Maya Angelou

For the last forty years of her life, writer/activist Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was a member of Glide Memorial Church, a United Methodist congregation in San Francisco, and supported its many outreach programs. As a child she attended the CME church in Stamps, Arkansas, with her grandmother, as she tell in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969.

Dr. Angelou's seventh autobiographical book, Mom & Me & Mon, came out in 2013, and she also wrote numerous volume of poetry and essays as well as plays and screenplays. Her first professional work was as a dancer, including being half of the dance team "Al and Rita" alongside Alvin Ailey. During the Civil Rights Movement she raised funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was appointed its northern coordinator by Dr. King, who was assassinated on her fortieth birthday. Also, she met Malcolm X while in Ghana, and worked with him to found the Organization of African-American Unity.

Read about her memorial service at Glade here http://www.beyondchron.org/dr-maya-angelous-life-celebrate…/

James Varick

James Varick (1750 - 1827) became a member of New York City's John Street Methodist Episcopal Church soon after it was founded in 1766 as the first Methodist congregation in North America. The African Americans in the congregation were required to have worship and prayer services apart from the white members, and in 1799 they began meeting at a separate location known as Zion Chapel. They remained affiliated with the MEC and visiting white elders preached and served communion.

Church leaders met at Varick's home in 1820 to pursue ordination of African American clergy, and resolved that they would neither join with the newly formed AME denomination nor return to white control. The congregation named Varick and Abraham Thompson elders, and within two years they, along with Leven Smith, were ordained by the MEC. Varick was then named the first Superintendent of the AMEZ Church (the title "Bishop" wasn't used until later".)

The women in mission of the AMEZ go by the acronym "WHOMS": Women's Home and Overseas Mission Society. Read more about them here http://whoms.org/

Dorothy Height

Dorothy Height (1912-2010) is considered the matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement and was an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington where she and Coretta Scott King were the only women on the platform, although she was not asked to speak at the event.

While in college at NYU she joined Harlem's St.Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church and was a member for over 70 years, briefly serving as Director of Christian Education. Mentored by Mary McLeod Bethune, Ms. Height was a full-time national staff member of the YWCA, overseeing its desegregation in 1944 and its civil rights involvement in the 1960s and 1970s. She was also National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (1946-1957) and President of the National Council of Negro Women (1957-1997).

See her New York Times obituary herehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/us/21height.html and a remembrance from the UMC General Board of Church and Society herehttp://www.kintera.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx…

James Farmer, Jr.

James Farmer, Jr. (1920-1999) entered Wiley College in Marshall, Texas on a four-year scholarship at age 14 and was a member of the national championship debate team portrayed on film in The Great Debaters. He earned a divinity degree at Howard University under Howard Thurman in 1941 and would have gone on to be a Methodist minister but objected to the segregation of the church after the 1939 merger between the northern and southern branches.

Farmer used his experience with the international pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. Dedicated to eliminating racism through non-violent action, the interracial group integrated schools and public facilities in Chicago and led a forerunner of the later Freedom Ride with the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947.

As Executive Director of CORE, Farmer planned and led the Freedom Ride which left Washington DC on May 4, 1961 with integrated groups of passengers riding on Greyhound buses to New Orleans.A bus was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, and participants were beaten and jailed along they way. Farmer himself spent 59 days in Mississippi's Parchman Prison.

CORE was also instrumental in voter registration drives the following years, working as a member of COFO (Congress of Federated Organizations) along with NAACP and SNCC. Farmer resigned in 1966 over the growing militancy of the organization and of the civil rights movement as a whole. He briefly served as Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before going on to teach at Lincoln University, NYU, and the University of Mary Washington.

Read more about James Farmer at the Texas State Historical Association websitehttps://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ffa19

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman (c. 1822 - 1913) listened to the Bible stories her mother told her as a child and later found guidance in the Old Testament stories of deliverance. Abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul."

She escaped slavery herself in 1849 after the death of her owner when it was likely she and others would be sold to settle the estate. She arrived in Philadelphia after traveling at night along the Choptank River from Dorchester County on the eastern shore of Maryland. Over the next twelve years she returned south 19 times to free at least 70 enslaved people, including many family members. During the Civil War she worked as a cook and nurse for the Union Army as well as a scout and spy behind enemy lines, and led the raid on the Combahee Ferry.

After the war she returned to her home in Auburn, New York, where she worked for women's suffrage and was active in the AME Zion church, donating land to the church for the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, opened in 1908.

A point of interest on Maryland's self-guided tour of her route include the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park and the present-day New Revived United Methodist Church in Taylors Island.http://www.harriettubmanbyway.org/

Read more about Harriet Tubman herehttp://www.harriettubman.com/callhermoses.html

Leontine Kelly

Rev. Leontine Kelly, the first African American woman to serve as a bishop in a mainline denomination, was described in these words by a colleague: "She called us into futures we never anticipated for ourselves, would not let us capitulate to our insecurities and druthers, and coaxed us into new lives that gave new leadership to The United Methodist Church."

Bishop Kelly was a high school history teacher when her husband, Rev. Dr. James David Kelly, urged her to become a Certified Lay Speaker to assist in his ministry. After his death, the congregation at the Galilee Church in Richmond, VA requested that she stay on at their pastor and she was ordained in 1977. She also served on the district level and with the UM Board of Discipleship and the General Board of Global Ministries before she was consecrated as a Bishop in 1984.

