grandmother and Eidie Storey was my grandfather. Jon Potts was my grandfather on my dad’s side, and Frenchie Potts was my grandmother on my dad’s side. But both sets of grandparents had a strong work ethic and they believed in the concept of family, and they stressed that. They believed in higher education for the children. It was always their request of us that we do better than what they had done. They had done the best that they could do in order for us to flourish and do better in our lives. So that was impressive with what they had to work with, how they did so much.
M: Yeah that’s good, and you show that in your leadership with us in the church, and I see now that’s just in your bones. It’s just way down in your bones, Reverend Potts, and it’s good. When you were a child would you describe yourself as a happy child?
H: Yes. We always knew that we were loved, by our parents, grandparents, and the entire community, and in the era that I grew up we had the extended family concept. So parents would raise you; uncles, aunts, and grandparents raise you; friends in the community helped to raise you up in a sense to be the kind of individual that the community would be proud of. So that was a big plus for me coming up, the extended family.
M: That was really important to me and my childhood, and especially my childhood at Allen Chapel. We’ve lost that. We can easily understand the dilemma that we find ourselves in today with our young people because that’s one of the things that was so important to our communities, and to our church families trying to get back to that in the midst of technology is something that I see you working with. We hope to be able to support you in that. Do you have any bad memories of your childhood that you would like to share?
H: Well in terms of division of the family, we had some programs, state and federal programs, come into our local community, namely the Urban Renewal program. That was designed to bring us up out of the doldrums and give us a higher standard of living, but I think the effect of Urban Renewal during my teenage days and early adulthood actually divided the community. Prior to Urban Renewal, out of our meager resources, we had family stores, drug stores, shops, barber shops, tire shops. Everything we needed in our community, we had within the confines of our own community, schools, churches. As a result of Urban Renewal, rather than lifting us out of the doldrums, it divided us, in a sense, and disenfranchised us. So my sad memories about my upbringing would be the breakup of our local community through the desegregation of schools, and the impact that Urban Renewal had on our local community. That would be something that really stands out to me even today.
M: You know, sometimes it’s like God bring things full circle, because you’re in the middle of Urban Renewal at the Allen Chapel AME church, and with the revitalization that’s going on all around you. And I can relate to what you’re talking about although you were in Lawton. I was here in Oklahoma City, and I can think of at least five re-locations that my family had because of Urban Renewal. I too, share the concerns at you have. My father was the last family to move off of Park Street where the bank is on 10th and Lincoln. That was my father’s property, and he held out when they were making the offers to sell that property. He had oil rights with the property. As I researched the family estate and tried to take care of the probate concerning my father, I don’t see where we were transferred those oil rights that went with that property. So you know, my work is cut out for me because the Urban Renewal was the vehicle that was supporting that.
As you well know, I’ve been involved revitalization programs around the city and you are at the helm of one of those projects and have been involved. Before you took this position, you were a pastoral overseer. You have knowledge about the land and responsibilities and all the things that go with the Urban Renewal. We are going to be trying to support you, Reverend Potts, as you work these things that you can impact during your ministry. I want to reassure you, at this time, in this interview, that we tried to be as diligent as we could in many areas. So, we have a higher power working in this as well. When I interviewed David Jones with the Urban Renewal several years ago, he did give us the history of the Urban Renewal. I think it’s just going to require people trying to make the best of the situation and being involved in their neighborhoods, and the decision making from this point on when decisions are being made concerning their neighborhoods. That comes with education. So your father had put the importance of education in your mind. It’s in your background. You’re encouraging it in our church with various education programs that you are supporting. I’m just looking forward to the progress that we can make. I want to get back a little bit to your childhood because that was a part of my childhood, and I couldn’t help but respond to that because we have so much at stake as a church family. So I had to stop and reassure you on that before we moved along in the interview. Did you have a nickname when you were growing up?
H: Actually, my nickname was “Peabody.” [M laughs]
M: Why did they call you that?
