5 Chapter 5
Whilst pastoring at Shiloh, in in 1937, Troy was asked to serve as a business manager at Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville, Alabama which operated under segregation. As one author explains, “Some of the students who had to deal with this practice were “driven” from the church”: they struggled to find employment within the church and were thus being forced to find work amongst other more accepting denominations, despite the SDA’s history of integration.
Segregated dining rooms, dormitories and staff at Emmanuel were challenged by Troy’s anti-segregationist stance, and the aid of his prominent brother-in-law Arna Bontemps. This endeavor was what first put Troy in contact with Director of The Associated Negro Press, Claude A. Barnett, who kept in contact with Dr. Troy on matters concerning the church and segregation throughout the following decades. Bontemps and Troy worked with prominent minsters and the Press to raise awareness of the situation in Michigan. For Bontemps, “segregation and kindred evils, even in so small a group as Seventh-day Adventists, should not be passed unnoticed.” Troy evidently felt just as impassioned: “It is extremely unfortunate that our youth have had to submit to the soul-embittering effects of prejudice and segregation” but was confident that the SDA World Conference in D.C. would correct the situation. Thanks to the advocacy of Troy, Bontemps and many others, the situation in Michigan reformed; in a letter to Barnett, Troy highlighted this progress: ‘Today [circa. 1945] that institution has nearly 30 colored students living in the dormitories and are well integrated in the entire life of the College. Last year one of the colored students was listed in “Who’s Who Among College Students.” This year a colored student from Chicago won first prize in an oratorical contest with 100 entrants.” Moreover, the World Conference of the SDA in Washington D.C., of which Troy was a delegate, remarked a new horizon for racial inclusion: a plan was launched for “an even closer integrated program than has been followed in the past,” which delegates suggested would include “the election of a Negro to an office such as vice president on the general conference level,” since this would “implement this racial constituency more closely into the organizational pattern of the denomination .”
However, Emmanuel was not the only Seventh-day Adventist institution operating an underlying Jim Crow system, as Claude Barnett explained: “SDA is doing many good jobs but like America in general she needs to clean out her own stables”; whilst Troy and Bontemps had experienced the best of SDA integrated education at Pacific Union College in 1920s Los Angeles, Michigan was merely one example of the widespread issues of discrimination in other SDA colleges. Tied to the Emmanuel case was that of Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville Alabama, headed by J. L. Moran.
Troy’s appointment to the business staff at Oakwood Junior College in 1937 marked