Civil Rights Work
While attending Furman, Paulk served as an associate pastor at his father's church in Greenville. While at Candler, he was called to his first pulpit, a Church of God in Buford, Georgia; north of Atlanta. It was during this time that he began preaching against racism. Years later, he said that he was influenced by seeing his uncle shoot a black friend in the back for cutting corners while plowing cotton. Paulk's stance was not typical for his time; it had long been common for white Southern preachers to use the Bible to justify support for racial bars.
In 1952, Paulk was named pastor of Hemphill Avenue Church of God (now Mount Paran Church of God) in Atlanta just as the civil rights movement was getting underway. He was one of the few white pastors who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. Not long after taking over at Hemphill, Paulk became a member of "Concerned Clergy," an interracial group of Atlanta pastors who opposed racial segregation. The group was led by King's father, Martin Luther King, Sr., and met in the basement of the elder King's church, Ebenezer Baptist Church. During this time, he served on a committee that observed Georgia's then-segregated schools, and determined that "separate but equal" was a fiction.
Earl Paulk said that he signed The Atlanta Manifesto, a statement prepared in the fall of 1957 by a group of clergymen in Georgia, relating specifically to the violence in Little Rock, Arkansas, and in general to issues of racial integration from the point of view of Christian social responsibility., but examination of that document does not include Earl Paulk's signature.
Paulk resigned from Hemphill in 1960. Officially, it was due to differences of opinion with Church of God leaders regarding his stance on racial integration, as well as the fact he allowed women in his church to wear jewelry (at the time, the Church of God, like many Pentecostal denominations, strongly admonished women against wearing makeup or jewelry). However, it later emerged that he'd had an extramarital affair with a woman in his church.
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