clergyman, community activist, denomination organizer, and black nationalist was born Albert Buford Cleage Jr., one of seven children of Pearl (whose maiden name is now unknown) and Albert Cleage Sr., in Indianapolis, Indiana. Shortly after Agyeman's birth, Cleage, Sr., a medical doctor, relocated with his family to Detroit, Michigan, where the father helped to establish the city's first African American hospital. After an undergraduate education that included a stay at Fisk University in Tennessee, Agyeman received his BA in Sociology from Wayne State University in 1937, serving as a caseworker for the Department of Public Welfare from 1931 to 1938. Subsequently Agyeman felt the call to ministry and obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Oberlin College Graduate School of Theology in 1943. Also in 1943Agyeman married Doris Graham, to which union was born two children, Kris and the ...
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Jeremy Rich
was born in Poitiers, France on 16 September 1852 to relatively poor and fervently Catholic parents. He attended primary school in his hometown and encountered two priests from his neighborhood, Joseph Dubois and Louis Bernard. He fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and exhibited some of the fiery courage that marked his entire life. After the war the priests from his hometown, Dubois and Bernard, encouraged Augouard to enter the minor seminary of Sées. While studying there, Augouard was inspired by Antoine Horner, a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers religious order, to consider missionary work in Africa. Horner’s description of Catholic evangelization on Zanzibar Island affected Augouard tremendously and in 1876 he was ordained a Catholic priest.
After spending a short time in the French town of Cellule, in the Puy-de-Dôme region, Augouard moved to the Gabonese capital of Libreville in 1877 Bishop Pierre Marie Le Berre ...
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Terence M. Mashingaidze
nationalist politician, first titular president of independent Zimbabwe, statesman, peace broker, clergyman, author, soccer administrator, academic, poet, and journalist, was born on 5 March 1936 at Esiphezini, in Essexvale (now Esigodini) District near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. The versatile Banana’s father, Aaron, was a migrant laborer from Malawi while his mother, Jese, was a Zimbabwean Ndebele woman. Banana married Janet Mbuyazwe in 1961; the marriage produced three sons and a daughter. Banana attended Mzinyati primary school and Tegwani High School. He trained as a teacher at Tegwani Training Institute and then attended Epworth Theological Seminary, resulting in his ordination as a Methodist preacher in 1962 Subsequently he worked as a Methodist schools manager principal chairperson of the Bulawayo Council of Churches and member of the Rhodesian Christian Council and World Council of Churches In the 1970s Banana attained a BA with honors in theology through distance learning from ...
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Genevieve Skinner
Civil War veteran, preacher, and teacher, was born free to an English sea captain and an African American mother on a ship sailing on the Atlantic Ocean. When Angus was two years old, his father died, and Angus and his mother were sold into slavery in Virginia, and later taken to Kentucky. He spent a majority of his early years in Virginia and learned how to read prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, an illegal pursuit for slaves. In 1864, now enslaved in Kentucky, at the age of sixteen Burleigh ran away from his master and enlisted in the Union Army at Frankfort, Kentucky. Upon enlisting Burleigh was trained at Camp Nelson in Kentucky, which was one of the largest areas for gathering African American soldiers during the Civil War. Burleigh became a sergeant with Company G 12th United States Colored Troops U ...
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Tina C. Jones
bishop, founder, and overseer of the National Convention of the Churches of God, Holiness, and civil rights leader, was born in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Mr. and Mrs. Senior and Lottie Burruss. The 1880 U.S. Census for Louisiana in East Baton Rouge listed his parents' household as follows (young King had not been born yet): Senior Burris (spelling of surname) 34, father; Lottie, 28, mother; William, 9, brother; Senior, 7, brother; Emma, 4, sister; and Benjamin, 1, brother. Living beside them were other close Burris relatives. According to King Hezekiah Burruss: And 25 Years of Progress, King H. Burruss was born three miles from Baton Rouge into a deeply religious family His father was a farmer and was able to afford to hire private teachers for his children as Negro children had no school to attend in that part of the state at that ...
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Susan J. Hubert
Jacobus Capitein was one of the first Africans to be educated in Europe, ordained in a Protestant denomination, and commissioned to return to his homeland as a missionary. Although little is known of his African heritage, Capitein was probably born in what is now central Ghana. Orphaned or otherwise separated from his parents, he was enslaved and obtained by Dutch traders when he was about eight years old. His enslavement ended in 1728, when his owner took him to the Netherlands to learn a trade. Capitein's tutors recognized his intellectual gifts, and with the understanding that he would return to Africa as a missionary, his theological studies were supported by Dutch patrons. In 1737 he received a scholarship to the University of Leiden, where he excelled as a student. Capitein completed his studies in March 1742 and was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in May. In July 1742 ...
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Leyla Keough
Jacobus Elisa Joannes Capitein was one of the few educated Africans in eighteenth-century Europe. He became a Protestant minister at a time when many Europeans doubted that Africans had souls and thus questioned whether or not they could be converted to Christianity. Capitein was born in West Africa, perhaps in Elmina on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), where he was sold into slavery at the age of eight. The man who bought him presented him to a Dutch captain and trader, Jacobus van Goch, at Elmina. Van Goch named him Jacobus Capitein and took him to the Netherlands in 1728.
