Portrait of John Wesley Edward Bowen, Sr. which hung in Bowen Homes. Photograph BOWE 2021.00001, Atlanta Housing Archives
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Dr. J.W.E. Bowen, Sr. (1855-1933)
Dr. J.W.E. Bowen, Sr. (1855-1933)
Bishop J.W.E. Bowen Jr. (1889-1962)
Bishop J.W.E. Bowen Jr. (1889-1962)
Bowen Homes was named for J.W.E. Bowen, Sr., a well-known religious and civic leader, and his son, Bishop J.W.E. Bowen Jr., bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church (now United Methodist Church.)
J.W.E. Bowen, Sr. was a remarkable black leader who influenced thinking in the African American community of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using his ministry, teaching, and writing to champion racial equality and black intellectualism. Bowen belonged to the American Historical Association, the American Negro Academy, and the NAACP. An endorser of the Niagara Movement in September 1905 led by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, Bowen founded the Georgia Equal Rights League, whose objectives were similar to those of the Niagara Movement. In 1906, when Bowen became president of Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta he became actively involved in the urban mob violence that became known as the Atlanta race riot. Seeing the slow racial progress in the church, Bowen advocated passionately for racial parity in the episcopacy thereby desegregating the Methodist establishment.
J.W.E. Bowen, Sr. was a remarkable black leader who influenced thinking in the African American community of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using his ministry, teaching, and writing to champion racial equality and black intellectualism. Bowen belonged to the American Historical Association, the American Negro Academy, and the NAACP. An endorser of the Niagara Movement in September 1905 led by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, Bowen founded the Georgia Equal Rights League, whose objectives were similar to those of the Niagara Movement. In 1906, when Bowen became president of Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta he became actively involved in the urban mob violence that became known as the Atlanta race riot. Seeing the slow racial progress in the church, Bowen advocated passionately for racial parity in the episcopacy thereby desegregating the Methodist establishment.
J.W.E. Bowen Jr. (1889-1962), graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, Wesleyan University and Harvard University. He became, like his father, a prominent figure in the Methodist Episcopal church, and was elected a bishop in 1949.
J.W.E. Bowen, Sr. as a young man, circa 1880s. Public Domain Image.
John Wesley Edward Bowen was born in New Orleans on December 3, 1855 (some sources say 1865) to former slaves Edward and Rose Simon Bowen. Bowen became a free man when his father, Edward Bowen, purchased his family’s freedom in 1858. Bowen’s parents, recognizing his fine gifts and talents early on, exposed him to the best educational opportunities that they could manage. Bowen attended Union Normal School in New Orleans and then New Orleans University, a school founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church to provide education for freemen. In 1878 he graduated with the first graduating class of New Orleans University, Bowen taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics at Tennessee College from 1878-1882. He began a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree at Boston University in 1882 and spoke at his commencement in 1885. The following year in 1886, he began working towards his Ph.D. in historical theology at Boston University where he became the second African American to earn that degree in the United States. While at Boston University, Bowen was influenced by personalist philosopher and fellow Methodist Borden Parker Bowne. Taking inspiration from Bowne’s ideas, Bowen known for his eloquence and powerful speaking voice, preached that blacks should not degrade themselves in the face of white oppression and that they should always remain in touch with their inborn senses of humanity and self-worth.
Bowen's first wife, Ariel Serena Hedges Bowen pictured in Twentieth Century Negro Literature (1902). Public Domain Image.
In the same year Bowen began his Ph.D. at Boston University, he married Ariel Serena Hedges, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and an educator, missionary, performing artist, reformer, and club leader. She taught at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. After the Bowens moved to Atlanta, Ariel Bowman became a professor of music at Clark University in 1895 writing broadly on music (Music in the Home), as well as being an accomplished vocalist and musician with the piano and pipe organ. She was also president of Georgia Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) No. 2 and was widely active in Christian and reform work. Together they had four children: Irene, Juanita, John Wesley Edward Jr., and Portia Edmonia (who died in childhood). His son John Wesley Edward Bowen Jr. would also become a prominent Methodist Episcopal minister like his father.
After Bowen’s graduation, he served as pastorate for several congregations and taught church history and systematic theology at Morgan College in Baltimore and Hebrew at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Before becoming a teacher at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, he served as field secretary for the Missionary Board. Bowen was Gammon’s first full-time African American professor.
During his long tenure at Gammon of thirty-nine years (1893-1932) Bowen served a broad capacity of roles, the highest of which was president of the seminary from October 1906 to June 1910 and vice president from 1910 until he retired from that post in 1932, thereafter holding the rank of emeritus professor.
