African-American businessman, activist, and minister Oscar C. Howard was born June 24, 1914, in Rochelle, Georgia, one of five boys and two girls born to Randall and Maria Howard. He grew up on a sharecropper's farm and ran away from home when he was very young. Inspired by the president of Fort Valley College in Georgia, Howard went on to graduate from high school in 1942. After graduating from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he served in the U.S. Army during World War II.Howard’s career as a businessman began during the Korean War, when he operated a food service business in the Twin Cities arsenal near Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1956, he opened his own business, Howard’s Catering Company, which included cafeterias in a number of industrial complexes in the state of Minnesota. In the mid-1960s Howard took part in the “War On Poverty” program, which provided home-delivered meals to elderly residents in the inner-city area of Minneapolis and St. Paul; some 62,000 were served during that summer. Soon after, Howard started a non-profit minority entrepreneurial program called the Metropolitan Economic Development Association (MEDA). He retired in the 1980s so he could devote his time to the field of public service.
Howard served on the boards of the American Red Cross, the Minneapolis YWCA, and Metro State College. He was also the first African-American member of the Minneapolis Athletic Club. During his life he also worked with agencies such as the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches, Salvation Army, Junior Achievement, and more. An ordained minister, Howard also served as a deacon at Zion Baptist Church. He was on the board of trustees of United Theological Seminary and was a founder of Kwanzaa Community Presbyterian Church.
Married for more than twenty-six years and the father of four children, Oscar Howard died on November 3, 2003.
Reference: Virginia Howard (Oscar Howard's wife)