“We see him as a symbol of progress for those of us who need inspiration in life,” Rev. Tukunbo Adelekan, senior pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, said following Sunday’s celebration.
Born the grandson of former slaves, Cross enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, in 1940.
Having always held an interest in art, Cross decided to study carpentry. However, his studies were put on hold during World War II.
Cross served nearly four years in the U.S. Army and spent 21 months overseas with the 367th infantry and then with the 364th infantry. He was selected for an honor guard for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during that time. He was honorably discharged in December 1945 and returned to Tuskegee, where he decided to change his course of study from carpentry to architecture. He graduated with honors in 1949.
Cross moved to the Dayton area in 1951, where he join the Architectural Section Base Civil Engineering at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
“I finally moved up to chief architect at the base level and and head of the architecture unit,” he said.
His baptism as a teenager, he said, shaped him into the person he is, which makes it fitting that he designed multiple churches, including Mt. Nebo Baptist Church in Dayton. He and his firm — Cross, Curry de Weaver, Randall & Associates, which formed in the late 1960s — were responsible for the renovation and redesign of Tabernacle Baptist Church.
Cross, along with his firm, designed a number of buildings in Dayton, including Fire Station 13 at the corner of Third Street and James H. McGee Boulevard.
“There are buildings that I know he was actually involved with and I’ll point it out to my sons and my wife that, ‘My uncle did this. Uncle Clarence did that,’ said his great-nephew Kevin Wilks of Dayton. “But he is a person that is not very boastful of himself so there’s a lot of things that I don’t know that he actually did.”
Now, thanks to Cross, many others are accomplishing their dreams. He has donated more than $100,000 to Tuskegee University.
“He didn’t have any biological kids, but what he would do was take kids that he did not know … he would sponsor these kids through school,” Wilks said.
Adelekan said younger generations should look to Cross, who was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and participated in the March on Washington in 1963, as an example.
“We’re at a critical moment in our nation’s history and we need bridge builders, peacemakers, people that understand what it means to get beyond conflict and to get to what makes all of us human,” Adelekan said. “Deacon Clarence Cross is somebody that’s embodied that for 100 years.”
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