Capitein and his owner settled in The Hague, where Capitein learned Dutch. Van Goch acquiesced when Capitein expressed interest in a theological education. Capitein learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and biblical Aramaic, and in 1735 he was baptized. In 1737 he won a scholarship to study theology at ...
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Grant Parker
Ghanaian slave, theologian, missionary, and first African Protestant minister, was born in present-day Ghana and sold into slavery during childhood. Two aspects of his identity account for his considerable fame (or notoriety): here was a black intellectual in eighteenth-century Europe and a former slave who argued in favor of slavery. His treatise addressing the question, “Is Slavery Compatible with Christian Freedom or Not?” concluded in the affirmative. He and his work were invoked on both sides of subsequent debates about slavery: some pointed to the central argument of the treatise, whereas for others the work, regardless of its stance, proved the intellectual capacity, and hence humanity, of black persons. Only recently has the work received detailed attention.
The chief evidence for Capitein s life is the preface to this treatise supplemented by letters and sermons held in various Dutch archives Having been orphaned by war or some other cause on ...
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Jason Philip Miller
mayor and U.S. Congressman, was born in tiny Waxahachie, Texas, into a family of preachers. He came of age in a public housing development near Wichita Falls, Texas, and attended the public schools there. For a time, he wished to pursue a life as a professional football player, but an injury prevented him from seeing that dream to fulfillment. Instead, he attended Texas A&M, from which he graduated in 1968. Falling back onto what was to some large degree the family business, Cleaver earned his Master of Divinity degree from St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri. There, at the behest of Ralph Abernathy he established a chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference He was assigned to St James Church and under his guidance the tiny inner city congregation fewer than thirty regular attendees when Cleaver took over soon blossomed into the one of ...
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Charles Rosenberg
a minister who helped consolidate the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church in the postbellum South, was born Jesse B. Colbert in Cedar Creek township, Lancaster County, South Carolina, the son of farm laborers Tillman Colbert and Mariah House Colbert. Neither of his parents could read, but they made sure their children attended school (1870 and 1880 Census, Kentucky Death Certificate). Colbert attended county schools until the age of eighteen and then entered Lancaster High School, originally called the Pettey High School after its founder and principal, Rev. (later Bishop) Charles Calvin Pettey, pastor of the Lancaster Courthouse AMEZ church.
After teaching school himself in South Carolina, Colbert entered Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, in January 1883, shortly after it was established by Dr. Joseph Charles Price, who served as president from 1882 to 1888. Bishop James Walker Hood recorded that Colbert ...
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Ness Creighton
Coptic pope (patriarch) of Alexandria, was the fifty-eighth patriarch of the See of Saint Mark (920/21–932/33). His twelve-year reign was long when compared to other patriarchs of his era. The History of the Patriarchs affords him only a brief treatment, despite the length of his reign, and secondary sources citing Abu al-Makarim’s History of Churches and Monasteries indicate he receives equally little commentary within this text as well.
Cosmas III came to power after Gabriel I (910–921), with no noted complications existing in the record surrounding the succession. It is not recorded from which monastery he came prior to being named patriarch. Little is said about Cosmas III’s person or character, and only two linked events are commented upon in his rule between the two previously mentioned sources.
While the century before had been marked with wars and tensions that had further divided the churches of Egypt and Abyssinia ...
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Robert Repino
football player, was born to Mabel and Samuel Cunningham in Santa Barbara, California. Mabel worked as a nurse, and Samuel was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Cunninghams lived in a house purchased by their oldest son, Sam Cunningham, who was a running back with the New England Patriots in the 1970s. Randall also had two other older brothers, Anthony and Bruce.
Randall Cunningham was a star quarterback at Santa Barbara High School, leading his team to a league title and to the state finals in his senior year. After graduating in 1981 Cunningham went to the University of Nevada Las Vegas where he became the starter as a sophomore From then on he set school records by throwing for over 2 500 yards in three straight seasons only John Elway and Doug Flutie had accomplished that feat at the college level by then while at ...
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Jeremy Rich
religious leader, was born in the town of Nkamba in the western Bas-Congo Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 22 March 1918. His father was the very famous African Christian prophet Simon Kimbangu, and his mother was Marie Muilu Kiawanga. He was the youngest of three brothers. When the Belgian colonial administration exiled Kimbangu in 1921 to Lumumbashi in southern Katanga Province, Diangienda stayed with his mother, although there are differing accounts of his youth. According to Kimbanguists, Diangienda worked with his mother and tried to help with supporting the family's farm until 1934. Government records indicate he was placed with the Catholic mission of Boma in 1921. According to members of the Kimbanguist church in later years, Kimbagu had conferred on his young son the leadership of the spiritual movement, although he grew up far away from his father. Beginning in 1934 ...
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James J. O'Donnell
Carthaginian churchman, was a man (or perhaps two men) whose life and work were so contested and his successors so vanquished that the man and his life have disappeared behind an image of schism and intransigence. But this could not have happened if the man himself were not a figure of power, persuasion, and authority among a large and determined group of followers.
