Edward Gonzalez Carroll

Edward Gonzalez Caroll was born in 1910 in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1930, he received his bachelor's degree from Morgan State University. Soon after, he entered the Yale Divinity School and graduated with a bachelor's of divinity in 1933. He married Phenola Valentine, and had two children, Edward G. Carroll, Jr. and Nansi Ethelene Carroll.

He was ordained an elder in the United Methodist Episcopal Church and went on to receive a master’s of divinity from Union Theological Seminary in 1941. During WWII, he served as an army chaplain. After the war, he served as Associate Secretary of the National Student YMCA. From 1950 to the mid-1960s, he served as a pastor for a series of churches in New York City and Baltimore and was an advocate for the neighborhoods in which the churches were located. In 1966, he was appointed superintendent of the Washington District of the Washington Conference for the Methodist Church. In 1969, he returned to ministry as a pastor of the Marvin Memorial Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. In 1972, he was elected as a bishop of the United Methodist Church for the Boston area and he served in this role until his retirement in 1980. He was a trustee of Boston University and a visiting professor and “Bishop-in-Residence” at its School of Theology.

In the 1990s, he served as interim director of Black Methodists for Church Renewal, a Black caucus within the United Methodist Church. Carroll also returned to his alma mater, Morgan State University. He helped establish the Morgan State University Christian Center and served as its interim director, and was also a chaplain and professor of religion. Carroll was involved with the NAACP, the Disciplined Order of Christ, and the Urban League. He died in Gainesville, Florida in 2000, at age 89.