Andrew Sledd

Andrew Warren Sledd (November 7, 1870 – March 16, 1939) was an American theologian, university professor and university president. A native of Virginia, he was the son of a prominent Methodist minister, and was himself ordained as a minister after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees. He later earned a second master's degree and his doctorate.

After teaching for several years, Sledd was chosen to be the last president of the University of Florida at Lake City, from 1904 to 1905, and the first president of the modern University of Florida (first known as the "University of the State of Florida"), from 1905 to 1909. He was also president of Southern University from 1910 to 1914, and later became a professor and an influential biblical scholar at Emory University's Candler School of Theology from 1914 to 1939.

Sledd first received national recognition after he wrote a 1902 magazine article advocating better legal and social treatment of African-Americans, some of whom faced lynching by white mobs. He is also prominently remembered for his role in founding the modern University of Florida, his scholarly analysis of biblical texts as literature, his call for an end to racial violence, and his influence on a generation of Methodist seminary students, scholars and ministers.

Early life and education Sledd was born November 7, 1870, in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of a Methodist Episcopal minister, Robert Newton Sledd, and his wife, Frances Carey Greene Sledd. The elder Sledd was an influential minister within the Virginia Methodist Conference, and at various times while Andrew was growing up, his father held prominent pastorates of large Methodist congregations in four different Virginia cities—Danville, Norfolk, Petersburg and Richmond. Andrew received his early education in the Petersburg school of W. Gordon McCabe, a former Confederate captain and veteran of the U.S. Civil War.

In 1888, Sledd entered Methodist-affiliated Randolph–Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Sledd left the college without finishing his undergraduate degree requirements, first accepting a position as a teacher in Durant, Mississippi, After teaching in Arkansas for two years, he returned to Randolph–Macon and completed his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in 1894. and was honored as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. and completed one year's additional graduate work toward a doctoral degree.

Scholar and educator Emory College and the "Sledd Affair" After completing his graduate studies at Harvard, Sledd briefly served as a Latin instructor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was ordained as a Methodist minister and licensed to preach in 1898. and was a few months from being elevated as a Methodist bishop. Candler was impressed with the character and academic credentials of the young scholar, and assisted him in becoming a professor of Latin language and literature at Emory College, a position Sledd held from 1898 to 1902.

Later in 1899, while traveling by train between Atlanta and Covington, Georgia, Sledd witnessed the aftermath of the lynching of an African-American man named Sam Hose. The idealistic young minister was outraged. In reaction, he wrote an essay entitled "The Negro: Another View," which was published as an article in the July 1902 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. While he flatly asserted that the "negro race" was not the equal of the "white race," he nevertheless demanded equal justice for blacks and whites alike, writing "There is nothing in a white skin or a black to nullify the essential rights of man as man." a public firestorm ensued in Georgia over Sledd's criticism of the South's treatment of its black citizens, with the controversy stoked by the vitriolic letters and editorial attacks of agrarian populist Rebecca Felton in The Atlanta Constitution newspaper. As the controversy grew, The Atlanta Journal and Atlanta News quickly joined the anti-Sledd chorus. When a majority of the members of Emory's board of trustees threatened to withdraw their support of the college because of the negative publicity, the newly installed college president, James E. Dickey, demanded Sledd's resignation from the faculty, and Sledd resigned on August 9, 1902. The Sledd Affair subsequently attracted attention throughout the United States as a matter of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

After resigning from the Emory College faculty, Sledd entered the graduate school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he began work in the advanced classics doctoral program, specializing in Latin. Sledd received $1,000 in severance pay from Emory pursuant to an agreement with Dickey and unanimously approved by the Emory faculty, and his father-in-law contributed $900 to help cover his tuition and living expenses while he attended Yale. He received a scholarship from the university, and earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Latin from Yale in 1903, after only nine months. Sledd declined all offers from Northern and Western institutions, and was determined to return to his native South. Several months later, on July 6, 1904, he was unanimously selected to be the president of the University of Florida at Lake City by its board of trustees. At the time of his appointment, the University of Florida at Lake City was experiencing a controversy of its own: its administration and faculty were hopelessly fractured by personality conflicts and its unpopular president's failed attempts at improving the small school's instruction and academic standing. The university's board of trustees had removed the ineffectual president, and dismissed seven members of its small faculty. The university consolidation movement gained the political backing of newly elected Florida Governor Napoleon B. Broward, and in 1905 the Florida Legislature passed the Buckman Act, which abolished the hodge-podge of state-supported colleges and consolidated their assets and programs into a new comprehensive university and land-grant college for white men, and a liberal arts college and normal school for white women. By a vote of six to four, the new Board of Control charged with the governance of the consolidated institutions selected Gainesville as the location for the new men's state university.

