Norfolk public servant Father Joe Green dies at 96; remembered for compassion, love for community

After Rev. Joseph N. Green Jr., 96, closed his eyes for the last time last Friday, his daughter took her grief for a ride around Norfolk.

“I looked at the buildings that are named after him, I looked at the plaques at Ocean View that he is on, I looked at the streets that are named after him, and it made me understand his impact on this community,” Angela Green Middleton said this week. “Not only are there concrete monuments to him, but an indelible imprint on how this city evolved.”

Green — often called “Father Green” — was a beloved public servant who spent 20 years on Norfolk City Council starting in 1977, including three terms as vice mayor, and served as rector of Grace Episcopal Church from 1963 to 1993. He is recognized for breathing life into housing, education and transportation in Norfolk, from the downtown Tidewater Community College campus to the light rail system.

“He loved his God, he loved his family and he loved his community,” said Evelyn Green, his wife of 67 years. “He had the biggest heart of anybody I could know. And I’m so grateful I was a part of his life. He was a kind, gentle, loving spirit. And still is. He will always be in my heart.”

Their daughter and son, Joseph N. Green III, have been with their mother this week, trying to keep up with messages of love and remembrance from people whose lives he touched.

“Angela said as he was dying, he looked up at her and she said, ‘Daddy, it’s OK. We’re going to take care of Momma.’ And he looked up and died,” Evelyn Green said. “He took care of me all my life, and he still will.”

Born in Jenkinsville, South Carolina, on April 15, 1926, Green was the ninth of 11 children. The local school gave Black children only three months’ education, but St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church offered six. Despite the work needed at the family farm, education took priority. The Greens went to the church school.

Then Green was called up to the Navy in 1943. He worked as a pharmacist’s mate at Great Lakes, Illinois, and noticed that the Blacks tended to be assigned night shifts, while white sailors got a lot more sunlight.

After that, his wife said, he felt called to the ministry and earned a degree from then-St. Augustine’s College in North Carolina. Green and nine classmates decided to study at a white seminary to prove that they could do just as well as white students, he said in a 2020 interview.

He went to Philadelphia Divinity School, where he crossed paths with Martin Luther King Jr., who was two years younger and a student at nearby Crozer Theological Seminary.

Green attended the historic March on Washington in 1963, which coincided with his appointment to Grace Episcopal.

After his ordination, Green worked in South and North Carolina before returning to Norfolk. He earned a master’s from the School of Theology at Sewanee in Tennessee in 1965, making him one of the first two Black students to do so, along with his cousin, William “Bill” Fletcher O’Neal.

Green didn’t expect the degree of racism he saw at Sewanee. When he and O’Neal went for a dip in the pool one day, all the other swimmers got out and left. The next day, the pool was closed for repairs until the end of the summer, he said in 2020 when the school commissioned a portrait of him for its lobby.

“It was the story of our church. We wanted to break down the barriers that we had broken down in other places. The church cannot function as a separate and unequal institution, and the school certainly cannot,” Green said.

Green took public office in 1972 when Vice Mayor Joseph A. Jordan Jr. — the first African American elected to the council since Reconstruction — nominated Green for a vacant seat on the school board. Green was then appointed to council in July 1977, and ran the following year.

“I think everybody wants to work. ... We want to be fulfilled and a job has a way of fulfilling us,” Green said in an interview with The Journal and Guide in 1978. “I don’t care where the jobs come from as long as they come. However, I don’t believe that the private sector is going to do a great deal for young, Black teenagers or young, Black men and women, period.”

He won, and worked to reshape the city for the next 50 years.

Former Mayor Paul D. Fraim said Green and another council member, Mason C. Andrews, were key to winning his first election in 1986. The three ran on what Fraim believes was the city’s first interracial ticket.

“The platform we ran on … was about working in all neighborhoods all the way across the city and quality education in all of our schools. Things that were important to the African American community,” Fraim said. “They were important to me. I think Father Green sensed that.”

Fraim recalled that he was nervous about a vote for two big projects, Harbor Park and Nauticus. Fraim wanted to separate the votes but Green said no. The vote passed unanimously, and Fraim never forgot the example.

If Green thought something was going to be good for the city, Fraim said, he wasn’t going to be scared away.

“I remember going, ‘Wow. That guy’s a lot tougher than I am,’ ” Fraim said. “He did not flinch.”

TCC’s Norfolk campus, founded in 1997, is among many education and revitalization projects attributed to Green. Its administration building was named for him in 2009.

Deborah M. DiCroce, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Community Foundation and president emerita of TCC, said the campus wouldn’t exist without Green.

“You were not living life in Hampton Roads if you didn’t know who Joe Green was. He was someone that you could count on to tell it to you straight and help you do the right thing,” DiCroce said. “We liked to say back then it was the greatest act of optimism, education was, and Joe Green was a model of that. He also was a shrewd politician who brought with that political savvy a compassion for people and a drive to help make life better for them, wherever they were in their life’s journey.”

Green pushed for the rescue of the Attucks Theatre on Church Street, which his daughter called “his baby.”

Founded in 1919, it was described as the “Apollo Theatre of the South.” It was designed, built and paid for by the Black community.

“All of the greats performed on that stage, and it was going to be lost to the wrecking ball,” said Jerrauld C. Jones, a former state delegate who is now a Norfolk Circuit Court judge. “But for Joe stepping in and saying no, and then not just saying ‘We’ve got to do something,’ but being able to cultivate the support and raise the money.”

Jones’ father, Hilary H. Jones Jr., went to Raleigh to recruit Green to Grace Episcopal in 1963, and it was “love at first sight,” Jones said. That same year, Jones’ father became the first Black person to serve on the Norfolk School Board. In 1969 he became the first Black member of the state Board of Education.

When Hilary Jones died a few years later, Jerrauld Jones was just 21. Green gave the eulogy.

“I adopted Father Green to be my father,” Jones said. “He’s been there for every significant moment in my life.”

Despite his age, Green never slowed down, Jones said. He was still preaching occasionally and was designated canon theologian at Christ & St. Luke’s Church in 2021.

Rev. Win Lewis, who served as rector at Christ & St. Luke’s for more than 20 years before retiring last year, said Green’s advocacy for racial justice and reconciliation in the Episcopal Church will be felt for years to come.

Lewis has known Green for more than 40 years, but one memory that stands out to him was a time about six years ago when Green preached at Christ & St. Luke’s.

“After his sermon, he had the whole congregation singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ That was a transcendent moment, I think, for all of us,” Lewis said. “The thing that he taught me was that one can speak out with a quiet voice. One can speak the truth in love.”

Services for Rev. Joseph Green will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at Christ & St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and are open to the public. The service will also be streamed online at christandstlukes.org.

Katrina Dix, 757-222-5155, katrina.dix@virginiamedia.com.