William Henry Sheppard - Early Life

Early Life

Sheppard was born in Waynesboro, Virginia on March 8, 1865, to William Henry Sheppard, Sr. and Fannie Frances Sheppard (née Martin), a free "dark mulatto", a month before the end of the American Civil War. No records exist to confirm William Sr.'s status as a slave or freedman, but it has been speculated that he may have been among the slaves forced to serve the Confederacy as Union troops marched upon the South. William Sr. was a barber, and the family has been described as the closest to middle class that blacks could have achieved given the time and place. At age twelve, William Jr. became a stable boy for a white family several miles away while continuing to attend school; he remembered his two-year stay fondly and maintained written correspondence with the family for many years. Sheppard next worked as a waiter to put himself through the newly created Hampton Institute, where Booker T. Washington was among his instructors in a program that allowed students to work during the day and attend classes at night. A significant influence on his appreciation for native cultures was the "Curiosity Room", in which the school's founder maintained a collection of Native Hawaiian and Native American works of art. Later in life he would collect artifacts from the Congo, specifically those of the Kuba, and bring them back for this room, as evidenced by his letters home, such as "t was on the first of September, 1890 that William H. Sheppard addressed a letter to General Samuel Armstrong, Hampton, From Stanley Pool, Africa, that he had many artifacts, spears, idols, etc., and he was '...saving them for the Curiosity Room at Hampton'".

After graduation, Sheppard was recommended to Tuscaloosa Theological Institute (now Stillman College, which dedicated its library in Sheppard's honor in 1959) in Alabama. He met Lucy Gantt near the end of his time there and the two became engaged, although they would not marry for ten years. Sheppard cultivated a desire to preach in Africa, but despite the support of Tuscaloosa founder Charles Stillman, the Southern Presbyterian Church had yet to establish its mission in the Congo. He was ordained in 1888 and served as pastor to a church in Atlanta, Georgia, but did not adapt well to the life of an urban black in a heavily segregated area of the Southern United States. After two years of writing to the Presbyterian Foreign Missionary Board in Baltimore, Maryland to inquire about starting a mission in Africa, he became frustrated by the vague rationale of the rejection letters and took a train to Baltimore to ask the chairman in person. The man politely informed Sheppard that the board would not send a black man without a white supervisor.

Samuel Lapsley, an eager but inexperienced white man from a wealthy family, finally enabled Sheppard's journey to Africa. They "inaugurated the unique principle of sending out together, with equal ecclesiastical rights and, as far as possible, in equal numbers, white and colored workers".