William Emanuel Hendricks

William Emanuel Hendricks was born in St. Croix, then a part of the Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands), on August 1, 1879. He attended Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania before attending Yale College, where he was involved with Dwight Hall and the Berkeley Association, an Episcopalian student organization. His senior year, he was a finalist for the DeForest Prize for oratory, speaking on “The Ideal of the Rhodes Scholarship.” He graduated from Yale in 1908 and subsequently entered the General Theological Seminary in New York. In 1911 he became an ordained minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church and moved to Puerto Rico as a missionary. The same year he married Laura Virginia Highgate, and in 1912 his son Guillermo Manuel Hendricks was born. In 1914 he moved to Philadelphia, where he became rector of St. Thomas’ Church, and in 1918 became chaplain of the Philadelphia City Mission. Hendricks died in Philadelphia on February 10, 1922.