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Mars Hill Alumnus Earns Honorary Doctorate
by Stephanie DeLoach
G. McLeod Bryan
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G. McLeod Bryan, MHC '39, will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Mars Hill College at graduation on May 8, 2004. He will also give the keynote address at the baccalaureate ceremony May 7.
In his honor the G. McLeod Bryan Caring Awards were created in 1996. Given each spring, they recognize students and faculty who demonstrate Bryan's reputation of work for the common good.
Bryan holds degrees from Yale University and Wake Forest. He has been a professor of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Christian Ethics at Mars Hill, Mercer University, Washington University, Trinity Seminary in Nigeria, Baptist Seminary in Ruschlikon, Switzerland, and Wake Forest University.
The religious life committee at Mars Hill nominated him for the honorary doctorate.
Stan Dotson, Dean of Lifeworks and a member of the committee said, "He has played an active role in civil rights work throughout his life. As a member of the Fellowship for Southern Churchmen, he worked with courageous Christians in the South and led the workshops they sponsored at their property in Buckeye Cove near Asheville. He has been a teacher, preacher, and writer."
Dotson went on to note that as a member of the Conference of Christians and Jews, Bryan has taught night classes for police, teachers, and social workers. He is a member of the Georgia Inter-racial Council. He has worked for the Ford Foundation to preach in Southern churches in order to advocate civil rights stands.
Bryan was close Friends with Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, and during the 1950s the two of them were the only white lecturers at the Morehouse Preachers' School in Atlanta. Bryan and his wife, Edna, were appointed Danforth Associates and participated in an exchange program in South Africa, where he befriended Byers Naude, the noted anti-apartheid preacher.
Bryan taught at Davidson College and was very influencial in helping the college through the integration process. Both at Mercer University and at Wake Forest University he introduced the first black students. "He worked with one of his former students, a missionary in Ghana, to recruit an African convert from the Southern Baptist mission field to be the first black student at Mercer," said Dotson.
His civil rights efforts allowed him to meet and become friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King even wrote a letter of introduction for him to African leaders for his tour of Africa in 1959, said Dotson.
Bryan's long determination and perseverance granted the privilege for him to be "appointed to the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1960," said Dotson
Bryan has also written many books associated with his Christian faith, the South, and civil rights. Titles include, Voices in the Wilderness: Twentieth Century Prophets Speak to the New Millennium; Communities of Faith and Radical Discipleship (written with Jurgen Moltmann and Carlton Mitchell); Dissenter in the Baptist Southland: Fifty Years in the Career of William Wallace Finlator; Those Few also Paid A Price: Southern Whites Who Fought For Civil Rights; and Naude: Prophet to South Africa.
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