Take On Responsibilities

The tall (6 ft. 3 in.), well-poised bishop on the rostrum rapped for order and the 700-odd members settled down. So this week, at the 100th annual Conference of the Southern California-Arizona Methodist Church at the University of Redlands, 71-year-old Bishop Alexander Preston Shaw became the first Negro to preside full-time over a conference of white Methodists.

Born in northern Mississippi, the eighth of "just eleven children" of ex-slave parents, Alexander Shaw started out to be a public-school teacher, but finally followed his father and an elder brother into the ministry. At one of his first assignments, in Winchester, Va., Dr. Shaw found the second-floor ceiling of his parsonage too low for him. When he solved the problem by persuading his congregation to rent him another house while leasing the parsonage quarters "to a much shorter man," newspapers in Washington and New York delightedly picked up the story and caused him "a good deal of embarrassment." But his brilliant preaching earned Shaw an appointment (1917-31) to Los Angeles Wesley Chapel, the city's fifth largest Methodist church.

Pastor Shaw's specialty was his urgent appeal to youth. "My church," he says proudly, "was not filled with bald-headed people. We had regularly as many as 200 to 300 youngsters attending services. Sometimes he brought an outstanding boy or girl into the pulpit with him to lecture on how the church could be made more interesting to young people.

In 1931 he became editor of the Southwestern edition of the Christian Advocate, which he built up, over five years from a circulation of about 5,000 to 9,000. In 1936 he was elected a bishop and in 1940 was assigned to his church's Baltimore area, where his jurisdiction include about 100,000 Negro church members in some 1,300 individual churches.

Bishop Shaw consistently advocates self-improvement and development for his race, rather than "the rough, wild way of pressure groups trying to stamp out anti-Negro activities ... A sufficient amount of real excellence--as has been achieved by Marian Anderson and Dr. Carver and Jackie Robinson--is the surest way." Above all, he believes that Negroes should observe the rule he himself has followed with such conspicuous success: take on responsibilities.

Says he: "If you don't have responsibilities, you don't grow strong enough to handle them."

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