black religious leaders

  Lemuel Haynes is credited as the first credentialed Black clergyman in the United States, and is considered the first minister to lead a white congregation. Haynes was born on July 18, 1753 in Hartford, Conn. to a Black father and white mother. Abandoned at five months of age, Haynes was raised by an indentured […]

Theologian, minister, author, and activist Howard Thurman was best known as an influence and early mentor of some of the civil right movement’s most notable figures. The Daytona Beach, Fla. Native was born November 18, 1899. The Morehouse man graduated as class valedictorian in 1923, and two years later became an ordained Baptist minister in […]

The late Dr. James H. Cone is widely considered the founder of Black Liberation Theology, which, in his words, Cone saw as “mainly a theology that sees God as concerned with the poor and the weak.” The Arkansas native was born August 5, 1938. James Hal Cone was raised in the racially segregated town of […]