In Darkness with God: The Life of Joseph Gomez, a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church

In great detail, Gomez-Jefferson, one of Bishop Joseph Gomez's two daughters, takes readers from her father's birth on Antigua in 1890 to his death and burial in Detroit in 1979. Gomez came to the U.S. when he was 18, and, after graduating from Wilberforce College in Ohio, he began his years of active ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1948, he was ordained an A.M.E. bishop. While active as a minister, he was also a scholar and a humanitarian, speaking out fervently for civil rights. Gomez-Jefferson reveals the trials the bishop faced as he walked through the darkness of racism from the 1920s through the 1960s. The son of an African mother and Portuguese father, Gomez was vehemently opposed by the Ku Klux Klan in his early ministry, and he was outspoken in his protest against the enlistment of black servicemen to fight both at home and abroad. Gomez-Jefferson's account of her father's public life is interspersed with engaging tales of Gomez as a private man with a touching sense of humor and a lifelong love of poetry. This valuable book offers a look at a man committed to ministering to people on social, economic, political and spiritual levels. (Dec.)