John Henry Lewis
Graduate of Yale Divinity School, 1913
Biography
Born in Oglethorpe, Georgia in 1882, John Henry Lewis received his BA from Morris Brown College in Georgia in 1905 and was ordained in the AME Church in 1907. After graduating from Yale with his bachelor's in divinity, Lewis received an MA from the University of Chicago in 1915. Lewis served as a pastor in Atlanta from 1904 to 1918, in Springfield, Missouri from 1918 to 1919, and in Pasadena, California. In 1920, he was appointed president of Morris Brown College, where he served from 1920 to 1928. He later returned to Morris Brown, serving as president again from 1951 to 1958. In addition, he received a doctor of divinity degree from Wilberforce University in 1921.
Other positions included serving as principal of Dunbar High School and Junior College in Little Rock, Arkansas, as president of Shorter College of North Little Rock from 1943 to 1944, and as dean of Payne Theological Seminary at Wilberforce University from 1943 to 1951. He was part of the group of Black students who reactivated Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity at Yale. He died in 1958 in Atlanta.
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Publications
"The Dying Girl Unprepared to Meet Her God," Modern Language Notes 28, no. 1 (1913).
"Social Services in Negro Churches." M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1914.