In 1971, Edler Garnet
Hawkins joined the
Seminary faculty as
Princeton's first African
American professor.
Geddes W. Hanson is
the Seminary's Charlotte
W. Newcombe
Professor of
Congregational Ministry.
Peter J. Paris is the
Seminary's Elmer J. G.
Hormighausen
Professor of Christian
Social Ethics, and
liaison with Princeton
University's Afro-
American Studies
Program.
Brian K. Blount,
associate professor of
New Testament at PTS,
recently published Go
Preach!: Mark's
Kingdom Message and
the Black Church
Today.
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At the age of
sixty-two, Hawkins had led more than a full life.
He was pastor of St. Augustine Church in Bronx,
New York, for thirty-two years and built that
church’s membership from nine to more than
1,000. Throughout his pastorate, he was involved
both in the leadership of the United Presbyterian
Church (USA) and in social activism.
Hawkins was elected
as the first African American moderator of New
York City Presbytery in 1958. Two years later, he
was elected as vice moderator of the General
Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church (USA).
In 1964, he was elected moderator of the
denomination and became the first African
American to occupy the highest position in any of
the major, primarily white, Protestant
denominations.
In 1968, Hawkins
inaugurated his denomination’s Council on
Church and Race; he was instrumental in the
establishment of the Presbyterian Economic
Development Corporation, which granted high-risk,
low-interest loans to African Americans, in 1976.
And, he played an important role in the
implementation of the Self-Development of
People’s grants program.
At the Seminary, his
presence paved the way for a Black Studies
program. He brought African Americans whom
students would otherwise not have been introduced
to onto the Seminary campus and into his
classes—people like Wyatt T. Walker, a key
strategist for Martin
Luther King Jr.
In 1976, the year
that Black Liberation theologian James Cone was a
visiting lecturer in the fall, a course titled
"The Bible and Black Theology" was
introduced into the curriculum. And in April
1980, the PTS faculty declared its intention to
work together with the Black members of this
community, with the administration, and with the
community as a whole to take seriously the need
for a Black presence in the key areas of the
institution’s work: recruitment, faculty
appointments, curriculum, campus life, and church
relations.
When Hawkins died in
1977, Dean James Hastings Nichols said,"It
was Edler Hawkins more than anyone else who, on
the one hand, shook the faith of some of us on
the faculty that a nineteenth-century Scottish
parson was the only viable minister; on the other
hand, he restrained some of our more impatient
students from burning the place down."
In 1980, Geddes W.
Hanson, now the Seminary’s Charlotte W.
Newcombe Professor of Congregational Ministry,
his sister, and his mother established the Edler
G. Hawkins Memorial Award as a continuing tribute
to the man who was their pastor at St. Augustine.
The first recipient of the award was Brian
K. Blount, who graduated from PTS in 1981 and
is now an associate professor of New Testament at
the Seminary. Other winners have included Obery
M. Hendricks Jr., the youngest president of Payne
Theological Seminary, the oldest African
American seminary in the Midwest, and Prathia
Hall, dean of African American ministries and
lecturer in Christian ethics at United
Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. Last year,
Hall was named by Ebony magazine as the best
African American woman preacher in the United
States.
In a sermon Hall
preached during the Seminary’s 1996 African
American Alumni/ae Conference, she said,
commenting on what has become the Black National
Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing":
We African Americans
sing James Weldon Johnson’s immortal
imperative in many different ways in the
1990s…. [But] when we give ourselves to
Johnson’s anthem, our anthem, we experience
the strength, the joys, the tears, the pain,
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