AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) — As national civil-rights champion Rosa Parks lay in honor in the United States Capitol Oct. 31, a local pioneer in advancing the cause of racial justice died in Texas.
Volma Overton, a longtime civil-rights activist in Austin, was 81 years old. Overton not only helped integrate the city's schools, but he also — much earlier — helped integrate the city's most prominent Baptist church.
In 1963, Overton became the first African-American since Civil War days to join Austin's First Baptist Church, according to the church's current pastor, Roger Paynter. He was a longtime deacon and still an active member of the congregation at the time of his death.
Overton succumbed to complications from pneumonia, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
He was a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr., and marched in Selma, Ala., with the civil-rights great. In the 1960s, Overton led demonstrations and sit-ins at the city's then-segregated restaurants and other public accommodations. In 1970, when he was president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he agreed to let his daughter, DeDra, be named the chief plaintiff in the desegregation lawsuit against Austin's public schools.
“It was a question of 'Who can stand the heat,' and since I was president, I felt it was my responsibility to use DeDra's name,” he said, recalling the event in 1983 to the American-Statesman.
Overton also took heat for his religious choices. Paynter said the church did not vote unanimously to receive the activist into membership in 1963 — but that the few white members who did vote against him left the congregation in protest.
Nonetheless, Paynter said, Overton “took a great deal of grief from other African Americans for being part of a predominantly white church. He often said that when push came to shove, the [white] members of First Baptist were with him more than some members of the black community.”
Overton's “active leadership in this church has always been a living witness to us about the costs of discipleship,” Paynter continued. “He enlarged our vision of the Kingdom and helped us take concrete steps toward becoming more intentionally diverse than we would otherwise have been. We are forever in his debt.”