Henry Beard Delany

Henry Beard Delany (February 5, 1858 – April 14, 1928) was the first African-American elected Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The Episcopal Church honors him, along with fellow African American bishop Edward Thomas Demby, who died on the same day in 1957, with a feast day on the liturgical calendar on the anniversary of their deaths, April 14.

Henry Delany was born into slavery in St. Mary's, Georgia in 1858. His parents were Thomas Delany, a ship and house carpenter, and Sarah, a house servant to a Methodist family in that town. After the American Civil War and emancipation, the family moved to Fernandina Beach, Florida, where young Delany learned brick laying, plastery and carpentry from his father, and also helped on the family farm. He was able to attend a school funded by the Freedmen's Bureau and staffed by missionaries. In 1881 the rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in that town, Rev. Owen Thackera, funded a scholarship to allow Delany to attend St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina, which episcopal priests had founded in 1867 to educate newly freed men and women. There, Delany studied theology, music and other subjects.

Upon graduating in 1885, Delany joined the faculty, where he remained until 1908. He taught carpentry and masonry and supervised building projects, as well as (after the ordinations discussed below) served as the school's vice-principal (1889-1908), chaplain and musician. Although not trained as an architect, Delany is credited as the architect as well as builder of the Norman Gothic-style historic chapel, crafted in part from stone quarried on campus. Delany and the students also built a library in 1898, and St. Agnes' Hospital (completed 1909 and the only hospital serving blacks in the area until 1940) on the St. Augustine's College campus.

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