Tennessee Wesleyan University will host The Rev. Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson as this year’s Heritage Day speaker.

Dickerson is a Retired General Officer in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Reverend James Lawson Chair in History, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University.

Rev. Dr. Dickerson specializes in American Labor History, the History of the U. S. civil rights movement, and African American religious history. He has written Out of the Crucible: Black Steel Workers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (1986), Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1998), African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (2010), and THE AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH: A HISTORY (2020). He has received grants and fellowships to support his research and writing from the American Academy in Berlin, American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Louisville Institute.

His current book project is a “‘Brother in the Spirit of Gandhi:’ William Stuart Nelson and the Religious Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.” Also, he is co-writing a book that is tentatively titled “Making a Nonviolent Movement: Nashville’s Pivotal Role in the Struggle for Civil Rights.”
He served as President of the American Society of Church History, 2004-2005 and is a member of the editorial board of Wesley and Methodist Studies.

Before his role at Vanderbilt, Dickerson taught at Williams College, Rhodes College, Yale Divinity School, and Payne Theological Seminary.

Dickerson has been married for 47 years to Mrs. Mary Eubanks Dickerson and they are parents to four children, three daughters and a son, all married; the children include two Ph.D.s, an Ed.D. and an M.B.A. They are proud grandparents of eleven grandchildren.

Dr. Dickerson will speak on Monday, February 24, at 7 pm in the Johnson Event Center in Colloms Campus Center and again on Tuesday the 25th at 11 am in Townsend Auditorium. The topic of the Townsend address will be “A Wesleyan Warrant for Global Reconstruction.”

Both events are free and open to the public.