Heirloom #18
by Will Frank
At noon on December 3, 1929, a representative of the American Unitarian Association, the Rev. Charles R. Joy, arrived in Norfolk by train from Richmond. On his journey from the Boston AUA headquarters, he had stopped in Richmond the day before to plan with the Rev. Frank W. Pratt the upcoming attempt to restart the Unitarian Church of Norfolk. They worked on the series of lectures to be given, advertising notices, and the details of how to reach potential new Unitarians in a region where liberal religion was little known.
The first thing that Joy did when getting off the train was to try to locate as many of the members of the former First Unitarian Church of Norfolk as he could find. But many had moved away, some had died during the hiatus of the 1920s, and there were even suicides. He also had to be careful not to rile up the old animosities over the last minister of the First Unitarian Church, the Rev. John Einstein. This had to be a fresh start, but it would be good to have a base of members of the former church who would be a positive element in the rising of a new congregation. That first afternoon, Joy was only able to encounter one enthusiastic Unitarian from the defunct church, a devoted woman over ninety years old and quite feeble. But he needed a base that was not only devoted but energetic.
He then found what he felt was a dream come true. “The next morning,” Joy wrote, “I came in contact with the Nowitzki family, of Jewish extraction, with numerous branches, and a whole Sunday School of children, twenty-five in number, ready for organization. I found some members of this family keenly interested in the establishment of a Unitarian church and ready to do everything in their power to make it a success. I spent the rest of that day mostly with Mr. Leon Nowitzki looking for a hall, – which proved to be a very baffling task, – arranging for printing, mailing, etc.”
Leon Nowitzki was a detective with the Norfolk Police Department, he and the other members of the extended family having connections with the established order of Norfolk. Joy found the family a mixed lot, some refined and delightful, some coarse and blustery, but together what seemed like a solid foundation on which to rebuild the church, so long as the base of the renewed congregation should be broadened to include “other cultured and representative people.” The Nowitzki family, true to Joy’s expectation, became a key element in reestablishing the Unitarian Church of Norfolk. They remained as leaders and doers in the congregation until 1956, when they dropped out under the impact of new ideas of diversity and equality born of the emerging civil rights movement. It must be admitted that in these early years, Norfolk Unitarians were all whites who largely accepted and even promoted the prevailing racial segregation of the era. Only starting in 1944 did ministers begin to try to challenge segregationist assumptions and practices.
On December 4, 1929, before returning to Boston the next day, Joy made final arrangements for advertising, posters, and other publicity for the upcoming Pratt lectures, scheduled to start on December 15. As the Norfolk effort was jointly sponsored by the American Unitarian Association and its Laymen’s League, it was arranged that Arthur Bartlett, Administrative Vice President of the Unitarian Laymen’s League, would come for these lectures and over the following week work with Pratt and the potential leaders of the revived congregation. The future for liberal religion in Norfolk now seemed sunny.