John Dillingham, Jr.

John Dillingham, Jr. was born in Leota, Mississippi, in 1896, to John Dillingham and Alice Person Dillingham. He completed a bachelor’s degree at Shaw University in 1925. He married Geraldine Satchell in 1926. He attended Yale Divinity School in the 1925-1926 academic year, then took a job as head of the Department of Sociology at the State Normal School in Montgomery, Alabama (now Alabama State University). He returned to Yale Divinity School in the fall of 1929.

While at Yale, Dillingham worked with the Dixwell Community House and was part of the 1931 seminar, “Whither the Negro Church?” held at the Divinity School. He completed an MA in 1931, affiliated with the divinity school, and his thesis was titled “A Study of the Present Work of the Church in Tax-Supported Colleges and Universities of the United States.” He was then employed as director of religious activities at Tennessee A & I State College (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville. In 1935, he was appointed by the American Missionary Association to serve as principal of Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Shortly after, he moved to Pennsylvania. He was ordained and became minister of a church in Chester in 1938, then served Faith Presbyterian Church in Germantown.

In the early 1940s, Dillingham was a commissioner to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and served on the church’s Committee on Social Education and Action. He was co-chair of the Interracial Department of the Philadelphia Federation of Churches. He was recognized by a Black organization in Germantown in 1943 for his public health work—he founded a clinic for babies at his church and facilitated free smallpox vaccinations for children.

In 1946, Dillingham moved to Oakland, California, where he worked as a field missionary. He organized a church and community center for the Presbyterian Board of National Missions. In Oakland, he was president of the Oakland Ministerial Fellowship and a member of the Mayor’s Committee for Civic Unity, among other community positions.

In 1950, he returned to the East Coast as minister of a church in Newark, New Jersey. There, he was director of the Newark NAACP, the Church Extension Board, the Community Hospital, and the Home for the Aged in Montclair. His wife, Geraldine, died in 1952. The following year, he married Gladys Freeman. He retired in 1957 and died in 1974.

"A Study of the Present Work of the Xhurch in Tax-supported Colleges and Universities of the United States." M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1931.

The Peace of these Mountains to You. Kings Mountain, NC: Self-published, 1935.

Making Religious Education Effective: a New Program for the Church Today. New York, NY: Associated Press, 1935.