Joseph C. Price

Joseph Charles Price (February 10, 1854 – October 25, 1893) was a founder and the first president of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was one of the greatest orators of his day and a leader of African Americans in the southern United States. His death at the age of 39 cut short a career that might otherwise have vied with that of Booker T. Washington.

Early life Joseph Charles Price was born free in Elizabeth City, North Carolina on February 10, 1854, to a slave father and a free mother.

Early career In 1871 he began his career as a teacher in the public school of Wilson, North Carolina. After four years he enrolled at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. At Shaw he converted the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and was granted a license to preach. He then enrolled in Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania to study classics. He graduated valedictorian from the classical department at Lincoln in 1879 and from the theology department in 1881. In 1880 he was a delegate to the M.E. General Conference in Montgomery, Alabama, and in September 1881 was a delegate to the Ecumenical Conference in London, England. He remained in England for one year raising money for the Zion Wesley Institute which would be used to help build Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Among his patrons back in the United States, particularly met during a fundraising tour of California, were businessman William E. Dodge, and Stephen V. White Price was then installed as president of the school and was professor of oratory, mental and moral science, and theology. He was also a noted figure in the 1881 North Carolina prohibition campaign. In 1888, President Grover Cleveland asked Price to serve as minister to Liberia, but Price felt he could do more by staying at Livingstone.

He was active in local and state Republican politics and attended a number of local meetings and conventions, but advocated blacks to think more about education and business than politics. At his death in October 1893 he was president of the American Society for the Education of Colored Youths The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography reports that, "W. E. B. Du Bois, August Meier, and others felt that it was the leadership vacuum created by Price's death into which Booker T. Washington moved, and that had he lived, the influence and reputation of Price and of Livingstone College would have been as great or greater than that achieved by Washington and Tuskegee." At his passing George C. Rowe wrote a noted poem in his honor. Other noted tributes to him were published in the New York Independent and Christian Advocate, the Boston Journal of Education and elsewhere.

Price's oration was so renowned, he is considered one of the greatest voices of the nineteenth century, and the London Times called him "The World's Orator". He was voted as one of the "ten greatest negroes" of the year in the September 20, 1890 edition of the Indianapolis Freeman.