Marilyn Mack’s lasting impression of an American legend was formed years ago, across a kitchen table in Buffalo. As a teenager, a high school teacher expected Mack to attend a play based on Greek mythology at D’Youville College, and it looked as if she had to go by herself.
She mentioned that assignment casually to Rev. Joseph De Laine, founder and former pastor of her family’s church, who was staying for a few days at their house. He listened intently, then surprised her by saying: “Well, let’s go!”
De Laine accompanied Mack to the play, a gentle gift of presence that only grows in magnitude.
Mack is a longtime member of the De Laine-Waring AME Church on Swan Street. She describes it as the place “where I learned about the Lord, and his spirit.”
It’s also a landmark in the national movement for civil rights, a purpose its new pastor, Rev. Earl Perrin Jr., sees as imperative as Buffalo steps into another Black History Month.
Mack is pleased about De Laine-Waring’s trajectory with Perrin, like herself retired from the Buffalo Police Department. The energy’s linked to growing awareness of the “significance of that church, and the hearts and souls behind it,” said Roy Jones, a Clemson University distinguished professor of education who has researched De Laine and what he sacrificed.
The name of the church goes to the essence of the Briggs v. Elliott case in South Carolina, a court action that Jones said led directly to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka – the nation-changing Supreme Court decision that reaches its 70th anniversary this year.
That 1954 ruling established state-enforced school segregation as unconstitutional, providing spiritual rocket fuel to the escalating quest for civil rights.
De Laine came to Buffalo in the mid-1950s, after his church was burned in South Carolina and he fired back at racist attackers, outside his home. “They came to kill him,” recalls Joseph “Jay” De Laine, 90,…
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