[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 22 (Thursday, February 2, 2023)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E89-E90]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 DR. HOWARD NELSON JR.'S 100TH BIRTHDAY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. EMANUEL CLEAVER

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, February 2, 2023

  Mr. CLEAVER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to celebrate the 100th 
birthday of a very special Kansas Citian who also happens to be a 
native Washingtonian. Dr. Howard Nelson, Jr. was born February 11, 
1923, the youngest of 4 children. His parents, Howard and Florence 
Nelson, came from a community outside Charlottesville, Virginia. His 
parents' mantra was ``education, education, education.'' They dedicated 
their lives to ensuring that their children would be college educated. 
As the youngest child, Dr. Nelson was affectionately called ``babe,'' a 
name that family and close friends still use when referring to him 
today. In 1939, Dr. Nelson graduated from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High 
School in Washington, D.C. In the 1940s, he was drafted into the U.S. 
Army and was one of 12 Black soldiers selected to attend Officer 
Candidate School, where he was one of 3 to graduate. Dr. Nelson was 
then assigned to the 92nd Infantry Division, which was the only Black 
division to see combat during WWII in Italy. After serving this great 
country with distinction, Dr. Nelson attended Howard University and 
earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology. During his time at 
Howard, Dr. Nelson was inducted into the men of Kappa Alpha Psi 
fraternity. In 1957, Dr. Nelson moved to Kansas City and opened his 
dental practice where he served the community for almost 45 years. Dr. 
Nelson was married to Evelyn, with whom he had 2 children--a daughter 
Karon (now 72) who is a local attorney, and a son Howard Drake ``Skip'' 
Nelson III, who followed in his dad's footsteps and became a successful 
dentist. Sadly, Skip predeceased his dad in September 2007. Dr. Nelson 
has several grandkids.
  In 1964, Dr. Nelson became Chairman of the Kansas City Chapter of the 
Congress of Racial Equality (``CORE''), an organization founded in 1942 
that became one of the leading activist organizations in the early 
years of the civil rights movement. On June 26, 1964,

[[Page E90]]

Dr. Nelson, then a successful 41-year-old dentist, and dedicated to the 
escalating fight for civil rights, suddenly found himself being lifted 
and physically removed from the Parkway Bowling Club, now long gone 
from 49th and Prospect Avenue. Dr. Nelson led a group of CORE members 
in a peaceful protest of the Parkway Bowling Club, which refused to 
allow Black people to bowl. The group refused to leave the premises and 
were later arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. This moment 
was historically memorialized by a then virtually unprecedented photo 
of Dr. Nelson being carried away by police. This fact was acknowledged 
in a Kansas City Star series of articles entitled ``The Truth in Black 
and White,'' which recognized that a decade into the struggle for civil 
rights, the newspaper had deliberately not published photos of any 
Black leaders of the movement on the front pages of either the Kansas 
City Star or the Kansas City Times. Consider for a moment that the 
paper did not publish photos of Emmett Till upon his horrific death in 
1955, nor when his killers were unjustly acquitted, nor the Rev. Martin 
Luther King Jr. when he came to Kansas City in 1957, nor the Black 
Kansas Citians picketing outside segregated downtown department stores 
in 1958, nor the NAACP's protests in 1960 over segregation at 
restaurants and movie theaters. Consider during that same week of June 
26, 1964, three CORE field workers--James Chaney of Mississippi, along 
with Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York--would go 
missing and were later found brutally murdered as part of what are now 
known as the ``Mississippi burning'' murders. What was the crime 
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner committed justifying being murdered? 
Registering Black folks to vote. Hence, the foregoing contextual facts 
are a testament to Dr. Nelson's profound courage and convictions, and 
they show his willingness to risk his life, liberty, and livelihood.
  In addition to leading sit-ins at the local bowling alley, Dr. Nelson 
also challenged housing segregation. In the early 1960s, Dr. Nelson and 
his family lived on 36th and Cleveland, but he and his wife Evelyn 
wanted the best education for his children, so they started looking for 
a place to build a new home near good schools. They looked in Johnson 
County, Kansas, a suburban enclave that had seen rapid growth in the 
post-war years, a population aided in no small part by racist deed 
restrictions and housing covenants that had shut out people like the 
Nelsons. One lot was left in an area that Dr. Nelson liked in an up-
and-coming neighborhood along 103rd Street in Overland Park. Banks 
ignored him when he tried to get a loan to build the house even though 
he had the finances, and architects were unwilling to design a house 
for a Black family in a white neighborhood. So, Dr. Nelson's wife 
Evelyn's Episcopalian church group stepped in to help. They bought the 
house for the Nelsons and then turned around and sold it to them. Dr. 
Nelson and his family fastidiously maintained the home, the yard, and 
the swimming pool out back, and they ``never had any trouble with the 
neighbors.'' Living in a segregated neighborhood in Overland Park was, 
in its own way, an act of defiance in Dr. Nelson's book. Dr. Nelson 
sought to ``raise the consciousness of the people in Kansas City.'' 
Coincidentally, that house is today occupied by another Black man named 
Mr. Byron Roberson, who happens to be the first Black Police Chief for 
the Prairie Village Police Department.
  Professionally, Dr. Nelson continued his list of being a man of many 
``firsts'' including first Black to serve on the Board of Governors of 
the Dental Association in 1972, where he served 2 terms. In 1986, the 
Missouri Governor appointed Dr. Nelson to be the first Black person to 
serve on the Missouri State Dental Board, eventually becoming the 
body's first Black President in 1991. Dr. Nelson was one of the first 
Black people to teach at the UMKC School of Dentistry, and Dr. Nelson 
served on the founding board of the Wayne Minor Health Center now known 
as Dr. Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center. As you can see, I am so very 
proud and honored to stand before you today to wish Dr. Howard Nelson a 
very happy 100th birthday.

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