W. T. Handy, Jr.

William Talbot Handy, Jr. (1924 – 1998) was an American civil rights activist and Methodist bishop. He served as the residing bishop of the Missouri Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church from 1980 to 1992. A friend of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Handy was active in the Civil Rights movement and helped lead the Louisiana State Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Baton Rouge chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was the first African-American to serve in an executive capacity at the United Methodist Publishing House.

Early life and family Handy was born in 1924 in New Orleans to Dorothy Pauline Pleasant, a music teacher, and Rev. William Talbot Handy, a choir member of the Tuskeegee University Quartet and a Methodist minister and district superintendent who sang at the funeral of Booker T. Washington. His parents owned Handy Heights, a 116-acre farm in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Handy was the brother of the flutist D. Antoinette Handy and the pianist Geneva Handy Southall.

Education Handy graduated from Dillard University in 1948 with a bachelor of arts degree.

Activism and ministry Handy, like his friend King, was active in the Civil Rights Movement. He helped lead the Louisiana State Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the Baton Rouge Council on Human Relations, the Baton Rouge chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Louisiana Council of Churches. From 1952 to 1959, he served as pastor of Newman Methodist Church in Alexandria, Louisiana. a denominational agency in Nashville, Tennessee that had previously been accused of racial bigotry. His wife was a schoolteacher and taught at W.H. Crogman Elementary School in Atlanta with Christine King Farris.

Handy died in Nashville, Tennessee on April 12, 1998.