Harrel Tillman
texan judge, actor and ministor
Harrel Gordon Tillman Sr. (January 18, 1925 - June 19, 1998) was an actor who became an ordained minister and moved to Houston Texas where he also became a lawyer and judge. He was the first African-American judge in Texas.
Tillman was born January 18, 1923, in Wadesboro, North Carolina. He grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. After college he moved to New York, where he had a brief stage career. Tillman then moved to Hollywood in 1947 where he appeared in a number of low budget films made with African American crews and casts including That Man of Mine, Love in Syncopation and The Fight Never Ends.
He left the movie business and joined the clergy of the African Methodist Episcopal church in New York City serving as an assistant pastor before becoming an ordained minister. In the early 1950s he was transferred to a church in Houston, and served as an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, In Harlem he was an assistant pastor at Harlem's Church on the Hill and then he was the pastor at the Walls Chapel in Houston. Tillman led a gospel music program on local radio and hosted a talk show on radio station KYOK in Houston.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q98922434. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1998, 1923 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harrel Tillman” 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.