Rev. Eugene Callender, Who Saw Potential of Disadvantaged School Dropouts, Dies at 87 The Rev. Dr. Eugene S. Callender, a civil rights advocate best known for starting an innovative series of "street academies" for disadvantaged New York City youths that became a model for nontraditional educational programs nationwide, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Lorena Rostig, a co-author, with George A. Zdravecky, of Dr. Callender's 2012 memoir, "Nobody Is a Nobody: The Story of a Harlem Ministry Hard at Work to Change America." A Presbyterian minister, Dr. Callender was for decades "one of Harlem's most active leaders," as The New York Times wrote in 1967. The longtime senior minister and chief executive of the Church of the Master, formerly on Morningside Avenue near 122nd Street, he was also a past executive director of the New York Urban League and a former president of the New York Urban Coalition. Dr. Callender, who preached and lectured throughout the country, also served in the administrations of Mayor John V. Lindsay, for whom he was deputy administrator of the New York City Housing and Development Administration, and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom he was the director of the New York State Office of the Aging. A Democrat, Dr. Callender turned down a position as an assistant labor secretary in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. Though Dr. Callender was a Massachusetts native, he had lived and worked in Harlem since the 1950s. He had vowed to live there as a young man, after seeing it for the first time on a visit to New York. "There was a sea of black faces," he said in an unpublished 1967 interview with The Times. " "Boy," I thought, "this must be our land." I made up my mind right there that I was going to live in Harlem. By the late "50s Dr. Callender had established the Addicts Rehabilitation Center, a drug program in Harlem. At the time, addicts were widely considered a marginal population unworthy of much attention, and such programs were rare. He was later the chairman of the Haryou-Act Community Corporation, a Harlem antipoverty agency. Dr. Callender, who in the 1960s accompanied the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights marches in the South, often said he had been concerned with the disenfranchised from the time he was very young. Eugene St. Clair Callender, the son of immigrants from Barbados, was born in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 21, 1926. His father, a factory worker, and his mother, a domestic, were determined that their children go to college. The way seemed clear for Eugene when he graduated second in his class from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School: The school's top three graduates traditionally received scholarships to Harvard. But when he went to Harvard to apply for his scholarship, he was told that the college had already admitted its quota of Negroes for the year. "That," Dr. Callender told The Cambridge Chronicle, a community newspaper, in an interview last year, "was my first act of social injustice." He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Boston University and on graduating enrolled in the Westminster Theological Seminary, near Philadelphia. "You're Eugene Callender!" an astonished administrator exclaimed the day he arrived there. The seminary had not known his race, and he would be its first black student. Before long, however, as Dr. Callender recalled, the entire student body and faculty had descended in protest on a Philadelphia restaurant that refused to serve him. After receiving a bachelor of divinity degree from Westminster in 1950, he earned a doctorate in divinity from Knoxville College in Tennessee. He later earned a law degree from New York Law School. Dr. Callender was the pastor of the Mid-Harlem Community Parish before joining the Church of the Master in 1959. He served with that church for decades and remained a guest pastor there until his retirement in 2010. In the mid-1960s, under the aegis of the Urban League, Dr. Callender established what became a chain of more than a dozen street academies in depressed New York neighborhoods. Storefront establishments financed with corporate contributions, the academies enrolled black and Hispanic high school dropouts and inspired similar programs in other cities. In 1975, The Times reported that 600 of New York's street academy graduates had gone on to college. Dr. Callender also founded the Harlem Preparatory School, intended to further prepare street academy graduates for a college education. Dr. Callender, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was married and divorced several times. His survivors include a daughter, Renée; a sister, Thelma Burns; a brother; Leland; a grandson; and a great-granddaughter. As his lectures and interviews made plain, Dr. Callender possessed a well-honed talent for driving a rhetorical point home. "We still have far to go before we are accepted as citizens on the same basis as others in this nation," he told an audience of foreign students in New York in 1963. "And if you doubt it," he added, "try to rent an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan."