Rev. Amos H. Carnegie

Reverend Amos Hubert Carnegie was a Jamaican-American Baptist minister who traveled throughout the eastern United States in the early and middle 20th century and financed several schools, hospitals and foundations.

Overview Rev Carnegie was a preacher in the US in the 1930s. He funded institutions for black people during the Jim Crow era and was also the founder and director of the National Hospital Foundation Inc. The influence of Carnegie and the hospital movement are cited in the text and bibliography of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr: Advocate of the social gospel.

Carnegie's autobiography, entitled Faith Moves Mountains is available online for free. including four boys and four girls, but one died in infancy. He was raised he joined a Baptist church, was baptized, and became a full member of the church. He was elected Superintendent of the Sunday School and President of the Christian Endeavor Society. In spite of references from the YMCA and the Jamaican Government, he could only find menial labor, picking apples and working as a sleeping car porter. With a gift from a benefactor, he enrolled in a primarily African-American school, Virginia Union University.

Without funds, he struggled to finish college, but he raised money by preaching at churches in the US and Canada, and received donations. He attended the Chatham Collegiate in Chatham, Ontario for a year while serving as pastor of a nearby church.

Imprisonment In 1917, Carnegie was drafted into the Canadian Army to fight in World War I, but as a Christian minister he was “hostile to the spirit of war”. For refusing to serve, he was court-martialed and sent to a prison camp where he was made to do hard labor.

Marriage and Children Once in the US, he married Susan Blake, also from Jamaica, and they had six children, one of whom died at birth.

Ordination Carnegie spoke and delivered sermons at various churches and civic gatherings in Virginia, West Virginia and South Carolina and he became pastor of the Carmel Methodist Church.

Plan to Build Schools Carnegie found the US to be deeply divided along racial lines by Jim Crow segregation, where other blacks warned him to step off the sidewalks if he saw whites coming along. It was the only black high school in a hundred-mile area. Two decades later, the school was closed in a consolidation with white public schools, with the goal of desegregation. speaking to audiences composed of civil leaders, business leaders, landowners and politicians, and he convinced southern whites to support the founding of schools for blacks. Among other arguments, he appealed to whites’ self-interest, arguing that the mass migration of blacks to the North was driven by poverty and lack of education. He saw the construction of as many schools as possible a way of preparing unlettered blacks to read the Bible and, therefore, as a natural outgrowth of his itinerant Christian ministry.

In 1951, the Journal of Medical Education reported that Carnegie's National Hospital Foundation and Howard University jointly 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. 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.".

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.".

Carnegie also proposed a 200-bed hospital for New York City that was to cost $4,000,000.

Fundraising Models Carnegie's fundraising model varied depending upon the audience and the circumstances, always involving such grants, state and federal monies as were available and sometimes proposing that blacks donate a penny per toward the construction of hospitals.

In the article, the Association rebuked and rebuffed Carnegie, ridiculing his belief that he could collect money from all African Americans nationwide and calling his proposals dreams. Carnegie's voice was influential in the debate; his article entitled, But Integration is Empty Talk was widely cited and debated at the time. However, the locally produced and self-published book includes no sources or citations for the accusation.

The accusation highlights the difficulty he faced engaging in fundraising and earning the trust of black and white populations. In one fundraising campaign, he proposed that money would be raised among blacks to be held in trust by white trustees.

Greyhound Bus Incident Carnegie was unafraid when he was informed that whites were unhappy with his efforts, but he was not immune to the violence that surrounded him. "In the US, too, Jamaicans like the Rev. Amos Carnegie had suffered from the vicious hatred of southern racists who beat him because he refused to take a back seat on a bus travelling through Georgia one night. And there were many others like him." The incident and the Reverend's legal action were reported widely in the US by wire services. The National Jet magazine reported that Carnegie sued Greyhound Bus for $100,000.

A photograph of him bleeding after the beating can be found in the archives of National Historic Images.

Arrest He was arrested in Birmingham, AL and convicted of soliciting monies without a license, given a suspended sentence of a year in jail and fined $50.00.

Influence Carnegie was an inveterate letter writer to institutions, civic leaders and celebrities, with letters published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, a collection of letters to Marion Anderson and several in the archives of Washington, DC's National Negro Opera Company.

Carnegie wrote an article about desegregation that was cited widely by blacks thinkers and organizers. He was cited various times in the national Jet magazine for his hospital plans, for being beaten on a bus and for his arrest.

Return to Jamaica In June 1950, Carnegie returned to Jamaica for the first time in almost four decades, as an ambassador for his US hospital movement. The Kingston Gleaner newspaper reported 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...". including the late Hon. Amos Hubert Carnegie, Jr., a New York state judge; the late Rachel Virginia (Holland), Ph.D., professor of sociology; the late Leanora M. (Leach), Ph.D., high school teacher; the late Dr Vida Mae (Gaynor), Ph.D., clinical psychologist and author and the late Joseph Carnegie, a New York labor organizer, as well as "Baby Carnegie" who was stillborn.

In her autobiography, Dr Vida Mae Carnegie (Gaynor), says that her father 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.

Dr Gaynor states that her father should not have referred to himself as a "Reverend", since she believes that he did not pastor a church after 1933. However, other pastors such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the appellation "Reverend" throughout the Civil Rights Movement although he did not actively pastor an individual church during that period.

Carnegie's autobiography

His autobiography did not identify his parents or siblings by name. they observed that: The Reverend Mr. Carnegie has lived a most interesting life, but he lacks the ability to record it to best advantage. His main difficulty is a tendency to overlook all autobiographical details except religious ones. For example, he spent one full year at Virginia Union University, and all that he records of this experience is that he "converted" his roommate. The author has labeled this work "Volume I." Presumably other volumes are to follow. Since he has lived so fully, one hopes that Mr. Carnegie in subsequent installments will give a picture of his whole life, not just those episodes connected with moral and religious uplift.

Death Rev. Carnegie died in August, 1978 in Flushing, Queens, New York.