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Rev. Amos Hubert Carnegie, Sr.
b.19 Apr 1886 Manchester, Middlesex, Jamaica
d.Aug 1978 Flushing, Queens, NY
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Facts and Events
The Rev. Amos Huberty Carnegie was a highly influential Jamaica-American minister who founded the first YMCA in his town in Jamaica and then traveled throughout the eastern United States founding and financing schools and hospitals for Blacks during the Jim Crow era. One measure of the Rev. Carnegie's notoriety and intellectual influence is that the hospital movement in general ( http://goo.gl/3X1f3x ) and Rev. Carnegie's self-published 1950 autobiography are cited in the text and bibliography of "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr: Advocate of the social gospel". http://goo.gl/InajpU Birth data drawn from Tennessee Naturalization Records. Social Security number 078-16-5171. http://sortedbyname.com/mobile/pages/c115978.html According to this document, Amos Hubert Carnegie was reported in the New York Times ca. 1937 to be trying to raise a penny from each African American in the USA, with the help of the National [Black] Medical Association, to start a chain of hospitals throughout the United States. But, the Association rebuked and rebuffed him, calling his ideas "dreams". http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2623643/pdf/jnma00757-0027.pdf Amos Sr. was born in 1886 in Jamaica, Amos Jr. was born in 1931, I believe West Virginia. Rachael Carnegie-Benjamin was Born in Jamaica on Jan 25, 1890 and her twin was Thomas Carnegie same year, then there is a Catherine Dorothy Carnegie, then a John Carnegie, then a Georgia Carnegie, all born in Jamaica. When immigrating to the United States, Amos H. Carnegie first traveled to Canada in 193 and then crossed the border into the United States, probably at Niagara Fall. http://books.google.com/books?id=TLk9AAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=canada http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?gl=allgs&gsfn=Amos&gsln=Carnegie&gss=seo&ghc=20 Once in the United States, where college education was mostly segregated at the time, Amos H. Carnegie attended the historically Black Lincoln University, where he won the college's singular $50.00 Nassau Prize upon graduation in 1923. http://www.lincoln.edu/library/specialcollections/herald/1923.pdf The same college journal that announced the award carried an article addressing social currents in Black America that would come to guide Carnegie's career in the ministry. Living condition, including abysmal housing and miserable or nonexistent education in the American Jim Crow South, were leading Blacks to engage in a great migration northward literally by the millions. Later, Rev. Carnegie convinced southern whites to start schools for Blacks in the South by arguing that Blacks otherwise would join the exodus to the North, leaving white southerners without labor for their fields, homes and businesses. In this way, Carnegie enlisted whites in the effort to build schools for Blacks even when these whites did not believe, as a matter of principal, in educating Blacks at all. Carnegie received his religious formation at a college that underscored, "The example of Lincoln Alumni, who are prominent leaders of their race in all parts of the country and in various lines of activity, holds out before the undergraduate high ideals of achievement and of usefulness in service." http://www.lincoln.edu/library/specialcollections/herald/1923.pdf X Carnegie, Rev. Amos H. Carnegie Sr.'s father, had a total of nine children, including five boys and four girls, one of which children died in infancy. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b193635;view=1up;seq=19
In 1951, Rev. Carnegie's National Hospital Foundation and Howard University proposed a 200-bed "interracial" hospital for Washington, DC "predicated on obtaining a $2,000,000 grant from Congress to be matched by the contributions of Negroes throughout the country. Rev. Carnegie said the hospital would be interracial in the sense that both Negro and white physicians would be on its staff and that it would accept patients of all races, but that its primary function would be to serve a community of 800,000 Negroes in the northeast sector of Washington who are not now provided with adequate health facilities." Journal of Medical Education: November 1951 - Volume 26 - Issue 6 - ppg 475, College News: PDF Only. http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Citation/1951/11000/University_of_Illinois_.39.aspx On October 1, 1953, Jet magazine reported that, "plans for a 200-bed Birmingham [AL] hospital, staffed by Negro doctors and nurses, were outlined to a group of white citizens by the Rev. Amos H. Carnegie, president of the National Hospital Foundation, Inc. Reverend Carnegie asked Negro employees to contribute fifty cents a week for twenty weeks to finance construction of the hospital. White trustees would control the money raised, Carnegie said." http://goo.gl/vUQspN The Rev. Amos H. Carnegie was an inveterate letter writer to institution, civic leaders and celebrities, with letters published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, a collection of letters to Marion Anderson, and in the archives of Washington, DC's National Negro Opera Company. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/music/eadxmlmusic/eadpdfmusic/mu2005.wp.0031.pdf Newspapers' published schedules of radio programs in the 1940s and 50s often included mention that the Rev. Carnegie would be speaking on issues of importance to Black people. http://goo.gl/1GjhDH Rev. Amos wrote an article about desegregation that was cited widely, but it is behind a paywall. Rev. Amos H. Carnegie was pastor of the Mount Carmel Methodist Church and founder of the only Smyth County high school for African American students, Carnegie High School. http://goo.gl/3X1f3x Ironically, the this first Black high school in the area, founded by a Black man, was reportedly closed some two decades later as a result of integration of, and consolidation with, the local white schools. After the school was closed, the building housed the local Head Start program. http://goo.gl/kGa6lU Although the teachers were Black at the Black schools, they might not have been permitted to follow their students to the "integrated" white schools. Black schools founded for the education of Black students, fell victim to the goal of desegregation. We now know that desegregation was a near total failure as an end in itself, since most Black students now go to segregated schools or are tracked into segregated programs within "integrated" schools. That does not explain why the National Black Medical Association failed to support Carnegie's establishment of new Black hospitals, although Rev. Carnegie might have lost Black and even white support when he began to try to raise money for integrated hospitals that would treat Blacks and whites alike. http://goo.gl/kGa6lU In June 1950, the Kingston Gleaner newspaper of Jamaica reported with respect to the National Hospital Foundation, "At the head of this organization is its founder and director, the Rev. Amos H. Carnegie. Mr. Carnegie, paying his first visit to the homeland since he left it, visited the Gleaner yesterday and in a brief talk told of the success that the nationwide hospital scheme that he is directing has met with..." Kingston Gleaner: Wednesday, June 14, 1950 - Page 5 http://goo.gl/VxEH4c One article in The History of Healthcare magazine of Lynchburg, VA, entitled, "And One Villain: The Rev. Amos Carnegie", alleges that in early December, 1935, the Rev. Amos Carnegie appeared in Lynchburg, collected money from local Blacks with a promise to build a hospital for Blacks staffed by Black doctors, and then disappeared with the money and without such a hospital being built. http://ourhealth.uberflip.com/i/102543/63 The reported sollicitation for the hospital closely tracks those which the Reverend made elsewhere. Family Life In her autobiography, the late Vida Mae Carnegie (Gaynor), first-born daughter of the Rev. Carnegie, says that the reverend was often away from the home, failed to provide sustenance or appear for special events in her life, and made a "narcissistic" promise to fund her education on which he subsequently reneged, causing her to lose another scholarship that she would otherwise have received. The Reverend's late daughter angrily charges in her autobiography that her father should not have referred to himself as a reverend, since he did not pastor a church after 1933, according to her. However, if pastoring a church were necessary to call oneself "reverend" then that would have precluded Martin Luther King, Jr. from using that appellation, since he did not pastor a church will leading the Civil Rights Movement. Both the Rev. Carnegie's autobiography and that of his oldest daughter recount that Rev. Carnegie did not always or often have a paid position as a pastor; was an itinerant organizer who subsisted financially from gifts from friends and supporters; often did not have money that he could use to support his family; and could not possibly have been present much in the home during those times when he was meeting civic leader, politicians, clergy and the Black and white public for the purpose of organizing the construction of schools and hospitals. It is likely that his family suffered considerably even as the public profited from his civic activities. http://www.amazon.com/11-Miraculous-Deliverances-Very-Moment/dp/1410752704 In his autobiography, the Reverend does not provide the names of his parents or those of any of his siblings and only names one of his children - the oldest. He does not mention that he is married and has children until a point in his autobiography that is long after his actual marriage and the birth of his children would have taken place. He provides no details of his courtship, his wife's profession or the circumstances of their wedding. When he does mention his wife, he recounts only the disagreements they had over their lack of money. He quotes a discussion in which his asks him, surprised, how he managed to purchase food. He reports, word for word, that he responds to her in a manner that can only be described as sarcastic and dismissive. Faith Moves Mountains, p. 85. http://goo.gl/qbznxk The Reverend reports that this type of conversation was typical. He expresses no regret. Image Gallery
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