Marcus Garvey Battle, (aka Mark G. Battle), was born into a poor Black family in southern New Jersey, (aka north Georgia), in 1924 -- a few years before the Great Depression struck. His father, who had been hounded by the Klan because of his “uppity” and militant activities, died when Mark was nine years old. Mark went to work as a stoop laborer in the truck gardens that made New Jersey the garden state. He joined five sisters and his Mother in trying to support the family. At thirteen, he was granted a scholarship to the MTIS in Bordentown, New Jersey. At this all-Black comprehensive residential secondary school, his world began to open up. Far from home, he participated in everything he could and, thus, the seeds of his future were planted. For example, he sang with the glee club and quartet. He became a captain in the Cadet Corps. He excelled on the track team at hurdles and at sprinting. As a junior in school, he won a competition in the Cultural Olympics at the University of Pennsylvania. As a senior, he was named Valedictorian and also received a certificate in carpentry. He was given a choice of several scholarship offers to college.
Mark spent his freshman year at Fisk University. There he sang with the Fisk Jubilee Singers as a part of a USO contract to entertain the troops. Like most young men at that time, he faced the reality of probably being drafted into the military at any moment. In an effort to try and control that prospect, he applied for the U.S. Navy V-12 Program. He passed the exams but was not selected because “the quota was filled.” When he went home for the summer, he was, in fact, drafted into the Navy. While on general duty in the Navy, he applied a second time to get into the V-12 Program. At that time, he was being trained as an Aviation Machinist Mate in the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Memphis. Again he passed the exams for the V-12 Program but, while everyone on base celebrated his good fortune, he was informed a second time that “the quota was filled.” Disappointed, Mark nonetheless returned to his training routine and graduated third in his class.
His next general duty assignment was to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. That assignment involved preparing planes received from the Grumman Plant for duty in the North Atlantic Fleet. After seven months supporting the Fleet’s efforts to help win the war in Europe, a request was made for volunteers to apply for the V-12 Program. Mark applied for the third time, passed all of the tests and, this time, was accepted. He was sent to the University of Rochester for officer training. It was not coincidental that his acceptance occurred in Brooklyn and not in Nashville or Memphis.
The war ended three months before he was to receive his Commission. Mark took his discharge and returned to civilian life as a student at the University of Rochester. The series of experiences Mark had had with the systemic racism in the Navy were both enlightening and influential in helping him come to terms with the reality of racism and ways of dealing with it.
In Rochester as an ordinary citizen, Mark joined a youth group led by Charles Emerson Boddie who was a close collaborator with Howard Thurman. In addition to pastoring his church, Chuck Boddie led an inter-group relations movement in the city of Rochester and the upstate New York region. The movement was beginning to have an impact and was regarded by some as subversive. It was in this milieu that Richard Cloward and Mark Battle conceived of a project to create a summer camp opportunity for Black children, which was non-existent at the time. They decided to make it an interracial summer camp. To the disbelief of some and the consternation of others, they succeeded in establishing the interracial camp. They organized a community board, raised operating and capital funds, rented a camp site, hired a staff including some parents, recruited campers (children Black and White) and effectively ran the first interracial summer camp in upstate New York. The impact was to change the situation for all children.
That fall, Mark was introduced to the Social Work profession when he accepted a job at Baden Street Settlement House in Rochester. Until then he had been struggling with the issue of how to work for a better society and earn a living at the same time. The work of the Settlement House at the neighborhood level as led by a well-trained Social Worker, Irving Kreigsfeld, seemed to be the answer.
Mr. Kreigsfeld and his staff embodied the ideals that motivated Mark to work for community change. After six months, Mark decided to attend graduate school and seek a professional degree in Social Work. This was managed with the G.I. Bill and with a loan from the local Rotary Club engineered by Mr. Kreigsfeld. The loan was a first in Rochester.
Mark attended Western Reserve University School of Applied Social Sciences (now Case Western Reserve) where he earned a Master of Social Science Administration (MSSA) degree. Through this experience, Mark found his pathway to helping the Black community and the larger society as well. He interned his first year at the Friendly Inn Settlement House in Cleveland. His second year, he interned at the Cleveland Urban League. There he staffed a successful project to open up the Driver Salesman Industry to Blacks. Thus, in 1950, new jobs as taxi drivers, milk truck drivers, bakery truck drivers and beer truck drivers were made available to people of color. Mark wrote his Master’s thesis on this project and the process of community organization that it embodied. This project was an important factor in the racial integration of the Long Haul Teamsters. Mark continued to work for the Urban League for only one year after graduation, although he maintained an active relationship with the League throughout his career.
In 1952, Mark began a series of management experiences by serving as Program Director and then Executive Director of the Lower North Center in Chicago. In 1957, Ebony magazine did a feature story on the job Mark did there in building a “people bridge” between the Gold Coast and the slums. The story also highlighted his success in getting the Federal Housing Administration to build a new community center to the specifications of Mark’s agency, which was then leased to the agency for a dollar a year. This new community center was the first of its kind.