Donatus came to fame in the aftermath of persecution. The Roman government of c. 305 made its last (and only really determined) attempt to persecute and suppress Christianity, failing miserably. In Roman Africa, however, the events of the persecution left deep rifts among Christians. Who had behaved badly among the clergy in kowtowing to Roman power? Who had handed over the sacred books to be burned? And if such traitors sought after persecution to recover church office, what was to be done?
The bishop of Carthage at ...
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Peter Limb
South African political leader, educationalist, editor, and writer, was born on the Inanda mission of the American Board Mission. Here he was first schooled, moving to Amanzimtoti (Adams College), and then Oberlin College, Ohio (1887 to 1891). His pamphlet A Talk upon My Native Land (1891) evokes an early interest in industrial education and tension between Christian moralizing and African identity. Family roots lay in the Qadi clan chieftaincy, with his grandmother Dalida and father, James, early kholwa (converts). Dube returned home to teach at Amanzimtoti where he met his first wife, Nokutela Mdima, and then, from 1894 to 1896, at Incwadi near Pietermaritzburg. He revisited the United States to be ordained in 1899 and gather financial resources to establish a school.
Dube s religion and education in the United States where he undertook manual and printing work to pay for his studies molded his commitment ...
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John Langalibalele Dube was born near Inanda, Natal (in what is now KwaZulu-Natal province), in eastern South Africa. Dube studied at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, and was ordained a minister before returning to Natal. In 1903 he was one of the founders and the editor of the first Zulu newspaper, Ilanga lase Natal (Sun of Natal). In 1909 he founded the Ohlange Institute for Boys and then a school for girls, both near Durban. The same year Dube helped convene a South African Native Convention at Bloemfontein to oppose the “European descent” clause in the draft constitution for the Union (now Republic) of South Africa, which would bar men of color from Parliament.
On January 8 1912, Dube was elected the first president general of the South African Native National Congress (which later became the African National Congress). He led the opposition to the 1913 ...
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De Witt S. Dykes
minister and registered architect, was born in Gadsden, Alabama, the second male and the fifth of six children born to Mary Anna Wade, a homemaker, and the Reverend Henry Sanford Roland Dykes, a lay minister in the Methodist Church (later the United Methodist Church), a brick mason, and construction contractor.
In the early 1900s the family moved to Newport, Tennessee, which was a racially segregated small town with a semirural atmosphere. Henry Dykes served as a circuit riding minister, conducting services on alternate Sundays at Methodist churches in three communities, including one at Newport, but earned enough to support his family as the head of a construction firm on weekdays until his death in 1945 Henry Dykes taught brick masonry and construction skills to not only his sons but also others By age fourteen Dykes had become a master mason by age seventeen he was a ...
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Marika Sherwood
Nigerian-born preacher and activist for racial equality in Liverpool, England, was born George Daniel in Calabar, Nigeria. The date of his birth is unknown. In Calabar, he worked as an errand boy for a Free Church of Scotland missionary and then for the famous Scottish missionary, Mary Slessor, in Itu. He learned to read and decided he also wanted to be a missionary and to visit the “holy land of England where my holy mother came from.” At an unknown date he married a woman named Lily; they had a son named George. Lily died in 1927.
Liverpool was the homeport of most of the British vessels involved in the trade in enslaved Africans and also in the slave grown sugar and cotton trades Many of these ships had some African crew as did some Royal Navy vessels those who were discharged settled in Liverpool The city was also ...
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Kathleen Sheldon
founder and leader of a Nigeria-based Christian sect known as the Cherubim and Seraphim Society, was born Abiodun Akinsowon in Porto Novo, Benin. She was the daughter of a Saro family with kin and business connections along the West African coast. Her father, Rev. B. A. Akinsowon, was pastor of a church in Porto Novo, where he also had commercial activities. Baptized into the Anglican Church in Lagos, Abiodun moved between Porto Novo, Ibadan, and Lagos and attended elementary school in Lagos until 1920. Though she had some training as a seamstress, she stayed with an aunt who was a market woman in Lagos and joined her as a trader.
Generally referred to as Abiodun, in 1925 she watched a Catholic religious procession in Lagos and fell into a trance that lasted for seven days She remained in a coma until Moses Orimolade Tunolase arrived he already had a ...
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Richard Saunders
lawyer and minister, was born James Frank Estes to Melvoid Estes and Bertha Lee Walker Estes in Jackson, Tennessee. Graduated from Lane College in 1942, Estes captained the football team and married a friend and classmate, Frances D. Berry. Enlisting in the Army the same year, he served on active duty in Europe and was one of the few African Americans accepted to Officer Candidate School. Estes was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1943 for the racially segregated 1317th Engineers General Service Regiment. The 1317th engaged in the Normandy landings on D-Day, as well as the Allied Forces Rhineland Campaign and battle for Central Europe. At his discharge in 1945 Estes remained in the reserves and enrolled at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which conferred on him an LL.B. degree in 1948 Returning to Tennessee Estes opened a law office on Beale Street the economic center ...
