Civil Rights Leader and Short-Term Missionary to India Lawson was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1928, one of nine children of a U.S. Methodist pastor and a Jamaican mother. He took much of his attitude toward others from his mother, who did not believe in violence. Lawson grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he became...
Advocate for Peace and Justice Deats grew up in a Methodist family in Texas and attended McMurry College in Abilene, Texas, in the early 1950s. There he became active in the Methodist Student Movement which was beginning to voice concerns about civil rights and racial justice, holding its first interracial meeting at McMurry. A visit...
Pioneering Korean Woman Educator Dr. Kim Hwal-lan, or Helen Kim—her English name— was a pioneer in many areas: the first Korean woman to receive a doctoral degree; the first Korean woman to become a university president; and the founder of Korea’s first English-language newspaper. Helen Kim entered Ewha Methodist School in Seoul, Korea, in 1907,...
Mission Bishop Promoted Indigenous Leaders Ralph E. Dodge was an outspoken advocate for racial justice in Africa and the last white bishop of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) during that country’s colonial era. Dodge’s 1956 election as a Methodist bishop for central and southern Africa marked the only time that an American Methodist...
Educator and theologian Born into slavery in New Orleans, Bowen became a free man when his father purchased his family’s freedom in 1858. After the Civil War, in which his father served with the Union Army, Bowen attended Union Normal School in New Orleans. In 1878 he graduated with the first graduating class of New...