In 1959, the Board of the Franklin Settlement House in Detroit was seeking its first Black professional executive. The Settlement House was in trouble, programmatically and financially, although it was one of the oldest settlement houses in the country. Representatives of the Board came to Chicago seeking to recruit Mark as Executive Director. Mark found the management and troubleshooting challenges irresistible. The neighborhood in which Franklin was located had changed from White to Black and the Settlement House had no knowledgeable Black leadership and no responsive program. Mark accepted employment as the Executive Director of Franklin Settlement House. His work there took on national significance when the revised and re-energized program was announced as a design for Social Defense. The program included a neighborhood revolving loan fund for housing, an economic development activity, and a political education program. One part of the economic development activity was a youth employment program, which included some entrepreneurial activity. This program particularly caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Labor. They sent a team to Detroit to review the program. The result was that they invited Mark to consult in their planning effort, which was dedicated to designing the implementation of the Hubert Humphrey Youth Employment Act. Mark agreed and consulted with the Department for three months. At that point, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and everything changed. The Department then asked Mark to lead a planning task force on youth employment to design programs to be a part of the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson. That assignment resulted in the creation of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps, and the New Careers Program, which were incorporated into the Economic Opportunity Act. Mark was named the first national Director of Field Operations for the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Two years later, President Johnson appointed Mark the Administrator of the Bureau of Work Training Programs in the Department of Labor.
As Administrator of the Bureau of Work Training Programs, Mark used his management skills and policy know-how to affect several changes in the Department of Labor. He negotiated approval for exceptional appointments for professionals of color and women to become permanent civil servants. One result was the appointment of Blacks and Chicanos to Regional Director positions in the Department of Labor. In addition, Mark quietly fought for and succeeded in getting the acceptance of a Social Work degree as a qualification for two positions by the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Labor. The two positions were Social Science Analyst and Employment Development Specialist.
When Richard Nixon was elected President, Mark resigned his position with the Department of Labor, which was expected of Presidential appointees. He was then appointed as a part-time Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Howard University by Dean Inabel Lindsay. A year later, he was appointed as a full-time Associate Professor by Dr. Lindsay’s successor, Dr. Douglas Glasgow. In this role, he engineered working relationships with federal Executive Branch agencies, the D.C. government and certain Congressional offices. In addition, he taught courses in administration and social policy. He also led the re-design of the curriculum into a macro Social Work series of offerings. Macro became a model curriculum copied by many graduate Schools of Social Work. Ultimately, Mark became a full professor and a master teacher sought after by many Schools of Social Work.
Mark’s consulting skills and experience led to the creation of the consulting firm, Mark Battle Associates, Inc. (MBA), which was one of the first successful management, research and consulting firms owned by Blacks. The services of MBA were used by a host of public and private organizations and institutions, which included the Executive Office of the President of the United States, six Cabinet-level Departments, five State agencies, ten City governments, fourteen private entities and two National Commissions (i.e., the National Commission on School Finance and the National Commission on Executive Organization).
In 1984, Mark was selected as the CEO of the National Association of Social Workers, making him the first Black CEO of a major professional association in the United States.
In this role, he managed an organization with 150,000 members worldwide, 52 State chapters, three wholly-owned subsidiaries with working assets of more than $35million. He successfully planned and led the final campaign to secure State licensing for Social Work in all fifty States. He wrote and successfully implemented an Association-wide Affirmative Action Program that included all staff and volunteer leadership positions. This Program was copied nationally. He guided the development of a Government Affairs Unit that helped both the Congress and the Executive Branch with conceptualizing social policy legislation and drafting regulations for program implementation.
Mark’s contributions were considered valuable enough that two cities (Washington, D.C. and Atlanta) named a day for him. Two national organizations awarded him Lifetime Achievement Awards (the National Network for Social Work Managers and the National Association of Social Workers). His alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, named him Outstanding Alumni. Upon his retirement, the National Association of Social Workers provided the seed money to establish a scholarship in his name at Howard University School of Social Work.
The last seven years of Mark’s active professional life (1992-1999) were spent as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work in Baltimore. He is credited with helping change a history of separation between “town” and “gown” -- one primarily Black, the other primarily White. In the process, he helped create a functioning entity called the Social Work Community Outreach Service. For his work, he was awarded the Dean’s Medal for Outstanding Service and elected to the Advisory Board of the School.
In retrospect, this is a man whose instincts, training and motivation to improve life for all people drove him to work at this goal at the local and national levels. This need to give and to improve inspired his educational endeavors. In fact, the history of working to make his life space and the world beyond a better place continues to inspire other generations. He has been called many names -- an academic, a bureaucrat, an administrator, a practitioner and an entrepreneur. But for now let’s just call him Doctor.