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In
1868, Major
Harrison Hobart Woodsmall, eldest son of Jefferson Hezekiah
Woodsmall, served
as an alternate delegate for the 6th District of
Indiana to the Republican National Convention.
He supported Ulysses S. Grant and the more vigorous
southern reconstruction policies of the Radical Republicans.
He left politics and went on to get a divinity degree
in South Carolina. In
1878, Rev.
Harrison Hobart Woodsmall
returned to the south, to found the Alabama Baptist
Normal and Theological School. a
four-year, private, co-ed, liberal arts institution affiliated
with the Alabama State Missionary Baptist Convention.
He founded the school to train blacks to become
ministers and teachers. Later
that year, the school purchased the old Selma Fair Grounds and
moved into the exposition buildings.
The school was incorporated in 1881 under its
second president who was born a slave. In 1884, under its
third president, the first class of eleven men and women
graduated. The institution was officially named Selma
University in 1908, enabling it to confer degrees and grant
diplomas. The University included an elementary school, high
school, college, and theological school until 1956 when the
pre-college programs were discontinued.
A
picture of Rev.
Harrison Woodsmall of Franklin, Indiana, may be seen on the
internet at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/boothe/ill194.html.
This is his picture in the 1895 publication “The
Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of
Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Work” by Charles
Octavius Boothe (p. 194). Rev. Harrison
Hobart Woodsmall was dedicated to uplifting the freed slaves.
In 1965, the famous march for civil rights for
blacks on the Pettus Bridge, led by
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., originated in the Brown
Chapel Church in Selma. Rev.
Harrison Hobart Woodsmall helped nurture in Selma what would
become the civil rights movement.
There were, thus, two contemporary Baptist "Rev.
Woodsmalls": Rev. Harrison Hobart
Woodsmall, the Union veteran in Selma, Alabama and the
Rev. George Lasley Woodsmall, the Confederate veteran in
Boone/Randolph Cos., Missouri.
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