Dennis C. Dickerson

Black Ecumenicism: Efforts to Establish a United Methodist Episcopal Church, 1918–1932

Between 1918 and 1932 representatives from three black denominations— African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal—devised plans to merge into one religious body which they hoped to name the United Methodist Episcopal church. During this period the clergy and laity of these three black denominations debated the advantages and shortcomings of the Birmingham Plan of 1918 and the Pittsburgh proposals of 1927 which sought to create a single black Methodist organization. Opponents of the Birmingham and Pittsburgh agreements feared that organic union would work against their particular denominational interests and destroy their historical identity. Advocates of merger stressed the common religious and racial background of the three churches and argued that black Methodist unity would benefit the nations black population. By 1932, however, the deep denominational divisions among black Methodists slowed the movement toward merger and undermined efforts to end the religious rivalry among these three important black institutions.

William Stuart Nelson and the Interfaith Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

William Stuart Nelson (1895–1977), dean of the School of Religion and later vice president of Howard University, became a preeminent scholar of Gandhian satyagraha. He interacted with the Indian leader during a sabbatical on the Asian subcontinent in 1946–1947. Since the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sponsored him, he studied Quaker pacifism and Gandhian nonviolence as strategic possibilities for deployment in the nascent American civil rights movement. Moreover, these explorations persuaded him that the principles of nonviolence and peace were embedded in the sacred texts of the world’s great religions.