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Historical Highway MarkersBishop Payne Divinity SchoolQA-31
The Bishop Payne Divinity School began here in 1878 at the St. Stephen's Episcopal Church Normal and Industrial School. For 71 years it prepared black men for the ministry in the church. Giles B. Cooke (1838-1937) headed the vocational school and helped develop the divinity school. In 1884 the school was named after the Rt. Rev. John Payne, the first bishop of Liberia. Prominent students included James Solomon Russell (1857-1935), who founded Saint Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, and George Freeman Bragg Jr. (1853-1940), who became a priest and civil rights advocate. In 1949 the school merged with the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.
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References/Bibliographic Citation: Office of Black Ministries, Black Bishops of the Episcopal Church; Bishop Payne Divinity School Records, Library of the Virginia Theological Seminary; George F. Bragg, The Story of Old St. Stephen’s Petersburg VA and the Origin of the Bishop Payne Divinity School; Odell Greenleaf Harris, The Bishop Payne Divinity School: Petersburg, Virginia 1878-1949: A History of the Seminary to Prepare Black Men for the Ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1980); Odell Greenleaf Harris, It Can Be Done: The Autobiography of a Black Priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church who Started Upon the Bottom and Moved Up to the Top (1985) |