Bowen edited the Stewart Missionary Magazine where he began to envision a new and liberated “Negro” to build a new nation. He launched The Voice of the Negro in 1904 with Jesse Max Barber. That same year tragedy struck. Ariel Bowen died while visiting the World's Fair in St. Louis.
John Wesley Edward Bowen, 1896. Public Domain Image.
Two years later the widower Bowen remarried a woman named Irene Smallwood. They also had much in common. She was active in the struggle for civil rights and was a teacher at the Calhoun Colored School, in Lowndes County, Alabama. This private boarding and day school was founded in 1892 by Charlotte Thorn and Mabel Dillingham, from New England, in partnership with Booker T. Washington. Irene was also a close friend of Mary McLeod Bethune, the unofficial advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This marriage lasted twenty-seven years.
By 1906, when Bowen became president of Gammon, Atlanta was involved in the urban mob violence known as the Atlanta race riot. White mobs, ranging in size from several dozen to five thousand, attacked blacks, black-owned businesses, and properties that blacks used, leaving twenty-five people dead and several hundred injured. The violence forced many blacks to flee for safety. The violence came after a staunch racist became a gubernatorial primary candidate; a crusade was launched against so-called vice in the black community, and yellow journalism practices of the local press reported an epidemic of rapes of white women. Bowen helped to protect blacks from the mobs, however, opening the seminary to blacks who needed shelter. Three days after the riot began, white police beat and arrested Bowen, injuring him severely. Jesse Max Barber, Bowen's co-editor for the Voice of the Negro, left Atlanta and took the journal to Chicago. There he continued to edit the publication, under the title Voice. Bowen had no further contact with the publication after it migrated to Chicago.
J. W. E. Bowen Sr. with his son, Rev. (and future Methodist Episcopal Church {now United Methodist Church} Bishop) J. W. E. Bowen Jr., and grandson (and future lawyer and member of Ohio State Senate) J. W. E. Bowen III, c. 1927. Public Domain Image.
After serving as President, Bowen served as chair of the Church History department until his retirement. Devoted to the Methodist Episcopal Church, Bowen served as delegate to its quadrennial general conference from 1896 to 1912. Seeing the slow racial progress in the church, however, he published An Appeal for Negro Bishops, but No Separation in 1912. It was not until the 1920s that the church elected its first African American bishops; unfortunately, however, Bowen was not among them. Bowen’s son, John W. E. Bowen, Jr. (1889-1962), educated at Phillips Exeter, NH (1904-1907), Wesleyan University (A.B. 1911), and at Harvard University, (A.M., 1913), went on to do what his father was unable to do, i.e. become a bishop in the Methodist church. In 1948 he became the church’s 9th black bishop and served until 1960.
Bowen’s long tenure at Gammon Theological Seminary continued until his retirement just a year before his death. He may have begun experiencing financial hardships. On March 7, 1929, he wrote a letter to W.E.B. Dubois on the letterhead of Gammon Theological Seminary regretting his inability to accompany him on his European trip or to attend the Pan African Congress and recommending an alternative list of individuals to contact and invite, stating “I find I am again too heavily burdened to undertake it” citing a review of his finances.
Bowen died at the age of 77 in Atlanta on July 20, 1933. He is buried at South View Cemetery in Atlanta.
Sources:
Sources:
Bethune, Mary McLeod. An Interview with Mary McLeod Bethune, ca. 1940. Florida Memory: State Library and Archives of Florida. https://www.floridamemory.com/learn/classroom/learning-units/mary-mcleod-bethune/lessonplans/sets/interview/?set=5
Bowen, J. W. E. (John Wesley Edward), 1855-1933. An Appeal for Negro Bishops, but No Separation. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1912.
Bowen, J. W. E. (John Wesley Edward), 1855-1933. Letter from J. W. E. Bowen to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 7, 1929. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b047-i316
"Bowen, J. W. E. ." Notable Black American Men, Book II. Encyclopedia.com. 12 Jun. 2022 <https://www.encyclopedia.com>.
Gann, B. (2011, June 06.). John Wesley Edward Bowen (18551933). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bowen-john-wesley-edward-1855-1933/
Ronnick, Michele Valerie. Bowen, John Wesley Edwawrd. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Database of Classical Scholars. https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/8564-bowen-john-wesley-edward
Obituary of the late J.W.E. Bowen, Sr., 1933
Obituary of the late J.W.E. Bowen, Sr., 1933
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