Bliss, William Dwight Porter (20 August 1856–08 October 1926), clergyman and reformer, was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the son of Edwin Elisha Bliss and Isabella Holmes Porter, Congregationalist missionaries from New England. A graduate of Amherst College (1878) and the Hartford Theological Seminary (1882), he served Congregational churches in Denver, Colorado, and South Natick, Massachusetts, from 1882 until 1885. In 1884 he married Mary Pangalo of Constantinople; they had two children....
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Bliss, William Dwight Porter (1856-1926), clergyman and reformer
Jacob H. Dorn
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Crummell, Alexander (1819-1898), clergyman, activist, and Pan-Africanist
Wilson J. Moses
Crummell, Alexander (03 March 1819–10 September 1898), clergyman, activist, and Pan-Africanist, was born in New York City, the son of Charity Hicks, a freeborn woman of Long Island, New York, and Boston Crummell, an African of the Temne people, probably from the region that is now Sierra Leone. Boston Crummell had been captured and brought to the United States as a youth. The circumstances of his emancipation are not clear, but it is said that he simply refused to serve his New York owners any longer after reaching adulthood. Boston Crummell established a small oyster house in the African Quarter of New York. Alexander Crummell received his basic education at the African Free School in Manhattan. In 1835 he traveled to Canaan, New Hampshire, along with his friends Thomas Sidney and ...
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Gardiner, Robert Hallowell, III (1855-1924), lawyer, social gospeler, and Episcopal ecumenical leader
John F. Woolverton
Gardiner, Robert Hallowell, III (09 September 1855–15 June 1924), lawyer, social gospeler, and Episcopal ecumenical leader, was born in Fort Tejon, California, the son of Major John William Tudor Gardiner and Anna Elizabeth West Hays. While Gardiner was a child, the family moved to Boston where his father, who suffered from crippling arthritis, was a recruiting officer for the Union armies. Sometime after 1865 the family moved to Montreal, Canada, where Gardiner attended high school. He took an extra year at the Roxbury Latin School from 1871 to 1872 and then distinguished himself at Harvard College. He was appointed Latin orator at his graduation in 1876. Throughout his life, Gardiner maintained a keen interest in languages and spoke French, modern Greek, Italian, German, and ecclesiastical Latin. In 1877 he spent a year as an assistant teacher at Roxbury Latin, where he taught French....
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Holly, James Theodore (1829-1911), black emigrationist, missionary, and bishop
David M. Dean
Holly, James Theodore (30 October 1829–13 March 1911), black emigrationist, missionary, and bishop, was born free in Washington, D.C., the son of James Overton Holly, a bootmaker, and Jane (maiden name unknown). At fourteen he and his family moved to Brooklyn, where he worked with his father. By 1848, while clerking for ...
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Holly, James Theodore (1829-1911)
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James T. Holly. Currier & Ives lithograph, 1875. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-93450 ).
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Murphy, Edgar Gardner (1869-1913), Episcopal clergyman and social reformer
Ralph E. Luker
Murphy, Edgar Gardner (31 August 1869–23 June 1913), Episcopal clergyman and social reformer, was born near Fort Smith, Arkansas, the son of Samuel W. Murphy and Janie Gardner. When her husband, whose occupation is unknown, abandoned the family in 1874, Janie Gardner Murphy moved her children to San Antonio, Texas, where she earned a modest living by running a boardinghouse. Befriended by the local Episcopal priest, Walter Richardson, young Murphy chose to prepare for the ministry by entering the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1885. There he was deeply influenced by the philosophical theology of ...
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Murray, Pauli (1910-1985), lawyer, writer, and minister
Peter Wallenstein
Murray, Pauli (20 November 1910–01 July 1985), lawyer, writer, and minister, was born Anna Pauline Murray in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of William Henry Murray, a public school teacher, and Agnes Fitzgerald, a nurse. Triracial, she had African, European, and Native American ancestry. Her parents both died when she was a child (her mother had a cerebral hemorrhage in March 1914; her father was murdered in a state hospital in June 1923), and she grew up from age three in North Carolina with her maternal grandparents and her mother’s oldest sister, Pauline Fitzgerald Dame, a public school teacher who adopted her....
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Murray, Pauli (1910-1985)
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Pauli Murray Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-109644).
