Daniel A. Payne

Daniel Alexander Payne was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, on the twenty-fourth of February 1811. Orphaned young and largely self-taught, he read voraciously in Scripture, science, and the classics, forging in himself a lifelong conviction that learning and faith were inseparable instruments of dignity for a people held in bondage.

At the age of eighteen, in 1829, he opened a school for free Black children in Charleston, teaching some sixty pupils. When South Carolina enacted a law forbidding the education of free people of color and the enslaved, the school was closed by order of the state. Rather than surrender his calling, Payne journeyed north, studied at the Lutheran seminary in Gettysburg, and was ordained to the ministry before joining the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1852 he was elected the sixth bishop of the AME Church, the first of its bishops to carry formal theological training, and he labored to raise the standards of an educated clergy. After the Civil War his missionary organizing drew hundreds of thousands of freedmen into the church across the Reconstruction South, planting congregations where slavery had forbidden worship.

In 1863, when the AME Church purchased Wilberforce University in Ohio, Payne became its president, the first African American to head an institution of higher learning in the United States, serving until his retirement in the 1870s. He also gathered and preserved the church's own history as its faithful chronicler. He died in 1893, having spent a lifetime insisting that no life be left in darkness. May the teacher who would not let a single mind go untended be honored forever.