H: Well it was I, think, the black rimmed glasses, thick black glasses, and sport coat and the big black briefcase.
M: [Laughing] We had this together then. That sounds good.
H: So, in high school the captain of the football team, Curtis Wilson, out of the blue one day said, “Mr. Peabody.”
M: [Still laughing] That’s a good one. Who were your best friends that you remember growing up?
H: Well, we were a tight knit community and at sixteen years of age I organized a, quote, gang. [M breaks into more laughter]. But the gang we had—we had a softball team. Friends, we were all about the same age, but they delegated me as the captain. So we would organize our softball team, and we would play other teams from the other side of the city. Also, we had a girls’ softball team in the same local community, Lawton View. So I would coach boys’ and girls’ softball, by about seventeen years of age. And so that was our little gang. We would do things together, socialize together, and we were supportive of each other. So we had a gang, quote, in a sense, but not in a destructive or derogatory sense.
M: That’s good. So you have actual proof that a gang of kids getting together can be positive as well as negative. Who were your best friends?
H: There was a friend, Charles West, we grew up together in Lawton View. I had several friends actually, but Charles and I were pretty close, real close friends. He’s deceased now. He went on to Langston and taught school in the Oklahoma (City) Public School System approximately twenty-five or twenty-six years, and so his family is still here in the Oklahoma City area. Then from kindergarten through college, to his death, was Clarence Wilson. Clarence and I were in the same class when we grew up from grade school, junior high, college. He lived in Oklahoma City and worked in the legal area in Housing and Urban Development. When I moved to Oklahoma City, we reunited our friendship of sort. Not friends on a daily basis, but we renewed that Lawton spirit. We would meet at Clarence’s house on the weekends, ten to fifteen individuals. Some were from Lawton, some from other areas of Oklahoma City, but we all bonded. So that had been real, up until his death in the 1995 Murrah Building bombing.
M: So I’m sad to say I knew both of your friends and they both had deaths at a young age. That has caused you to have to deal with a loss of camaraderie, and fellowship at a very young age.
H: In the ministry I had two very good friends, Reverend Harold Davis, formal pastor of Allen Chapel AME church, and Reverend David Stuckey. Unfortunately, they both have died since that time. But in the ministry, we developed a bond and a close relationship doing the work of the church across Oklahoma and across the United States, actually. But I could call maybe ten or twenty names of what we would call, back in those days, close friends. I could just start recalling names.
M: Would you like to do that?
H: I’ll miss someone. Just like at the church, I always miss—
M: If you miss someone then you know you’ll be in trouble if they pull this tape. So, you better do it like you said you were going to do it at the appreciation dinner. The list of getting so wide, you’re going to get in trouble if you don’t work on that. Your list is getting pretty wide.
H: But in that game, we had LeRoy Butler. We had Bobby Ray Easter, Gayle Jackson, Norlyn Potts, my brother, Charles West, Duree Jackson, Stanley Haywood, who is a city council man in Lawton, Oklahoma now, is my cousin, and we were all part of that nucleus there in Lawton. Janice West, Gloria West, Rosie Mitchell, Diane Woods. I can list probably sixty or seventy names. We had a close neighborhood, and we cherish those memories today when we see each other.
M: You had a village. As you began to call all those names…What you had was a village.
H: Yes. Exactly.
M: And you’re familiar with the village concept, and that’s what you’re developing. I see that. It helps me to understand. Thank you. That’s what you’re doing. I know that you have a family. I’d like to open this up so that you can talk about your family.
