Memorial plans for NC social justice leader, pastor, senior advocate Robert Seymour
Updated: The story was updated at 1 p.m. Oct. 24 with information about Robert Seymour’s memorial service.
The Rev. Robert E. Seymour Jr., a longtime voice for civil rights and pastor at Chapel Hill’s Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, died Sunday at the age of 95.
Seymour was a lifelong advocate for change in the church, pushing for a stronger role for women and the integration of schools, congregations and community life. He served as the senior pastor at Binkley Baptist Church for 29 years before retiring in 1988 to the role of pastor emeritus.
Memorial services will be streamed Sunday, Oct. 25, on the church’s Facebook page, beginning with worship at 11 a.m. led by the Rev. Dr. James Forbes. The memorial begins at 1:45 p.m. with a prelude, and an organ recital featuring Kyle Ballantine is scheduled for 7 p.m.
Information about how to watch the services can be found at tinyurl.com/yxfq3zax.
Seymour, a native of Greenwood, South Carolina, was born July 13, 1925. As a young man, he enrolled at The Citadel military college “in deference to his father’s wishes,” according to a UNC libraries biography, but chose to become a chaplain after joining the Navy.
In 1945, Seymour graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s degree from Yale Divinity School in 1948. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Seymour already was a voice for equal rights for women and for minorities. After the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954, he submitted an unsuccessful resolution at the N.C. State Baptist Convention calling for integration of the state’s Baptist colleges.
Despite opposition from the Baptist leadership, Seymour persisted with his push to integrate the colleges at both the state and Southern Baptist conventions. He was isolated by church leaders as a maverick, according to author Elaine Allen Lechtreck in her book, “Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement.”
Seymour’s path as a pastor first took him to Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte — regarded as a liberal congregation at that time, he told Chapel Hill Magazine in a 2015 interview. His next post was at the more conservative Warrenton Baptist Church in Warren County, north of Louisburg, followed by a stint at Mars Hill Baptist Church, located in a small college town in western North Carolina.
It was there that he met Pearl Francis, the church’s organist and his future wife.
In 1959, the young couple moved to Chapel Hill when Seymour accepted the position as pastor at the newly formed Binkley Baptist Church, which then met on UNC’s campus. Pearl Seymour became the church’s organist.
Friendship with UNC Coach Dean Smith
Under Seymour’s leadership, Binkley expanded its focus on church membership to people from diverse Christian faiths and walks of life. But its open membership and baptism policies conflicted with the Southern Baptist tradition, leading the church to align with the American Baptist Churches.
Seymour built Binkley Baptist Church “from an idea to an institution now that certainly is highly respected and looked to to provide certain kinds of responses to social problems and justice challenges,” former Chapel Hill Mayor and state Sen. Howard Lee said.
“His impact I compare to the old adage, if you stick your hand in a bucket of water and take it out, the hole left is how much a person will be missed,” Lee said of his longtime friend. “I think Bob Seymour is more like sticking your fist in a bank of snow and taking it out. The hole left is how much he will be missed.”
As his role in the civil rights movement grew, Seymour also took part in small acts of civil disobedience, joining young protesters in front of the Colonial Drug Store on Franklin Street for the 1960s sit-ins and encouraging white residents to join Black friends at local restaurants for dinner.
In 1962, Seymour joined then-UNC assistant basketball coach Dean Smith and a Black theology student for dinner one night at The Pines restaurant, which was popular with the basketball team. The restaurant was not integrated — nor would it be until 1964 — local sports commentator Art Chansky told WUNC in an interview.
“They served them because they knew Dean would go back and tell [head coach] Frank McGuire and McGuire would have pulled all his business out of The Pines,” Chansky said.
The long friendship between pastor and coach started at Binkley in 1959, but the men also shared a desire to advance social justice. In 1967, Seymour encouraged Smith to break another barrier by recruiting Charlie Scott, the university’s first Black basketball player who would lead the team to two NCAA Final Fours.
In 2004, Smith wrote in the foreword to one of Seymour’s books, “When Life Becomes Worthwhile: A Christian Perspective,” about the influence that his friend and pastor wielded from the pulpit.
“His preaching always succeeded brilliantly in what many pastors try to do: comfort the guilty and make guilty the comfortable,” Smith wrote. “But what I think really makes Bob’s sermons special is that, as you hear or read them, you feel like you are being ministered to rather than preached at.”
