Introduction and Early Life
Charles Wells Sr. pastor father worked in the coal mines and who got into school scuffles while staring down prejudice in his hometown in Pennsylvania. As a teenager, Wells drew glares when he began dating a White girl, the daughter of the president of a city bank. He ignored the stares and kept on dating her.
Activism and Leadership
Wells later went on to lead boycotts from the pulpit of his Georgia churches, moving with the assured manner of a military man, as you’d expect of a former US Army first lieutenant.
Legacy
The Reverend Charles Wells, a 1966 ITC graduate, died in 2004 at age sixty-five after pastoring in Georgia for four decades with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He died on the job in Atlanta as he was renovating his church. Wells’s last breath came as he sat in a church library chair, with his arms at his side and “his head looking up to God.”
Quotations
“When we reached the door, the people who had been standing around on the sidewalk gathered around us, and we were completely encircled,” Wells said. “Mr. Maddox called us Communists and agitators. He was applauded and cheered by the other people while he made a speech.”
Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (pp. 119-120). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
Hearing on Feb. 1 for January event
Greene, Ronnie. Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration (p. 156-7). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition.
“Mr. Maddox’s son ripped some buttons off my clothing,” Wells said. “From the time I left the vestibule of the restaurant, I was repeatedly pushed, shoved, struck, choked till such time as I departed from the premises.” Wells continued. “I was standing there and Mr. Maddox spun me around and pushed me out of his restaurant and repeatedly pushed me afterwards until such time as we left the premises,” he said.
“Now,” Alexander asked, “when you stated that you were choked by Mr. Maddox, which Mr. Maddox are you referring to?” “Lester Maddox,” Wells replied, pointing to the restaurateur sitting in court. “The one sitting there.” One of the lawyers representing Maddox, Sidney T. Schell, then rose to cross-examine Wells. Did you ever personally threaten Maddox? Schell asked. “No, I did not,” Wells said. Then Schell veered into broader terrain, touching upon one of Maddox’s strident themes, anti-Communism, while harkening back to the infamous McCarthy Senate hearings a decade earlier. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Schell asked Wells. Beyond serving in the ministry, Wells had enlisted in the military and worked as a distribution clerk at the US Post Office. “I have not been a member of the Communist Party,” he replied. “If I had I would not have been working for the federal government.”