Samuel DeWitt Proctor
American minister
Samuel DeWitt Proctor (July 13, 1921 – May 22, 1997) was an American minister, educator, and humanitarian. An African-American church and higher education leader, he was active in the Civil Rights Movement and is perhaps best known as a mentor and friend of Martin Luther King Jr.
Proctor served as president of Virginia Union University, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He also led the Peace Corps in Africa, and served as the senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.
Early life
Samuel DeWitt Proctor was born in Norfolk, Virginia on July 13, 1921. Unusual for an African American born in this era, Proctor's grandparents on both sides had received education at the university level: his paternal grandmother had attended Hampton Institute, and both of his maternal grandparents had attended Norfolk Mission College, the forerunner of Booker T Washington High School in Norfolk, Virginia. His parents, Herbert Proctor and Velma Hughes met while they were both students at Norfolk Mission College, the only high school for blacks at the time in Norfolk, Virginia. Proctor was raised as a Baptist and as a child attended the congregation that had been founded by his great-grandfather, Zechariah Hughes. Herbert Proctor worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, in Portsmouth, Virginia.
Proctor graduated from Booker T Washington high school in Norfolk, Virginia Class of 1937 and enrolled at Virginia State College, having won a music scholarship to attend.
The public source identifies “Samuel DeWitt Proctor” as american minister. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Samuel, DeWitt and Proctor.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel DeWitt Proctor” 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.