Bishop Kelly's father was also a Methodist pastor and a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives. Her mother was a founder of the Cincinnati Urban League, and her first husband, Gloster Current, was an executive with the NAACP for over 50 years as well as being a pastor and jazz musician.

Read Bishop Kelly's obituary here http://www.umc.org/news-an…/bishop-leontine-kelly-dies-at-92

Mary McLeod Bethune

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls in 1904 with $1.50 and desks made from packing crates for the six students in its first year. She and the students sold fried fish and sweet potato pies to raise money, and she soon became adept at fundraising among tourists and businessmen in the area, including James Gamble of Proctor & Gamble and John D. Rockefeller.

The school affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1926 and merged with the all-male Cookman Institute to become what is now Bethune-Cookman University. Mrs. Bethune stayed on as president until 1944, while also serving as a consultant on racial matters to the White House beginning with Calvin Coolidge. She became especially close to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was part of FDR's unofficial "black cabinet".

Formerly Presbyterian, Mrs. Bethune joined the MEC when the college became affiliated. She was a delegate to General Conference from 1928 through 1952, served on the General Board on Higher Education, and was outspoken against the creation of the Central Jurisdiction in the 1939 church merger.

UMC Discipleship Ministries has an excellent article using her example in its stewardship series "Exploring Stewardship with the Saints: Mary McLeod Bethune—The Way of Authority" based on James 2:1-8. http://www.umcdiscipleship.org/…/exploring-stewardship-with…

Fanny Jackson Coppin

Fanny Jackson Coppin (1837-1913) was the second African American woman in the United States to earn a BA degree when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1865 after having taken the "gentlemen's course" which included Latin, Greek, and "as much mathematics as one could shoulder". She began teaching at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (now Cheyney State University) and was soon promoted to principal and then superintendent, the first African American woman in the country to fill such positions. She was also active in the AME church, serving as president of the Women's Home and Foreign Mission Society.

In 1881 she married Rev. Levi Jenkins Coppin, pastor of Bethel AME in Baltimore, who later was made a bishop. The couple spent ten years as missionaries in South Africa where they established mission houses in Cape Town and smaller villages.

Read more about her here http://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/coppin.html

Hiram Rhodes Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels was sworn in as the first African American U.S. Senator on February 25, 1870. He had been in politics only two years, first serving as a Natchez alderman and then as the Adams County representative to the Mississippi State Senate. The State Senate elected him to the U.S. Senate on the strength of his oratory in the prayer he gave at its opening session. (U.S. Senators were not elected by popular vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1913.)

Two months before the end of his term, he resigned his seat to become president what is now Alcorn State University. He also resumed his career as a minister, which he had begun on 1857 by pastoring African Methodist Episcopal churches throughout the Midwest and serving as a chaplain during the Civil War. During this time he switched from the AME church to the MEC. He later left Alcorn State to teach at MEC-affiliated Rust College, to edit the Christian Advocate denominational newspaper, and to serve as Presiding Elder of the Upper Mississippi District. He died while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi.

Read more here http://history.house.gov/…/R/REVELS,-Hiram-Rhodes-(R000166)/

Joycelyn Elders

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who became the first African American Surgeon General of the United States in 1994, had no plans to continue her education after high school but as valedictorian she received an automatic scholarship to Philander Smith College from the Women's Society of Christian Service, a forerunner of United Methodist Women.

Her seven younger brothers and sisters gleaned cotton on a Sunday afternoon to pay her bus fare to in Little Rock. She majored in biology with the goal of becoming a lab technician, and was inspired by meeting Dr. Edith Irby Jones who at the time was the first African American woman attending the University of Arkansas Medical School.

Learn more about Dr. Elders in this New York Times interview from January 1994http://www.nytimes.com/…/…/30/magazine/joycelyn-elders.html…

Linda Brown

Pictured below here are Linda Brown (left) and her younger sister, Cheryl, on their way to their segregated elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Their father, Oliver Brown, was the named plaintiff in Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision which led to desegregation of public schools in the United States. Rev. Brown was a welder and associate pastor of St. Mark's AME in Topeka, and died in 1961 when Linda was 18.

Read more about Linda and Cheryl here http://brownvboard.org/node/157 

Victoria Gray Adams

Victoria Gray Adams (1926 - 2006) led voter education classes for the black population of Hattiesburg, Mississippi in the early sixties and was a field secretary for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). She was a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Demoratic Patrry, and along with Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine led the 70-member contingent that attempted to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. They were removed from the floor and offered two seats as a compromise, to which Hamer replied, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Mrs. Adams was also one of the chief organizers of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), an umbrella group that enabled civil rights groups working in the south at that time to share resources and talents. At her urging, many of the planning meetings for the different groups took place at the Methodist Church in Palmer's Crossing (the African American section of Hattiesburg), and the church was opened to volunteers from around the country.

She later taught at the Royal Thai Army Languages Academy in Bangkok, Thailand and at Virginia State University where she was Director of Campus Ministry for 30 years. Her son, Rev. Dr. Cecil Conteen Gray, is a member of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the UMC.

There are more pictures of Mrs.Adams and other participants in the Civil Rights Movement in and around Hattiesburg herehttp://www.crmvet.org/images/prandall.htm