In 2015, Seymour eulogized his friend at a Smith Center funeral by challenging the crowd to live lives of courage and compassion.
“How do we honor him?” Seymour said. “Dare we hold up our lives against this man’s life, as we see his virtues, his values, his goodness, his generosity, his kindness to everyone? My friends, we honor Dean Smith when we support the civil rights for every human being. We honor his memory by never allowing athletics to eclipse academics.”
Encouraged Chapel Hill’s 1st Black mayor
Seymour’s leadership also was felt across the Chapel Hill and Carrboro communities.
In 1963, he joined a group of women to found the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, a ministry that still provides food, clothing and housing help to Orange County’s low-income and homeless residents. Seymour was the group’s founding president for seven years.
He saw the value of political action, as well, friends said, and encouraged others, including Lee to run for political office. Lee was elected Chapel Hill’s first Black mayor in 1969 and then to the state Senate in 1990, where he served for 13 years.
Lee was first introduced to Seymour the minister as a graduate student in social work at UNC. It was his first experience being inside a white church that didn’t involve janitorial work, Lee said in an interview with The News & Observer..
“One of my classmates persuaded me to go with him to a service at Binkley, which I was hesitant to do because I still didn’t know all that much about Chapel Hill and certainly didn’t want to create problems here during my first year,” he said. “I went, and I’ll tell you it was the most gratifying experience I’ve ever remembered having in a church.”
Seymour continued to be a friend and supporter through good times and bad, Lee said, as he recalled the death threats against his family when they first moved to the then-all-white Colony Woods neighborhood in Chapel Hill.
Seymour’s support and the issues he raised were a tipping point in his decision to run for mayor, Lee said.
“Bob Seymour, Rebecca Clark, R.D. Smith, Adelaide Walters, Mary Prothro, a long list of people … both black and white who were the stalwarts trying to bring a more balanced response from the governing board in Chapel Hill following the civil rights movement,” Lee said. “I just happened to be the instrument in the right place at the right time to become the mayor, just as Dean Smith just happened to be the instrument at the right time to bring pressure on the restaurants in Chapel Hill.”
The Rev. Robert Campbell remembered Seymour as a mentor to social justice organizers and a “friend and confidant” to most area pastors. He was “inspirational to most of the work that we do now,” Campbell said, as he also noted Seymour’s environmental work, including his support for closing Orange County’s landfill on Eubanks Road and rectifying its effects on the Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood.
“His leadership was one of the most profound in the community (and he) crossed the aisle to embrace those on the other side to tear down the barriers,” Campbell said.
Village Voices columnist
The church’s outreach also grew under Seymour’s leadership, increasing missions to other countries and bringing recreation and child care programs to Chapel Hill’s poorest neighborhoods. He became a regular “Village Voices” columnist for The Chapel Hill News.
Seymour was able to make things happen, and he understood the problems and the value of the town’s Black communities, said Delores Bailey, a community organizer and executive director of Empowerment Inc. Yet, he was humble with a lively spirit, she said.
Seymour and the late Rev. J.R. Manley “were the bigwigs of the ministers back then, and they pretty much ran Chapel Hill around racial issues,” Bailey said. “And they did it the right way — they worked together to make things happen and make things change.”
Seymour remained active in his later years, working with organizations, such as People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and advocating for Chapel Hill to preserve its local and civil rights history by opening a new museum in the historic Town Hall on West Rosemary Street. The IFC and its Community Kitchen currently occupy the building while a new FoodFirst center is being built in Carrboro. The town has not made a decision about the building’s future.
He also lent his support to Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, going last year to Hillsborough to celebrate Habitat’s first older adult community. Lee said he is proud that he was asked to dedicate the first cottage in his friend’s name.
Elder care issues were another longtime passion, whether it was raising money with then Town Council members Alan Rimer and Lee Pavao to open Chapel Hill’s first senior center on South Elliott Road in 1992 or helping the Charles House Center for Community Eldercare expand to Carol Woods in 2015.
In 2007, the Seymours were honored at the opening of the county’s second senior center, the Robert and Pearl Seymour Center, on Homestead Road in Chapel Hill.
Seymour remained the primary caregiver for his wife in her long battle with dementia after they moved to Carol Woods in 2001. Pearl Seymour died in 2011, after 55 years of marriage.
The Seymours are survived by their son Rob, daughter Frances and their grandchildren.
This story was originally published October 12, 2020 at 12:16 PM.
