George Edwin Covington

Born in 1904 in Loachapoka, Alabama, George Edwin Covington studied at Fisk University and graduated from Talladega College before earning his bachelor's of divinity from Yale. He studied for one year at the Princeton Seminary, and a newspaper account in 1942 noted that he was the only Black student at the seminary at that time. Covington then earned an MA from the Hartford School of Religious Education and another master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University (nearly completing the requirements for a PhD).

After completing officers’ training at Howard University, Covington served as a chaplain in the US Army from 1943 to 1946, attaining the rank of captain. Covington’s first ministerial position was in Hartford. He then served as director of religious education in the Synod of East Tennessee and helped organize dozens of Sunday School programs. For three years, he was the pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Englewood, New Jersey, also serving on the executive board of the Englewood branch of the National Urban League. In 1942, Covington became the pastor of St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Following a divorce from his first wife, he moved to Florida and, in 1950, became an assistant professor of religion at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee. He had also taught at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas, and served as a pastor in Key West, Florida.

In 1956, Covington published a book, What They Believe, an analysis of young people’s views on religion and ethics, based on survey responses from 800 college students to questions about God, prayer, and religious life. Published by the Philosophical Library, What They Believe was reviewed in the Philadelphia Tribune and other journals and newspapers. The Tribune review stated that Covington was a member of the Florida Conference of the AME Church, the Tallahassee Ministerial Alliance, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Tallahassee Civic League, and the American Association of University Professors. Around 1954, Covington remarried to Ann Eizabeth Floyd. With their family they resettled in Saginaw, Michigan, where Covington died in 1989.

What They Believe: A Survey of Religious Faith Among Groups of College Students. New York, NY: Philosophical Library (1956).