H: I attended Cameron University in the late sixties, early seventies, after I returned from the United States Marine Corps, and I met my wife in college at Cameron University, Lawton Oklahoma, in 1967 or ’68. We were married in 1970. We have four children: Stephanie Gaynel, Kendra Michelle, and Latoya Potts, and then the baby boy is Harvey Potts Junior. I have six grandchildren. Stephanie is currently in college; she’s working and going to school. Kendra is doing the same thing. The two oldest are working and going to school. Latoya, the baby girl, attended and graduated from Langston University, a school that I support wholeheartedly. She went to Oklahoma City University and graduated with a master's degree in early childhood education. Harvey, the baby boy, is currently in Cleveland, Ohio. He’s pursuing a medical degree. He also went to Langston University, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and then attended and graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Master’s in public health. From that point, he went to Dominque to pursue his clinical work in medical school, and now he’s in Cleveland attempting to finish up that whole process. I’m proud of all my children, and my stress, my focus, to them was education, and I believe that they bought into that.
M: Seems like it.
H: Education and trust in the Lord.
M: I understand also that your wife has taken it on herself to help educate some children outside of your family. Want to talk about that a little bit?
H: Probably two or three children who befriended my children, and as a result developed a good wholesome relationship with my wife. She’s encouraged several children, other than our own, to go to college. I admire that in my wife. As a matter of fact, what I admire most about her, is in our early marriage, she quit college in order to support me and get me through college. So, she worked two jobs and raised three and four children in order that I might go to school and pursue my education. And so I’m very appreciative of my wife and the attitude that she has. Even today she has that same spirit -
M: She does.
H: - Of encouraging others to be the best that they can be. So my wife, she’s not only put me through college, but helped my children, very much so. Also, other children within the community, she’s encouraged.
M: Well, she’s a scholarship fund. She’s made a great contribution to education, and at great personal sacrifice because it was her original intent to go and complete her own education and she certainly is intelligent. She’s getting to see her investment pay off as she sees you all’s faithfulness, as she sees the fruit. I especially would like to say thank you to her for all she’s done to make this time in your life possible. We recently had an appreciation service for you at church, which was your first appreciation service as a pastor and I hope that we adequately showed our love for you, and hope that there are many more. I’d like for you to talk a little bit about your relationship with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, when you actually started pastoring, and kind of take us through, in your own way, your career as a minister and in the church. I know you told me that my father had prophesied, when you were still a child, about your ministry. I don’t remember the age you were at; maybe you do. But if you could just start wherever you would like and tell us what you would like to tell us. First in the ministry, how did you get into the ministry, and what was your relationship with the African Methodist Episcopal Church?
H: According to my parents I was actually baptized in 1945 shortly after birth and grew up in the church and was nurtured by my parents, grandparents, and extended family that I mentioned earlier. Then, going off to college, I continued to stay with the church and after completing college I worked at the Taliaferro Mental Health Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, where we worked with individuals who were coming out of the mental institutions back into the community and we were helping them make the transition from institutionalization back into the mainstream society. As a result of that I met the Reverend Jessie Davenport, and Mr. Don Abbot2, who have now become my greatest mentors. Reverend Davenport is deceased. Don Abbot still lives here in the Oklahoma City area. But about the age of seventeen, you dad laid his hands on me in the church ground of Grant Chapel AME Church, Lawton Oklahoma. He said, “Young man, someday you’ll be a preacher in this church.” I had no idea what your dad was talking about.
M: [chuckles] “In that church,” so he didn’t just tell you were going to preach, but he said also in that church.
H: Yeah, in an AME church. I didn’t have any concept or idea. I was seventeen, so about the age of 31, no 33, I did accept the call to come and preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I was ordained a deacon by Bishop Brookins, H. Hartford Brookins3, and ordained an elder in the AME church in 1986 by Bishop H. Hartford Brookins, who I still have a warm relationship with down through the years. After being ordained, Reverend N.C. Irving, who also nurtured my development prior to me accepting the call, Reverend Nathanial Charles Irving. Avery Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, and Mother Irving, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I lost my father to death in 1977, and I moved to Oklahoma City in 1981. And Reverend and Mrs. Irving, they nurtured me, and they nurtured my family, and I actually went into the ministry under his leadership. The way he found me when I had moved to this city was, Reverend Holt told Reverend Irving to look me up, and Reverend Winn Hightower told Reverend Irving find me and they did, at the V.A. Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Reverend Irving invited me to church. I’ve had a relationship with that family since that time. He’s recently passed away, and I was honored to have been asked by the family to preach his eulogy and preach at his funeral. That was quite an honor for me under the circumstances, in that he had nurtured and developed my ministry down through the years. So, coming into the ministry under Reverend Irving, the Reverend Dr. L.B. Quinn, presiding elder of the Oklahoma City District, assigned me, through the Bishop, to a church in Seward, Oklahoma. Robinson Chapel had five members.
