John Robert Paul Brock was an early casualty in the movement toward civil rights in (Atlantic City and) America.
Brock pictured in his Dickinson College yearbook, no later than 1901.
The burdens of the psyche may defy, or reinforce, medical analysis. In the case of early 20th century educator John Robert Paul Brock, despair mirrored deterioration. Whichever the culprit, some broken hearts cannot be mended.
That was the fate of JRP Brock. Placed in charge of Atlantic City’s two “colored” schools by 1921, Pennsylvania native Brock succumbed the following year at the age of 42, in the thick of a battle over whether or not to integrate the local schools. After being summoned to the Brock home on Magellan Avenue late in the night of Nov. 24, family physician P.L. Hawkins found his friend and colleague already dead. Brock had died, Hawkins told a newspaper reporter in the wee small hours, “from a broken heart” resulting from the “segregation controversy.”
That controversy had just begun to build. As the only secondary school in the city, Atlantic City High School (then located at Ohio and Pacific avenues) necessarily was integrated, but the rest of the school district was not. Brock was superintendent of the Indiana Avenue and New Jersey Avenue schools. Hawkins, also a black man, was a member of the school board.
Each favored the status quo. An increasingly vociferous segment of the African-American community did not. Brock died before the rift could grow wider.
His life had been one of high achievement and surmounting barriers. Born in 1880 in Harrisburg (his father, a minister, was a Civil War veteran), Brock attended schools in Massachusetts and Philadelphia before graduating from West Chester High School and entering Dickinson College at the age of 17. There, on the venerable, liberal arts campus in Carlisle, Pa., he forged his personality — modest, efficient, gentlemanly — and a record of quiet leadership. A Phi Beta Kappa and Dickinson’s first black graduate (1901), Brock stayed put for a year to earn a master’s degree before embarking on a career in education.
“A lot of times you find that the ‘first’ African-Americans were in name only, but [Brock] made a mark,” says Rachel Jones Williams, who has researched and written about the Brock family. (Three JRP siblings included a Westfield, N.J. doctor.)
Equipped with two academic degrees and a gift for communication, Brock taught school in Carlisle, Baltimore, and Philadelphia before arriving in Atlantic City in 1919 to take command of the Indiana Avenue School. He quickly distinguished himself as a capable administrator and low-key leader, and his impact extended beyond school boundaries; he helped found a bank, steered the Arctic Avenue YMCA toward a greater sense of community service, and fostered an extra-school site known as the Study Center of Atlantic City. His perspective was ahead of its time.
But not, evidently, when it came to the prospect of integration. Some latter-day observers, who cite the strength of the period’s black schools and their inclusive curricula, say that Brock and the majority of black residents likely resisted the notion of integration because they feared it would dilute or misrepresent their cultural values in the classroom. It was an idea, they believed, whose time had not yet come.
Not everyone shared that view. On the morning of Nov. 24, 1922, a delegation of “colored folk,” the Atlantic City Press reported, met with Mayor Edward L. Bader (presumably more dignified than his Boardwalk Empire character) to state their case for integration and take particular issue with school board member Hawkins, whom they asserted was not a true barometer of their community’s feelings.
The mayor’s visitors asked that Hawkins be dismissed from his post, and argued that the school board should heed state law, which did not stipulate segregation in schools. They envisioned not a wholesale mixing of the races, but an opportunity for black children to attend “white” schools that were much closer to their homes than their current schools — the inverse of the national “busing” controversy later in the century.
Judge Nelson Johnson's latest book 'The Northside,' on Atlantic City's history of African-Americans, is missing key components says community leader. Johnson's previous book Boardwalk Empire was turned into the 2010 HBO series, the second season of which is filming now.
There was a reason why I dedicated my book, Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City: Wash’s and the Northside, to all the families in Atlantic City, in addition to my own grandparents and children — I knew they had similar stories to tell.
“I really don’t think there is a name as beloved in baseball as Clemente’s,” says Michael Everett, director of the Pop Lloyd Committee. “We already know a lot of people are turning out solely because of the connection to Clemente. It’s really amazing the command and the respect the name brings with it.”
Today, most funding comes from city grants, local businesses and casino donations.
“There was no crime in Atlantic City — they [the “organization”] took care of crime,” says local resident Richard Black, whose grandfather was a law enforcement official at the time.
To date, more than 400 children have come through the Art Dorrington Ice Hockey Foundation, where education, opportunity and life skills are stressed as much as the sport. In 2006, the students won the Hockey in the Hood tournament in Detroit. Mr. Dorrington has been Atlantic City’s Softball Commissioner since 2002.
“The three eras that attracted me where the 1920s, the ‘50s and the ‘70s. And really HBO’s mandate was [so broad that] I literally had a huge canvass to work from.”
FIVE YEARS AGO THIS WEEK Atlantic City lost a treasure. I still carry around the late Sid Trusty’s faded yellow business card in my wallet. I got the opportunity to meet the man on a few occasions before he passed away on Aug. 16, 2004.
His white hair tufted beyond tolerance, the minister stepped into the barbershop and its buzz of bonhomie. Combs raked scalps, scissors snipped furiously, and the scent of lilac water suffused the air. Twenty minutes later, the clergyman stood from the pedestal-chair and surveyed his reshaped dome. The dark skin of his forehead glistened below the white fringe. He paid the barber and paused on the black rubber mat. “Am I good for another dime?” The barber grinned. “You bet.” And so he did — 10 cents on number 357, a wager to be rewarded only if the digits corresponded, respectively, to the last number on each of the day’s win-place-show handles at Aqueduct Racetrack, some 90 miles to the north. The “numbers,” or “policy,” game was a lottery before lotteries were legal. Nearly everyone in town played it even...
Pop Lloyd played professional baseball in the Negro Leagues from 1906 to 1932, as a shortstop, second baseman and first baseman, including two stints with the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City. In 1910 he out-hit Ty Cobb in a Cuban winter league series — .500 to .385.
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1. Dexter R. said... on Feb 21, 2012 at 10:27AM
“Mr. Waltzer, fabulous story here! I never knew any of this! Interesting how the Ritz workers strike in season 2 of Boardwalk Empire occurred at same time - 1921.”
2. H. Harris Rogers said... on Feb 22, 2012 at 01:44PM
“sad story of the civil rights movement I had never heard before! Great reporting.”
3. Anonymous said... on Mar 1, 2012 at 12:07PM
“James--you've done it again. Great insight into an important and little known chapter of local history.”
4. Rachel Jones Williams said... on Mar 1, 2012 at 12:18PM
“A great article ! Wonderfully written and full of important history. This is the kind of information that inspires and challenges . . . thank you Mr. Waltzer for taking on Mr. Brock and bringing him to life. A great topic that is still in many way relevant . . . Thank you Atlantic City Weekly for printing the important stuff !”