Thomas Nelson Baker Sr.

Thomas Nelson Baker was born into slavery on August 11, 1860 to Thomas Chadwick and Edith Nottingham Baker in Northampton County, Virginia. Both his parents were enslaved. His father was a Civil War soldier in the Union Army. He was one of five children.

Baker was only partially formally taught, having only attended public school from the ages of 8 to 12, at which point he began to work as a farm laborer. Between the ages of 12 and 21 he maintained his studies on his own, and in 1881 he enrolled in the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) High School program, where he graduated valedictorian in 1885 as a protégé of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. He attended Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts, a predominantly white “opportunity” school from 1886 to 1889. Baker was one of only two Black students at the school. These two periods of high school education prepared him for college, and he enrolled in Boston University 1890 at the age of 30, graduating in 1893 as the university’s first Black valedictorian. He was also the first Black person to be elected to speak at BU’s commencement. He subsequently attended the Yale Divinity School, earning a bachelor of divinity degree in 1896. From 1897 to 1901 he worked as minister of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in New Haven while simultaneously studying at Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 1901, he married Elizabeth Baytop, a graduate of Hampton Institute, and they had four children. Each of their four children earned advanced degrees. In 1903, Baker earned a PhD in philosophy from Yale, the first Black person known to have done so.

Baker served as minister of the Second Congregational Church in Pittsfield, MA, from 1901 to 1939; he may have finished his Yale dissertation there. Baker was named minister emeritus of the church from 1939 to 1940. He was a member of the Pittsfield Council of Churches, the Berkshire North Conference of Congregational Churches, and Congregational Council of Churches of New England and Vicinity (Black).

The philosopher George Yancy has written extensively on Baker, studying both his personal biography and scholarly contributions. Yancy argues that Baker’s writings

constitute an early and significant philosophical precursor to a movement which later became known as the Harlem Renaissance.… Indeed, Baker is a very early precursor (though unacknowledged) to the Black Arts Movement.

Baker died in 1941, from complications of carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning heater.

"The Ethical Significance of the Connection Between Mind and Body." PhD diss., Yale University, 1903.

"Not Pity But Respect," Alexander's Magazine 2, no. 1 (1906).

"Ideals," Alexander's Magazine 2, no. 6 (1906).

"The Negro Woman," Alexander's Magazine 3, no. 1 (1906).

"Speech of Lincoln," Alexander's Magazine 7, no. 1 (1909).