Daniel Alexander Payne

1811–1893 · African Methodist Episcopal · Charleston, Baltimore and Wilberforce, Ohio

Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–1893) was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, where the closing of his school by state law in 1835 drove him north to the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg. Elected a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1852, he laboured for an educated ministry and orderly worship, and from 1863 served as president of Wilberforce University, the first Black college president in the United States. He was also the first historian of his denomination.