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Page, Ann Randolph Meade (1781-1838), Episcopal slavery reformer
Arthur Dicken Thomas
Page, Ann Randolph Meade (03 December 1781–28 March 1838), Episcopal slavery reformer, was born at “Chatham,” the family home in Stafford County, Virginia, the daughter of Col. Richard Kidder Meade, aide-de-camp of General George Washington, and Mary Fitzhugh Grymes. She grew up on “Lucky Hit,” her parents’ plantation in Frederick (now Clarke) County, Virginia. She was raised in an educated gentry family of English descent. As an evangelical, her mother taught her children not only reading and writing but also what evangelicals cherished—the importance of self-denial, simple living and service to slaves in contrast to what the gentry sought—a fashionable living reminiscent of the English nobility with servants to indulge their needs....
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Rainsford, William Stephen (1850-1933), clergyman and social reformer
Gardiner H. Shattuck
Rainsford, William Stephen (30 October 1850–17 December 1933), clergyman and social reformer, was born near Dublin, Ireland, the son of Marcus Rainsford, an Anglican priest, and Louisa Anne Dickson. Rainsford moved to England in 1865 when his father took charge of a parish in London; he received his bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University, where he studied between 1870 and 1873. Ordained a deacon of the Church of England in December 1873 and a priest in 1874, he started his ministry as a curate at St. Giles’s parish in Norwich. Dissatisfied with English church life, however, he left Norwich in 1876 and spent the next two years working as a traveling preacher in Canada and the United States. Following a mission he led at St. James’ Cathedral in Toronto, Rainsford became assistant rector of that parish in 1878. In April of that year he married Emily Alma Green, a widow, with whom he had three children. He later married Harriette Rogers in 1926, three years after Emily died....
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Stuck, Hudson (1863-1920), Episcopal clergyman, social reformer, and author
David M. Dean
Stuck, Hudson (11 November 1863–11 October 1920), Episcopal clergyman, social reformer, and author, was born in Paddington, England (a suburb of London), the son of James Stuck, a lumberyard foreman, and Jane Hudson. Upon completion of secondary education at King’s College, London, and service as secretary to the political maverick and businessman William Hall in Bristol, Stuck emigrated to the United States in 1885....
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Ward, Henry Dana (1797-1884), reformer and clergyman
William H. Brackney
Ward, Henry Dana (13 January 1797–29 February 1884), reformer and clergyman, was born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the son of Thomas Walter Ward, a sheriff, and Elizabeth Denny. Ward studied history and classics at Harvard, where he earned a B.A. in 1816; in 1819 he earned an M.A. from Harvard. He married Abigail Porter Jones of Lebanon Springs, New York, in 1821. They had no children....
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Whipple, Henry Benjamin (1822-1901), Episcopal bishop and champion of Indian rights
Henry Warner Bowden
Whipple, Henry Benjamin (15 February 1822–16 September 1901), Episcopal bishop and champion of Indian rights, was born in Adams, New York, the son of John Hall Whipple, a merchant, and Elizabeth Wager. Raised in a Presbyterian home, he studied in private schools supported by that denomination until he went to Oberlin College in 1838. Forced by poor health to leave the following year, Whipple spent the first decade of his adult life as an inspector of township schools and a militiaman and served for a year as secretary of the New York Democratic party (1847). He was also continuously associated with his father’s mercantile activities. In 1842 he married Cornelia Wright; over the years they had six children. Whipple’s wife belonged to the Episcopal church, as did his grandparents. This combination of influences helped him decide to become Episcopalian too and to seek the priesthood. Accordingly, he studied theology under William D. Wilson of Albany, New York, from 1847 to 1850. After ordination as deacon in 1849 and as priest in 1850 he was ready for an ecclesiastical vocation....
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Williams, Peter, Jr. (1780?–17 October 1840), clergyman and abolitionist
Graham Hodges
Williams, Peter, Jr. (1780?–17 October 1840), clergyman and abolitionist, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of Peter Williams, a slave, and Mary Durham, a black indentured servant from St. Kitts. A patriot soldier during the American Revolution, his father was sexton and undertaker for John Street Methodist Church in New York City. In an unusual arrangement, the church in 1783 purchased him from his departing Loyalist master and allowed him to purchase himself over time, completing his freedom in 1796. A founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church and a tobacconist and funeral home owner, he was a leader of the small black middle class in New York City....
