The Right Rev. Terry Allen White, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, will speak Saturday, Oct. 12, at Grace Episcopal Church, 216 E. Sixth St., for a program on the Rev. A.H. McNeil. The program begins at 10:30 a.m.
Now in its third year in Hopkinsville, the McNeil program is sponsored by the diocese’s Racial Healing Commission. The public is invited to hear about the life and work of McNeil, an early Black religious leader in Hopkinsville.
Although his full name was Alexander Hamilton McNeil, he somehow became known as Aaron McNeil in Hopkinsville. Today the Aaron McNeil House, a nonprofit crisis relief agency, is run from the church building at Second and Liberty streets where he worked during his tenure in Hopkinsville.
McNeil was born Oct. 10, 1958, in North Carolina, and presumably began life enslaved, according to research by the Very Rev. Stephen Spicer, rector at Grace, and his wife, Amy Spicer.
He studied for four years at Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute, which later became Hampton University in Virginia, and graduated in 1877. He was a school teacher, and in 1889 began studying theology at Howard University in Washington.