Emma Hamilton Dancing

Charles Harris Wesley was born on December 2, 1891 in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1911, and subsequently received an MA in history from Yale in 1913. While at Yale, he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha. He later served as president and long-term historian of the fraternity, publishing The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in Negro College Life (1929). Wesley graduated with a PhD from Harvard in 1925, one of the first African Americans to do so, and he earned a doctor of divinity degree from Wilberforce University in 1928.

Wesley was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and accomplished historian, becoming one of the first Black recipients of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930 and authoring twenty-four books in his lifetime on various subjects of African American history. Among his significant publications are The Collapse of the Confederacy, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History, and The History of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs: A Legacy of Service.

Wesley served on the history faculty of Howard University from 1913 until 1942. He was also a college administrator, serving as dean of Liberal Arts and Graduate Studies at Howard from 1940-1942. In 1942, he became president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1947, he helped establish Central State University (an HBCU in Ohio) and served as its first president. Wesley continued to work there until 1965, when he returned to Howard University as a history professor. In 1976 he became Director of the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia.

In addition to his work as a scholar and college administrator, Wesley was a pastor of the Ebenezer and Campbell AME churches in Washington, DC, and a presiding elder in the AME Church. He was a Mason and active in the Elks and Odd Fellows. Wesley died on August 16, 1987 at the age of 95.