Honors for Negroes

For Christians, black & white, who feel that the churches have been more than slow in offering Christian fellowship to Negroes, there was good news last week:

P: For the first time in its 40-year history, Cleveland's Ministerial Association (representing virtually all Protestant denominations) chose a Negro president. He was Dr. Wade H. McKinney, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church. Last year Dr. McKinney investigated Detroit's race riots for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, later wrote a report which Cleveland's Mayor Frank J. Lausche used in organizing that city's Committee on Democratic Practices.

P: In St. Louis the city's 18 Presbyterian churches chose for their local moderator (highest office) the Rev. Alexander Hamilton Johnson, Alabama-born Negro pastor of small, spic & span McPheeters Presbyterian Church. Said Mr. Johnson: "I would rather not have had it. I did not seek it. I would rather seek humility as a man of God."

P: At Newton Center, Mass., famed old Andover-Newton Theological Seminary called the Rev. George Dennis Kelsey to teach Christian Ethics at its summer school. Born 34 years ago in Columbus, Ga. (his parents both teach in Griffin, Ga.'s public schools), Mr. Kelsey hung up one of Andover-Newton's highest student scholastic records a decade ago, is now finishing a year's Rosenwald Fellowship at Yale's Divinity School. In the fall he will go back to teaching philosophy and religion at Atlanta's Morehouse College.

P: In Washington the U.S. Navy Chaplains Office announced that it will shortly select two Negro clergymen (from applications coming in daily) to be the Navy's first Negro chaplains. Like other Navy chaplains, their age will determine their commissions: if under 38 they will be lieutenants, junior grade; if over 38, full lieutenants. In World War I the U.S. Army had 57 Negro chaplains: today, there are over 300 in service.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.