M: That was your first charge.
H: First charge. And from there to Forest Hill AME Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. And then back to Avery, as assistant to the pastor, under the Reverend Dr. Leodis Strong. And then from there to St. Paul AME Church Frederick, Oklahoma, which was just a beautiful ministry for me. It was roughly 140 miles from my front door to the front door of the church one way. But that was a beautiful ministry in that the church thrived. And at that church, St. Paul AME Church Frederick, Oklahoma, I started a building fund, and they kept the building fund going, and actually have a new church. After all these years, they worked on that building fund, just six members.
M: Is that right?
H: They had the groundbreaking. They will have the opening of the new church someday.
M: That is so good. God is faithful.
H: So I planted that seed. From there to Bethel AME church Shawnee, back to Sherman Chapel AME Church, Spencer, Oklahoma, and then to presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1995. That appointment was made in the historic Allen Chapel AME Church, Oklahoma City. So, I’ve been presiding elder for ten years, and just last December, 2006 named the pastor. Appointed by Bishop Richard Allen Chappelle Senior appointed me as the pastor of AME church, where I currently pastor. And I’m thrilled to death to be the pastor of that great church, of which you are a member, a faithful member.
M: I am a member of your flock. I would like to say, whenever you came back, I just had an elated feeling in my heart, that God would place you there. So I just appreciate everything you’ve done for me personally, and the ministerial—you know some pastors are teachers, and all of them have the prophetic word as they speak the Word, but some are teachers and some are pastors, and some are preachers. And I’d consider you a pastor, and you have been a teacher for me. I would just like to thank you for all of those things that you do in the line of duty that we expect and just would fall apart if you didn’t do. In the choir you did specifically place me in that charge when we visited. I’d like to know what you would like to see me accomplish in the choir. What is your hope for me as a member of the choir? What has God placed on your heart to talk to me about that? What did you specifically have in mind?
H: Well, I talked with you prior to that time and you accepted the charge to share in the choir. It’s because of your ability to work with other people. I believe you as the chaplain of the choir can bring a sense of guidance, leadership, and spiritual direction to the choir. And that’s one of the skills that I see in you, among others, is the ability to pull the voices together in a bonding kind of spirit as we minister to God’s people. And so, I thank you so much for accepting that charge and for the work that you do. That’s one of the things that has impressed me about you, is your ability to work with other people and do so in difficult situations sometimes.
M: My father made me learn that, just like he came and talked to you. I had a problem working in the Black community with the training that I had. He insisted. I appreciate that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work in the Black community with the psychoanalytic and psychology training. It was just that the Black community, because of the discrimination we had faced, and because the people that have those services usually have the financial means, that our community was not familiar with what I did. I had to go away and live in Atlanta, Georgia, where Black people had the resources and the means, to get my psychology career off the ground. I went there and I was the first Black school psychologist in the DeKalb schools, and I helped found the Black Psychologist Association in Atlanta. And I began my psychoanalytic work under Doctor William P. Sapp, who was the first Black psychiatrist in the state of Georgia and the first Black psychoanalyst in the country, and who worked as a Freudian psychiatrist. And so, it was difficult for me to come back here and try to utilize that training without a lot of awkward situations. So, I came back here and went into the insurance business [laughs] and went underground and did my clinical work. So that’s kind of what happened. With your help, however, I’ve been able to get some things done. And I just want you to know that when I didn’t go to Grant Chapel, it was because I was doing some church work with someone from Las Vegas that would benefit our church. So back to your interview, I didn’t know about your military career, but you were in a career at the Veterans Hospital, and you are working with veterans, and you do have a military career on your own. Let’s talk about that military career and try to get as much of that as we can into your interview.