Sledd had not anticipated that the Lake City campus would be abandoned, and had assumed that it would be selected as the location of the newly consolidated men's university, placing him in a strong position to become the first president of the new institution. Murphree remained the president of the newly consolidated women's college in Tallahassee until 1909.

Sledd nominated all of the original faculty members, a majority of whom he had previously selected to be professors at the University of Florida at Lake City. When registration for classes was held in Gainesville on September 24, 1906, there were 102 students and fewer than a dozen faculty members. and, together with his wife and their young children, moved into the still incomplete Buckman Hall dormitory on the Gainesville campus.

Sledd played a key role in the formation and ultimate success of the new university, but his time as its president was a relatively short four years. Nevertheless, the Board of Control continued to back Sledd, and its members threatened to resign in protest. Seeking to avoid an unwinnable political controversy, Sledd resigned, and the Board of Control replaced him with Albert Murphree, the political favorite of several legislative leaders and the Board of Education.

Methodist ministry and Southern University Following Sledd's resignation, he and his family returned to Atlanta and stayed in the home of his wife's parents. Within a few weeks, he was appointed minister of the First Methodist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, a position he held for the remainder of 1909 and the first half of 1910. While president of Southern University, he implemented a new pre-college preparatory school and a four-year course of Bible study, and focused his personal efforts on restoring the school's finances and improving the quality of its instruction.

Candler School of Theology In the fall of 1914, Sledd resigned the presidency of Southern University and returned to Emory College, by then renamed Emory University and relocated to its new main campus in northeast Atlanta, as the first Professor of Greek and New Testament Literature at the Candler School of Theology, the newly established seminary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Sledd became well known as a professor of Greek, Latin and New Testament studies at Candler, and was the author of several scholarly books on New Testament subjects, including Saint Mark's Life of Jesus (1927), The Bibles of the Churches (1930) and His Witnesses: A Study of the Book of Acts (1935). He was selected to be a member of the American Standard Bible Committee, which was preparing a revision of the American Standard Version of the Bible. He continued to advocate internal Methodist reform and an end to racial violence, and his teaching inspired a generation of his Candler theology students to act as change agents within the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. and volunteered to serve as the board's treasurer.

Sledd and his wife Annie also suffered a personal tragedy during his time as a Candler professor, when their first-born son and his namesake, Andrew Sledd Jr., died after an extended illness in 1919. Andrew Jr. was 16 years old, and had graduated from Decatur High School only weeks earlier.

Death and legacy

Sledd became a recognized New Testament scholar and a significant voice of educational, social and ecclesiastical reform within the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Following Sledd's funeral, his body was buried in the Decatur Cemetery.

In his 1960 History of Methodism in Alabama and West Florida, Marion Elias Lazenby remembered Sledd as "one of the [Methodist] Church's most scholarly and reverent teachers." Given his chosen career of minister and professor, he never accumulated much personal wealth. In 1933, John J. Tigert, the university's third president, invited Professor Sledd to be the university's baccalaureate speaker. After his death, the university honored him again, renaming one of its early residence halls as Sledd Hall in 1939. The small state university, which Sledd had been instrumental in creating and organizing, is now one of the ten largest single-campus universities in the United States, with a total enrollment of nearly 50,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.

Sledd and his wife Annie had nine children. Eight of their children graduated from Emory, seven with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a fact newsworthy enough to be picked up by the Associated Press wire service when youngest daughter Antoinette graduated from Emory the year following Sledd's death. Two of their sons followed in their father's footsteps, earning doctorates and becoming university professors: James H. Sledd became a Rhodes Scholar and noted professor of English literature at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas; Marvin B. Sledd was a professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech.

In 2002, after almost a century of ignoring its role in the "Sledd Affair," Emory University sponsored a presentation entitled "Professing Justice: A Symposium on the Civil Rights Legacy of Professor Andrew Sledd." In holding the inter-disciplinary symposium, Emory University acted to "right a wrong committed a century ago by revisiting the 'Sledd affair' and reflecting on its meaning for Emory today."