Born: June 23, 1884, Ninety-Six, SC

Education: Benedict College, A.B., 1911, B.D., 1912; Colgate University, A.B., 1919, B.D., 1920; Harvard University, M.A., 1921

Died: July 24, 1970, Richmond, VA

“This world must be brotherized or it will be brutalized,” Hancock, a Virginia Union University sociologist and Richmond pastor, told the 1939 World Baptist Alliance in Atlanta. Unless the Christian church renounced racism, it would “seal its own damnation.”

He grappled with the color line. “The problem of race relations is crucial if American democracy is to survive,” he taught. His course on “Race Relations,” one of the first in a Negro college, studied racial and ethnic groups; their contact, conflict, cooperation, and commingling. In his Associated Negro Press column, carried by 114 newspapers, he urged black empowerment through education, jobholding, thrift, moral uplift, voting, and patronizing “race” enterprises. Invited to speak at white colleges, he invoked tolerance, fairness, and justice, once declaring: “Segregation means death to the Negro race. It is a form of elimination that must be terminated if the Negro is to survive.”

Hancock worked for an integrated South and nation. For example, he co-organized the Durham Conference of southern black leaders (1942). Their “Durham manifesto” declared that “We are fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of segregation in our American society.” It challenged sympathetic whites to stand with them and helped catalyze post–World War II civil rights activism.