George Augustus Stallings Jr.
African-American Independent Catholic bishop
George Augustus Stallings Jr. (born March 17, 1948) is an American religious leader. He was the founder of the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation and was long active in the Black Catholic movement. He served as a Catholic priest from 1974 to 1989, and was based in Washington, D.C., for many years. He established the Imani Temple as an independent church in 1989, making a public break in 1990 with the Roman Catholic Church on The Phil Donahue Show. The Archbishop of Washington excommunicated him that year.
Biography
Early life and priestly ministry
Stallings was born in 1948 in New Bern, North Carolina, to George Augustus Stallings Sr., and Dorothy Smith. His grandmother—Bessie Taylor—introduced him as a boy to worship in a black Baptist church. He enjoyed the service so much that he said he wanted to be a minister. During his high school years, he began expressing "Afrocentric" sentiments, insisting on his right to wear a mustache, despite school rules, as a reflection of black identity.
The public source identifies “George Augustus Stallings Jr.” as african-American Independent Catholic bishop. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around George, Augustus and Stallings.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Augustus Stallings Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.