Andrew Hairston is ‘the strength that runs through our veins’
ATLANTA — At age 21, Willie A. Watkins found himself “on the other end of the stick.”
He didn’t say what that meant exactly — just that it landed him in front of a judge.
“What do you want to do in life?” he recalled the judge asking him.
“Right now I’m working in a funeral home,” Watkins said. “I want to be an undertaker.”
The judge replied, “The road you’re traveling, you ain’t gonna be no undertaker. You’re going to be taken under.”
Next to a picture of the late Andrew J. Hairston, Jonathan Givens leads Hairston’s family into the auditorium of the Simpson Street Church of Christ. Givens, senior minister for the Southside Church of Christ in Montgomery, Ala., served as minister for the Hairston family.
But the judge did more than discipline Watkins. He promised to keep an eye on him and help him stay on the right path.
He made good on that promise, Watkins said. “He always had an encouraging word for me. God first. Prayer second. Stay focused, and God will direct your path.”
On Saturday, a gray-haired Watkins shared that story at the “Homegoing Service” for the judge, Andrew Jasper Hairston.
Then, as the congregation sang “Mansion, Robe and Crown,” staffers with the Willie A. Watkins Funeral Home escorted Hairston’s casket from the Simpson Street Church of Christ auditorium.
The Andrew Hairston Memorial Chorus sings hymns including “Waymaker” during the Homegoing Service at the Simpson Street Church of Christ.
Ministers, Atlanta city officials and believers from across the U.S. and the African nation of Liberia lined the pews for the three-and-a-half-hour service.
Speakers highlighted Hairston’s accomplishments: Attorney for Martin Luther King Jr. Prosecutor of notorious pornographer Larry Flynt. Atlanta’s first Black chief magistrate judge. Military chaplain. And preacher at Simpson Street for some 55 years.
Hairston died Jan. 14. He was 92.
“He held many titles that a lot of Black men and women, especially of his generation, would dream of,” said Kenneth Rucker II, one of Hairston’s five grandchildren.
He took the title of “Pawpaw” with equal seriousness and dedication, Rucker said.
When Rucker was 11 and his dad deployed to Kuwait for a year, “my grandfather would take me to get my hair cut and then take me and my sister to get KFC,” Rucker said. “When I outgrew my suits, he and my grandmother paid for new suits.”
‘Can you keep my girlfriend company?’
Hairston and his wife, Jeanne, met after his graduation from Southwestern Christian College in Texas. In their later years, whenever Hairston needed to be away from the house, he’d call Pat Applewhite, a 49-year member at Simpson Street.
“Applewhite, this is brother Hairston,” he’d say. “Can you keep my girlfriend company?”
Pat Applewhite speaks during the Hairston memorial service.
“Yes, leader. When do you need me?” Applewhite replied. She’d visit with Jeanne until she got another phone call. “Applewhite, this is brother Hairston. You are released.”
“I’d look over at sister Hairston, and she’d be there smiling,” Applewhite recalled. “She’d say, ‘Is that my boyfriend?’”
After nearly 70 years of marriage, Jeanne Hairston died on Oct. 10, 2022.
Another grandson, Alexander Hairston, read a poem, “The Pillar.” He thanked his grandparents for providing “the blueprint on how to live life well.”
“You were there for our first steps, our first heartbeats, our first games,” the younger Hairston said. “You were the strength that runs through our veins.”
Alexander Hairston reads an original poem, “The Pillar,” written for his grandfather.
Not a ‘hellfire-and-brimstone’ preacher
Charlie Simmons was 17 when Andrew Hairston began preaching for Simpson Street in 1961. It didn’t take long for the 29-year-old preacher to persuade Simmons to be immersed in baptism.
“We had never seen anybody work like him. That’s why all of us got two jobs,” said Simmons, now 81 and a deacon at Simpson Street.
Charlie Simmons, right, greets fellow Christians as he walks toward the Simpson Street Church of Christ building from a nearby school, used for overflow parking.
Tony Phillips was 12 when Hairston baptized him in 1976. Now city administrator for the Atlanta suburb of Fairburn, Ga., Phillips also serves in ministry for the Camp Creek Church of Christ in Atlanta.
Across the city, “I doubt you could go to a congregation and not find folks who, at some point, were under his ministry,” Phillips said.
“I doubt you could go to a congregation and not find folks who, at some point, were under his ministry.”
