Alumnus Nat Green has spent career helping others

Louisville community leader, businessman and University of Louisville alumnus Nathaniel “Nat” Green is a doer. If he sees something that needs changing, he pitches in. If he finds someone who needs help, he volunteers.

Take for example his work mentoring basketball players at Simmons College of Kentucky, a small African-American Bible college located in Louisville. Green’s mentee was in desperate need of dental care he couldn’t afford. Green paid for his dental work and is arranging to have the entire team’s dental care taken care of.

“People can be giving, and they can be kind. But it’s rare they are quiet about it,” says longtime friend and colleague Dick Wilson. “But Nat is. He’s humble. How many people know what he did for that team? No one.”

Green, who earned a master’s degree in community development from UofL in 1972, may be quiet, but he has resolve—as anyone who has worked with him can attest. This steely determination is something he developed while working in the civil rights movement in the Deep South.

“Nat had nerves of steel,” remembers Elvernice Davis, a retired U.S. Airforce chaplain  who attended Rust College in Mississippi with Nat in the early 1960s. “He invited bravery, and inspired me to do things I didn’t think I could.”

Things such as standing down a white police officer at the Birmingham, Ala., bus station in 1961. Green and Davis were on their way to a Methodist conference in Atlanta when they decided to walk into a “whites only” area at the bus station.

“The police man jumped up in my face. People were mad. They were yelling at us to get back into the colored area,” says Green.

When the officer asked Green questions, he replied with a simple “no” or “yes”—not followed by the requisite “sir.”

Davis remembers the officer saying, “I am a bona fide officer of the solemn state of Alabama, and you are to say, ‘Yes, sir.’ Do you hear me?”

Green’s reply? A polite but firm, “Yes.”

“The man’s face turned red like he could kill us on the spot,” remembers Davis. “I was scared. But not Nat. He was cool.”

Green grew up in the Newburg and West End areas of Louisville and attended the then all-black Central High School. When he moved to Morristown, Tenn., in 1960 to play football for a small African-American junior college, he experienced an awakening. Students were participating in anti-segregation sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Green led in the organizing efforts, attending rallies and workshops and participating in protests.

“We wanted change, and the sit-ins and protests were an effective way to make that happen,” he says.

In 1961 Green transferred to an African American public university in Mississippi to finish his football and college career. He was there less than a week when he was awakened in the middle of the night by his football coaches. They said that then-Governor Ross Barnett had gotten wind of Green’s civil rights work in Tennessee and North Carolina and had Green ousted from all of Mississippi’s public universities and colleges.

Green left that night on a greyhound bus, headed to Rust College, a private Methodist school in Holly Springs, Miss., that welcomed students interested in civil rights. It was there that Green became an NAACP student chapter leader and worked with members of SNCC, CORE and other civil rights groups on and off campus. He entered the “whites only” sides of stores and public buildings. To protest a segregated movie theater in Mississippi that made African American sit in the balcony, he convinced friends to stop frequenting the theater; it closed down for lack of business.

He knew the late Medgar Evars, who tried to convince Green to remain in Mississippi after graduating in 1962and run for public office. Soon after that conversation, Evars was murdered.

But after four years of working in the movement, Green was exhausted.

“I was considered the leader, and everything fell on my shoulders,” he says. “I lost hair in the back of my head my senior year from stress. I was most concerned about the students who were volunteering and participating and looking to me for direction,” he says. “We were like sitting ducks.”

“I decided to follow the advice of a black professor who was leading our nonviolence workshop at Fisk University—to dedicate a time of my life to the movement, and then to get out.”

So he moved back to Louisville, bringing with him his wife, Holmesetta, whom he met at Rust College. And while he no longer worked in the civil rights movement per se, he continued to work for change. He earned his master’s degree in community development from UofL, and a master’s degree in religious education with a focus on social work from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

His career was varied, but always had one thing in common: helping others. Green created one of the city’s first integrated day care centers at the Chestnut Street YMCA. He wrote a book on the history of black Catholic leaders for the West End Catholic Council. Working with former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloane, he helped create the Park DuValle Neighborhood Health Center in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of town. He served as deputy director for the Housing Authority of Louisville. Eventually, the Internal Revenue Service recruited him into their leadership ranks, and he worked to advance minorities nationally in the IRS. He retired in 1997.

But retirement didn’t sit well for a man who had always been an activist. He became involved with Louisville’s Sister Cities program and helped promote business interests in Ghana, Africa. The U.S. ambassador to Ghana invited him to attend the Millennium Challenge Grants ceremonies at the State Department. He worked as an executive-in-residence in UofL’s College of Business for two years. He joined a number of volunteer boards, including the UofL Board of Overseers, the Alumni Association, UofL Libraries and the Salvation Army and was appointed to the UofL Board of Trustee twice.

Holmesetta retired after a long career as a school teacher in Jefferson County. Like her husband, she was used to doing, not sitting. (In fact, she was the first African American to win a state and national tennis championship from Kentucky.) Her sister in law, a dentist in Mississippi, talked her into becoming manager of the Colgate-Palmolive Company’s Bright Smiles, Bright Futures Heartland team, which provides free oral health education and screenings to children in underserved communities in seven states. She fell in love with the work, and soon her husband started helping out by managing the business side of the program. Their dental van reaches some 32,000 children, 300 days a year.

Neither Nat nor Holmesetta Green gives any indication that their community work will stop any time soon.

In fact, in February they made a $1 million bequest to the University of Louisville. The gift will be split equally between three programs they care passionately about: the UofL Libraries, the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice and the African American Theater Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Blaine Hudson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says he is grateful for the Greens’ leadership.

“This is very, very generous of the two of them to do this, and we so appreciate it,” Hudson says. “For some of our smaller programs to get this type of money means so much. In these tight budgetary times, it’s a real challenge to maintain our level of commitment to some of our smaller programs that may not attract the same level of attention as our larger programs.”

Nat Green says, “Education has been a big part of my and Holmesetta’s success, and we decided we wanted to make a lasting impact on this area. We don’t feel like it’s our money but God’s money—something we should share with causes we believe in.”

Alumnus Nat Green and his wife, Holmesetta