The American activist, George Mills Houser, who passed away this month at 99 years of age, while not widely known, was central to civil rights and racial justice struggles in the United States, and especially to liberation movements against colonialism and Apartheid in Southern Africa. 

In the hours immediately after his passing, members of the community who fought apartheid and colonialism began sharing the news. The first prominent obituary, though, was by the New York Times. A few days later, the Washington Post published an obituary. These articles, predictably, offered great praise—and justifiably so—but equally predictable was the slant: leading with Houser’s impressive civil rights activity with CORE in the 1940s and spending almost no time on what he spent most of his life doing. The New York Times, for example, committed two paragraphs to Houser’s Africa activism, when Houser spent the last fifty years of his life fighting on behalf of African liberation and though he saw these efforts as inextricably linked to struggles close to home. 

Houser helped found both the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), two interracial organizations that ultimately advocated for the same ideals: black humanity and equality. 

For fifty years, Houser moved the proverbial ball forward while choosing to stay in the background. He did not need to grab the microphone to speak but, rather, was an ally of African Americans activists, like Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, and Africans, including a who’s who of revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Oliver Tambo, and Kenneth Kaunda.

Houser’s parents were Methodist missionaries so George, born in 1916, lived part of his childhood in the Philippines. His parents instilled in him a belief in the social gospel and a sense of internationalism. Following in his parents’ footsteps, he enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While there, Houser joined the international Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and took his first public step to protest war in 1940. Along with other seminarians, he refused to register for the military and served a year in federal prison. After his release, Houser transferred to the Chicago Theological Seminary.

While in Chicago during World War II, Houser helped found CORE, an interracial organization committed to nonviolence, along with James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, Bernice Fisher, and a few others—most of whom became leading civil rights activists in the 1950s and 60s. Houser became CORE’s first executive secretary. In 1947, CORE and FOR planned the Journey of Reconciliation to test the previous year’s Supreme Court ruling in Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that banned racial segregation in interstate travel. Houser and fifteen other black and white men took buses across the South to see whether the Supreme Court ruling would be upheld. Predictably, this group found that, in numerous cities, their actions caused them to be harassed, beaten up, or thrown in jail. Rustin spent three weeks on a North Carolina chain gang for his part. If the Journey of Reconciliation sounds like the 1961 Freedom Rides, it is because the latter was a carbon copy.

However, while he remained committed to the US civil rights movement, in the 1950s Houser helped start the American Committee on Africa and devoted his considerable organizing energies to black freedom struggles in Africa for the next fifty years. As he recalled a decade ago, “We always conceived our work as part and parcel of the civil rights struggle… The struggle in Africa was to us, as Americans, an extension of the battle on the home front.”