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He studied at the Missionary Training Institute (now Nyack College in New York) in the early 1940s and graduated from Wheaton, in Illinois, with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1947. He returned to Birmingham after the fatal shooting by police of a Black minister who had been registering Black voters.
“I went to the funeral home where the reverend was, and I stood over him in the casket,” Mr. Oliver told the Wheaton magazine. “I looked at him and thought, ‘If this is what they do to a minister, if something is not done to fix this system, then one day I will lie down like him, and it will be the end of me.’” (He said he himself had survived two attempts on his life.)
In 1948, when he was 23 and serving as pastor of the African American Church in Birmingham, he was arrested, along with several white civil right activists, for “allowing unsegregated seating” in his church.
He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania; served for seven years as the pastor of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in northern Maine; and then returned to Birmingham, where from 1960 to 1965 he worked with the Inter-Citizens Committee and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an early associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Oliver’s marriage to Ruby King ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, from that marriage, he is survived by his wife, Lorna (Silvera) Oliver; a son, Claude, also from his first marriage; and a grandson.
In Brooklyn, he was pastor of Westminster Bethany Presbyterian Church from 1967 to 1992 and did counseling for a year at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.
After receiving his theology degrees in the early 1950s, he recalled in an interview with the Westminster Theological Seminary news site in 2013, “it was understood by the higher-ups in the church that there was no future for me being called to a white church. That’s when the call came to me to serve in Maine, and I accepted that and went there and served.
“But the racial divide in America is still as strong as it was in the ’40s and ’50s,” he added. That divide, he said, was “just more polite, but it is no less real, no less firm, and no less impregnable.”
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