H: It was a short military career. I served approximately two years in the United States Marine Corps, from 1965 to 1967, as a personnel administration specialist. During that time, we were at Camp Pendleton, California, where we were processing troops through the infantry training regimen. From there, right into Vietnam. They would get a short break at home and then right into Vietnam. So, I’ve seen a lot of young men leave the United States and go straight to war. Administratively I was involved in that whole process or processing the paperwork, the military records, and those kinds of things, preparing them their orders to Vietnam. So, I did not actually go to Vietnam but was involved in the training, the processing, and the shipping of the troops to various parts of the country during the war. So that was interesting work, but then I got out of that work to come back home to complete more education. The United States Marine corps was an eye opener for me because I did not have a lot of discipline prior to going into the Marine Corps. I came back to that same college, Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, in the classes of the same professors that I had when I was going to United States Marine Corps, and they saw such a change. One professor asked me. He said, “There’s something different about you. Where have you been?” I said, “I’ve been in the United States Marine Corps.” He said, “Oh, okay.” The grades came up. The attitude, there was a paradigm shift, because my one goal was not to go back to the Marine Corps. So that’s how that came about.
M: [chuckling] I can understand that. That’s nothing like an experience that’s life changing and eye opening to let you know how it really works.
H: Exactly.
M: Well you need that background for the work you’re called to do. And certainly, it takes a tough person to come in while all this revitalization is going on. Our church is having to be looked at. I can remember when you had to do the balancing act of being presiding elder and pastor of three churches at the same time. I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. And I would like to make sure that I say, in this book that left a lot with me, I would like you to say how you did it. Because sometimes people have their backs up against the wall. You had lost your two best friends at the time. I used to consider you all like the three musketeers, you, Reverend Davis, and Reverend Stuckey. Y’all were like three little musketeers. Here you’ve lost your two best friends in the ministry, your running buddies and colleagues, and you’ve got to cover their churches as pastor and oversee the paperwork. So I think when you give us your reflection on that—we’ll let you give your reflection on that, and then wrap it up with the last comments you would like to make before we close out your interview.
M: Okay. Yeah, the churches you involved: First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Reverend Harold Davis, he passed away in October, I believe. Reverend Stuckey then passed away in November. That was a trying time. I give all praises to God and to the congregations, as they pulled together as a collective family to work through that transition period, the death of two of the major pastors in our local church. And to serve as presiding elder and also to serve as pastor in the interim, all I can say is it was the Lord working through us and through the congregations that actually had that come to fruition successfully. And to get pastors into those various churches after the deaths of those giants in the AME church. It makes me kind of sad, thinking back on those days, but through it all we’ve learned to trust and to lean and depend on the Lord. It was a deep valley, but we discovered that the Lord was in the valley with us.
H: Bringing us out.
M: It was powerful, the way the congregations pulled together during those trying times. And in closing, I really want to thank you, Sister Melba Holt for this interview in particular, and for all that you do in the local community. My early relationship with you professionally was with the insurance business, where you had all of my insurance business, the home, autos, and life. That’s the kind of trust that I had in you. That’s the kind of trust I continue to have in you. I count it joy and a privilege to work with you in kingdom building. That’s my favorite phrase. The joy of Jesus, it really is the joy of Jesus that sustains us in all that we do. So, I want to thank you very much for this interview, and we wish you well. I wish you well in this particular endeavor that you’ve engaged in. And I know that, if you’re involved, it is successful. We claim the victory.
M: We claim and I come into agreement, and I thank you. You’ve just been so great. I thank you so much. The people in the library have been so good in terms of opening this opportunity up to the community. Thank you, Reverend Potts.
H: Thank you for having me.