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Article

Costen, Melva Wilson  

David B. McCarthy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

musician, educator, and prominent Presbyterian, was born Melva Ruby Wilson in Due West, South Carolina, one of five children of Azzie Lee Ellis Wilson and John Theodore Wilson Sr., both of whom were college graduates and teachers. Because the local black public schools were unaccredited, her parents sent her to a black boarding school, Harbison Junior College in Irmo, South Carolina, at the age of fourteen. Two years later, at the age of sixteen, she entered Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. There she met fellow student James Hutten Costen. She graduated with a BA in Education in 1952 and married Jim Costen the day before he graduated in 1953. They eventually had two sons and one daughter, James Jr., Craig, and Cheryl.

Costen taught elementary school in the Mecklenburg County school system from 1952 to 1955 the year her husband ...

Article

Dykes, Eva Beatrice  

R. Baxter Miller

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

scholar and educator, was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of James Stanley Dykes and Martha Ann Howard. Eva graduated from M Street High (later Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in 1910. As valedictorian of her class, she won a $10 scholarship from Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority to attend Howard University, where in 1914 she graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English. After a year of teaching Latin and English at the now defunct Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee, and for another year elsewhere, she was urged by James Howard, a physician and uncle on her mother's side, to enter Radcliffe College in 1916. Subsequently, she earned a second BA in English, magna cum laude, in 1917. Elected Phi Beta Kappa, she received an MA in English in 1918 and a PhD in English philology in 1921 Her dissertation was titled ...

Article

Dyson, Michael Eric  

Dorsia Smith Silva

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer, educator, and preacher, was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Addie Mae Leonard, a teacher's aide. In 1990 Dyson was adopted by the auto worker Everett Dyson when Leonard married him. As a child, Dyson read avidly and enjoyed the Harvard Classics. His intellectual vigor earned him a scholarship to the prestigious Cranbrook Kingswood School in 1972. However, Dyson behaved poorly and was expelled in 1974. He then attended Northwestern High School and graduated in 1976.

In 1977, Dyson married his girlfriend, Terrie Dyson, who gave birth to Michael Eric Dyson II a year later. Due to the pressures of being a young couple, Dyson and his wife divorced in 1979. To help focus his life, Dyson became a licensed Baptist preacher in 1979 and ordained minister in 1981 with his pastor Frederick G. Sampson II s assistance He ...

Article

Ellison, John Malcus, Sr.  

Raymond Pierre Hylton

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

minister, author, and educator, was born near Burgess in Northumberland County, Virginia, to Robert, a fisherman, and Maggie Ellison, a homemaker. Coming from an impoverished background, he received a rudimentary education and had to work at age fourteen as a farm laborer earning seven dollars per month. His first stroke of good fortune occurred in 1906 when he entered the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (later Virginia State College and still later Virginia State University) in Ettrick, Virginia. Getting into Virginia Union University in Richmond was not so easy; there was initial skepticism on the part of its president, Dr. George Rice Hovey, who saw no academic promise in the young man. In 1909 Hovey reluctantly admitted Ellison to the Wayland Academy (as Virginia Union's high school program was then called), and he then went on to the collegiate undergraduate program, graduating in 1917 ...

Article

Gilbert, John Wesley  

Michele Valerie Ronnick

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

professor of ancient Greek, philologist, ordained Methodist minister in the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, and missionary to the Congo, was born in Hephzibah, Georgia, not far from Augusta, to Gabriel and Sarah Gilbert. His parents were field hands, and scholars are not certain whether John was born free or enslaved. Some sources give his birth date as 6 July 1864. As a child he was eager to learn, but he had to mix long hours of farm work with brief periods of school. At last overwhelmed by poverty he was forced to withdraw from the Baptist Seminary in Augusta. After a three-year hiatus from schooling he resumed his work when Dr. George Williams Walker, a Methodist pastor who had come to Augusta to teach in 1884, and Warren A. Candler pastor of Augusta s St John Church offered him assistance With the help ...

Article

Moore, Louis (or Lewis) Baxter  

Mathias Hanses

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

classicist, Congregationalist preacher, and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, was born in Huntsville, Alabama, the youngest child of Henry Moore and his second wife Rebecca (née Beasley). Louis would in his early years have witnessed the black community's enthusiasm toward such new freedoms as political participation. At the same time, he suffered the hardships besetting his family of twenty-eight in the transforming Deep South. Before Louis turned ten years old, his home state's race relations started slipping toward their “nadir.” Alabama endured Ku Klux Klan terrorism and voter intimidation; a “Redeemer” government rose to power in 1874 as black workers and sharecroppers fell into economic dependency on their former owners; and in 1876 federal Reconstruction efforts were sacrificed to political deal making which further impeded blacks access to polls and lecterns Still increasing numbers of African Americans came to ...

Article

Wansharisi, Ahmad al-  

David S. Powers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Maliki scholar, jurist, and mufti, was born in Jabal Wansharis (Ouarsenis), a mountain massif in the Central Algerian Tell, 31 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Algiers. When Ahmad was five years old, his father moved the family to Tlemcen, where he studied the Qurʾan, Arabic language, and Maliki law and jurisprudence with distinguished scholars.

In 1469 at the age of forty al Wansharisi incurred the wrath of the Zayyanid sultan Muhammad IV who ordered that his house be ransacked and plundered Leaving everything behind al Wansharisi fled to Fez where he was welcomed by the scholarly community receiving food and shelter from the jurist Muhammad al Sughayyir He moved into a house near the Muʿallaq mosque in the Sharratin quarter of Fez al Qarawiyyin and was appointed professor of Maliki law at the Madrasa Misbahiyya His knowledge of the law was proverbial He who has not studied with al ...

Article

Washington, James Melvin  

Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

scholar, preacher, and teacher, was born at the Colored General Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Annie Beatrice Moore Washington and James W. Washington. Raised with six siblings (Louise Hill, Helen Brown, Howard Moore, Willie Moore, Charles Washington, and Ray Washington) in the Austin Homes Project and at Mount Olive Baptist Church, Washington felt the call of God to preach in 1961 while attending a meeting of the National Baptist Young People's Union (Conversations, xxvii). In 1971 Washington married Patricia Anne Alexander, with whom he had a daughter, Ayanna Nicole Washington.

As a youngster from a working class family in a segregated city Washington s only source of books was a small library for colored After reading in the newspaper that Knoxville libraries were no longer segregated he visited the magisterial Lawson McGhee Library with its ...

Article

Washington, James Melvin  

Richard Newman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

James M. Washington was born April 24, 1948, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Annie and James W. Washington. He was ordained in 1967 by his home church, Mount Olive Baptist, for the pastorate of the Riverview Missionary Baptist Church. He earned degrees from the University of Tennessee, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale University, where he received a doctorate in 1979.

Washington taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, New York from 1975 until his death, being promoted to full professor in 1986. He was the author of Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (1986), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (1986), and Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans (1994 He held dual membership at Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn and the Riverside Church in ...