Willie Jackson first attended Simpson Street four decades ago. After hearing Hairston’s sermon, Jackson called his mother and said, “Oh Lord, hellfire and brimstone is gone!”
Instead of pounding the pulpit and focusing on divine wrath, “he was focused on you and your relationship with God,” Jackson said. “And it was just so special.”
He loved Liberia, waited for God’s justice
Hairston’s ministry extended far beyond Georgia.
Members of Atlanta’s Liberian community attended the service. One of them, Mabel Green, praised Hairston for the assistance he gave them in the 1970s as they navigated U.S. immigration law.
“His love for Liberia is immeasurable,” Green said. Along with minister R.C. Wells, Hairston launched Wells-Hairston High School in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. Hundreds of students have graduated from the school, including George Weah, a soccer star who served as Liberia’s president from 2018 to 2024.
Six years ago, O.J. Shabazz and other Christians incorporated a foundation for the school. At the memorial service, Shabazz, minister for the Harlem Church of Christ in New York, assured Hairston’s family that he was committed to “keep the doors of the school open” and continue the work Wells and Hairston started.
Jerry Taylor, a longtime minister and Bible professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, said that Hairston “viewed the pulpit as a solemn platform from which he eloquently addressed the important domestic and international issues of the day.
An usher greets visitors at the beginning of the Homegoing Service for Andrew Hairston.
“In the evening years of his life, Dr. Hairston grew troubled by the national erosion of the principles he had spent his long life defending,” Taylor said. As a Black man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, Hairston knew the dangers of racism veiled as government policy, Taylor added. But he also knew about the apostle John’s vision in Revelation 18, which predicted the fall of “Babylon the great” and the vindication of God’s people.
“This hope,” Taylor said, “sustained Dr. Hairston in the darkest hours of disappointment.”
A carpenter’s belt in his wardrobe
Although Hairston was an advocate for justice, “his sermons were never focused on civil rights,” said Geraldine Sharpe, who served as the minister’s clerical assistant. “His advocacy was for education and righteousness … which placed him in the center of the civil rights movement.”
Geraldine Sharpe speaks about the legacy of Andrew Hairston during the memorial service.
He wanted men and women to get involved in ministry. He published a study on the role of women in the church, “and for years one of our sisters in Christ served as director of our educational program,” Sharpe said. Countless Christian women have served as teachers and ministry directors at Simpson Street.
Hairston was a builder — of lives and of edifices.
“I was surprised that he came in one day wearing a carpenter’s belt,” Sharpe said. At the church’s former facility, Hairston helped to construct and repair his office and the ladies’ lounge.
A historical marker outside the Simpson Street Church of Christ’s building notes the accomplishments of Andrew Hairston.
That old building collapsed in 2011, four years after the church constructed a new meeting place across the street. Last year, the church finished demolition of its former facilities and broke ground on an apartment building. Partnering with government agencies, the church plans to create affordable housing for residents who’d otherwise be priced out of the neighborhood by gentrification and urban renewal.
Sharpe was born in the neighborhood near the church building. She moved away for a while, but returned in part because of the church’s housing initiative, a longtime dream of Hairston’s.
“We might consider putting a carpenter’s belt in our wardrobes so that we would all have a place to stash our love, our blessings, our desire to help others.”
“We might consider putting a carpenter’s belt in our wardrobes,” she said, “so that we would all have a place to stash our love, our blessings, our desire to help others.”
The site of the former Simpson Street building has construction items for a future affordable housing development.
Above all else, Hairston was a servant, said Rucker, his grandson, who studied at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. His grandfather believed that success — as a preacher, a judge or an undertaker — required a denial of self, as Jesus tells his followers in Mark 10:45: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
“He believed that we all have a purpose,” Rucker said, “and that we should come together to serve each other.”
Kenneth Rucker II eulogizes his grandfather, Andrew J. Hairston, from the pulpit of the Simpson Street Church of Christ in Atlanta.
ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact [email protected]. Follow him on X @eriktryggestad.
Mourners visit the casket holding Andrew J. Hairston as Chris Turner leads singing at the Simpson Street Church of Christ in Atlanta.
Ministers from across the nation embrace members of the Hairston family during the memorial service.
A family pays their respects at Andrew Hairston’s casket before the memorial service.
Ushers placed boxes of tissues throughout the auditorium of the Simpson Street Church of Christ before the memorial service.
Ministers from across the nation take a group photo at the conclusion of the memorial service for Andrew Hairston.
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