Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence was born in Harlem, New York and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After graduating from the local all-black high school at the age of 14, she moved to Harlem to further her education at the prestigious Wadleigh High School for Girls. Two years later she graduated with a scholarship to attend Cornell University as a pre-med student.
As the only black student on campus, Lawrence was not permitted to live in the dorms, and despite graduating with a nearly perfect academic record, she was denied entrance to Cornell’s medical school. In 1940, Lawrence graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Three years later, she earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University. In 1948, she became the first African American to be certified in psychoanalysis at Columbia University’s Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.
Lawrence began her career teaching pediatrics and public health at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1963, she became a founding member of the Harlem Family Institute, a psychoanalyst training institute. Until her retirement in 1984, she was also a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. For over two decades, Lawrence served as chief of the Developmental Psychiatry Center for Infants and Young Children and their Families at Harlem Hospital Center.
Lawrence was a member of the Peace Fellowship of The Episcopal Church and the recipient of an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. Her remarkable career was celebrated by one of her daughters, Dr. Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, in a 1998 biography, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer.
Margaret Morgan Lawrence married Charles Radford Lawrence II on June 5, 1938, while she was in medical school, and together they had three children. She died in Massachusetts on December 4, 2019 at the age of 105.
Charles Radford Lawrence II was a longtime Church leader, social activist, and educator. From 1948 until his retirement in 1977, he worked at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York as professor of sociology and chairman of the Department of Sociology. His active involvement in the Church began in 1952 when he became the vestryman and senior warden for Saint Paul's in Spring Valley, New York. Sixteen years later, he became the first black senior warden for New York's historic Trinity Parish.
Lawrence served as a Deputy to General Convention from 1967 to 1985, attending eight conventions. In 1976, he became the first African American, and third lay person, elected President of the House of Deputies. Two of the most controversial changes in the Church in the 20th century, the ordination of women and the adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, occurred during his presidency.
Throughout his work for the Church, Lawrence served on several committees, commissions, and boards. In 1973, he served as chairman of the House of Deputies' Special Committee on the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood and Episcopate. In 1976, he was the co-chairman of the Executive Council’s Special Advisory Committee on Church in Society. Additionally, Lawrence served on the Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations and the General Board of Examining Chaplains. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Virginia Theological Seminary, General Theological Seminary, and Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.
Lawrence’s deep concern for social justice and racial equality directed his academic and Church careers at home and abroad. He was a participant on the Anglican Consultative Council in England (1981) and in Nigeria (1984). In 1982 the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, of which he was a longtime member, awarded him the Episcopal Peace Award. He was an early advocate within The Episcopal Church for the end to South Africa's apartheid policies, and led the effort that resulted in the Church's 1985 vote to divest its portfolio of stock in firms continuing to work in South Africa.
Charles Lawrence married Margaret Morgan on June 5, 1938 and together they had three children. He II died in Pomona, NY, on April 3, 1986 at the age of 70.
Born in 1909, the Rev. Leslie John Alden Lang was ordained to the diaconate in 1933 and to the priesthood in 1934. He served as Assistant Rector of St. Peter's Church in Westchester, New York from 1934 to 1943 and as rector from 1943 to1963. During this time he received a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree from General Theological Seminary (1959). Lang continued to be active in Church affairs in the New York area until his retirement in 1974 when he became an honorary assistant at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Leslie John Alden Lang died on April 26, 1991.
Daisuke Kitagawa was born on October 23, 1910 in Taihoku, Japan. Prior to emigrating to the United States in 1937, he attended St. Paul’s University (Rikkyo) and the Central Theological College in Tokyo.
In the United States, he received his Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree from the General Theological Seminary in New York. Kitagawa was ordained a deacon in 1939, a priest in 1940, and served from 1939 to 1942 as Priest-in-Charge at St. Peter’s Mission in Seattle and St. Paul’s Mission in Kent, Washington. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was interned with other Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake relocation center in Newell, California. There he served as the Minister at the Tule Lake Union Church and as the Field Secretary for the Federal Council of Churches’ Committee on Japanese-American Resettlement.
After the war, Kitagawa moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota where he continued his work with Japanese Americans in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area. Additionally, he ministered to other minorities, founding the Rainbow Club in 1947 to encourage social interaction, friendship and understanding among the different racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds of the city.
In 1956 he began working with the World Council of Churches (WCC), first as Associate Secretary to the Department of Church and Society and then, in 1960, as the Secretary for the first Programme on Race Relations. After leaving in 1962 to serve on the Episcopal Church’s National Council and then on the Executive Council (1965), he returned to the WCC in 1968 to join the Division of World Mission and Evangelism, where he was in charge of a program for Urban and Industrial Mission in 48 countries.
Daisuke Kitagawa died on a Good Friday, March 27, 1970.