In order to become more like my Caucasian professors, I began to squelch everything in me that didn’t correspond to them in order to do “real theology.” I began stripping away my blackness in order to fit the evangelical theological mold.

I had well-intended white professors who assigned white authors and invited white guest lecturers. My theological education offered me a love for Scripture and a theological framework, but it unintentionally taught me that people of color have little to contribute to theological discussions. It wasn’t until my doctoral studies that I discovered Plain Theology for Plain People. His book provides a definite system of organization while allowing simplicity of language and structure to prevail. Writing with the average sharecropper in mind, Boothe set out to spare others the frustration of traversing the lofty theological rhetoric of other texts. He wrote Plain Theology for Plain People as an aid for his theological seminars. While in the pastorate, Boothe maintained an itinerant teaching ministry, conducting literacy and theological training for emancipated slaves and their children. (In recent decades, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church received international attention because of its role in the civil-rights struggle and the leadership of its 20th pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., after whom the church was renamed-King Memorial Baptist Church.) He established and ministered in two churches: First Colored Baptist Church of Meridian, Mississippi, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Boothe desired to promote literacy so former slaves could read the Bible for themselves and escape the oppressive interpretative practices that had made the Christian faith a tool of black subservience.īoothe’s devotion for education notwithstanding, he was, most importantly, a churchman. He later served as the university’s second president (1901–02). In the early 1870s, Boothe was a preliminary member of the Colored Baptist Missionary Convention that founded Selma University. At the age of 22, Boothe began teaching for the Freedmen’s Bureau and lecturing regularly at Booker T. In 1860 he testified that he “reached an experience of grace which so strengthened me as to fix me on the side of God’s people.”Īt the conclusion of the Civil War, Boothe’s passion was racial uplift in a society that denied blacks’ humanity before God and the Constitution. Over time, his exposure to Scripture drew him to salvation. Mid-19th-century legal practice was rooted in biblical logic, which required young Boothe to explore Scripture on a regular basis. Terrel, and he began working as an office boy at a law firm in Clark County, Mississippi. At the age of 3, Boothe learned the alphabet from lettering on a tin plate. Advertise on TGC Who Is Charles Octavius Boothe?īoothe was born on June 13, 1845, in Mobile County, Alabama, as the legal property of Nathaniel Howard.

Charles octavius boothe