This collection contains materials concerning Charles Wesley's career at Wilberforce University.
This photo was scanned from the Wesley collection.
Dr. Charles Harris Wesley was born in Louisville, Kentucky on 2 December 1891. Wesley—focusing on history—studied at Fisk University, Yale, and Harvard. He also briefly conducted research in London as a Guggenheim Fellow. His scholarship emphasized black history, a subject on which Wesley published extensively, even becoming the historian for the historically black Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
Wesley was also heavily involved in academia. From 1937 to 1942, he served as a dean at Howard University, first for the liberal arts college and then for the graduate school. He subsequently became the president of Wilberforce University and served in that capacity from 1942 to 1947. In 1947, he helped establish Wilberforce’s College of Education and Industrial Arts as its own independent college. This would eventually become known as Central State University, and Wesley served as its first president until 1965. His tenure at Central State was followed by a return to Howard University as a history professor and a stint as the director of the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia. Wesley died on 16 August 1987 in Washington D.C. at the age of 95.
Unless otherwise stated, information for the biographical sketch comes from the collection.
Bibliography
Barnes, Bart. “Charles H. Wesley, 95, dies.” Washington Post. August 21, 1987. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1987/08/22/charles-h-wesley-95-dies/f51c9819-8375-475c-aa57-7baefcc2b47a/.
Boyd, Herb. “Dr. Charles H. Wesley: The eminent historian on Black labor.” Amsterdam News. February 26, 2015. https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2015/02/26/dr-charles-h-wesley-eminent-historian-black-labor/.