Emma Hamilton Dancing

Harold M. Kingsley, Sr. was born on March 1, 1887 in Mobile, Alabama. He graduated from Talladega College in Alabama in 1908 and subsequently attended the Yale Divinity School, where he developed an interest in becoming a minister. While at Yale, he was a founding member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Following graduation from Yale, Kingsley pursued ministry in a variety of denominations. He had been raised in a Baptist family but attended an Episcopal church during his youth. His first job as minister was for an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, at Bethel Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut—a departure from both denominations in which he had been raised. However, he shortly thereafter converted once again, becoming a Congregationalist minister for Union Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island (1911-1913). Subsequently he returned to the South, pastoring throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida as part of the American Missionary Association, a formerly pro-abolition and later pro-civil rights religious organization. By 1927 he had returned north to the Church of the Good Shepherd in Chicago, and he expanded his activist preaching, addressing racial economic inequality and providing financial education and aid to recent Black migrants from the South.

In 1943 Kingsley moved to Los Angeles and became director of the Pilgrim House, for the first time serving an interracial population in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Kingsley became a vocal opponent of Japanese incarceration and, much as he did for Black migrants in Chicago, invested in social services to re-integrate formerly incarcerated Japanese people into the local community following the end of WWII. Kingsley died in 1970 in Los Angeles.