Black Fact=1811 (Feb.24) – Daniel Alexander Payne, educator and pastor in the AME Church, was born on this date in 1811. He helped the church start schools such as Wilberforce University (1856), the oldest black private liberal arts university. He served as its 1st president.
At 19, he taught at a school he founded for Black children. He was forced to close the school after South Carolina passed a law that regulated educating slaves and free persons of color. After that, he traveled north and enrolled in the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 1837, he joined the Franklin Synod of the Lutheran Church and was ordained as the first African-American minister in the Lutheran Church in 1839. Payne left the Lutheran Church and joined the A.M.E. Church in 1841, becoming part of the ministry in 1843. Under his leadership, they expanded its foreign missions, reorganized its publication program, and established hundreds of new congregations. Payne became the first Black American to lead a college and was named the president of Wilberforce University in 1856. The Wilberforce University Board of Trustees approved the establishment of a seminary in 1871 and Payne served as the first dean. Payne made his last public appearance at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and passed away shortly thereafter on November 2, 1893, in Xenia, Ohio at age 83.
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