Of vision and power : the life of Bishop Edgar Amos Love
The Methodist Church, founded in 1784, has historically been a paradoxical, often contradictory institution in America. Developed amid the turmoil of an ambivalent nation, the Christian religion was one constantly struggling to reconcile the principles of a theology espousing brotherly love, compassion and truth and the peculiar institutions of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and subsequent Jim Crow laws. The Methodist Church itself, despite John Wesley's staunch opposition to the separation of the races, would ultimately find itself segregated into a church within a church-the all-black, cross-regional Central Jurisdiction headed by black bishops and the Methodist Church at-large. Though there is a paucity of scholarly research into his life, Bishop Edgar Amos Love, whose stalwart example of ecclesiastical, civic and human rights leadership began during his undergraduate days at Howard University, would raise the clarion call to integrate what would ultimately become the United Methodist Church in 1968. The purpose of the present study is to: Examine the social and historical construction, development of Edgar A. Love's leadership potentialities; to assess the policies and practices of the Methodist Church vis-à-vis the prevalent racial attitudes between 1784 and1968; to provide a seminal analysis of historical documents pertaining to the ecclesiastical perspectives and civil and human rights work of Edgar A. Love; and, to elucidate Bishop Edgar A. Love's role in integrating the United Methodist Church and influencing the Civil Rights Movement
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2009