page_title: Andrew Sledd
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Andrew Sledd / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Archway in Sledd Hall at the University of Florida
context_page_description: Andrew Warren Sledd was an American theologian, university professor and university president. A native of Virginia, he was the son of a prominent Methodist minister, and was himself ordained as a minister after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees. He later earned a second master's degree and his doctorate.
  After teaching for several years, Sledd was chosen to be the last president of the University of Florida at Lake City, from 1904 to 1905, and the first president of the modern University of Florida, from 1905 to 1909. He was also president of Southern University from 1910 to 1914, and later became a professor and an influential biblical scholar at Emory University's Candler School of Theology from 1914 to 1939.
  Sledd first gained national recognition after he wrote a 1902 magazine article advocating better legal and social treatment of African-Americans. He is also prominently remembered for his role in founding the modern University of Florida, his scholarly analysis of biblical texts as literature, his call for an end to racial violence, and his influence on a generation of Methodist seminary students, scholars and ministers.
context_section_description: Sledd became a recognized New Testament scholar and a significant voice of educational, social and ecclesiastical reform within the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. For nearly twenty-five years, he remained a professor at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, until his death from a heart attack on March 16, 1939. Following Sledd's funeral, his body was buried in the Decatur Cemetery.
  In his 1960 History of Methodism in Alabama and West Florida, Marion Elias Lazenby remembered Sledd as "one of the [Methodist] Church's most scholarly and reverent teachers." Immediately after his death, Sledd was widely eulogized in Methodist churches across the country, and numerous obituaries appeared in regional and national newspapers across the country. The Atlanta Constitution, whose editorials had vilified Sledd in 1902, paid tribute to him in its obituary as a "nationally known Bible authority"; no mention was made of the "Sledd Affair."
  Sledd's advocacy of social change and an evolving understanding of biblical texts came at a high personal price. Given his chosen career of minister and professor, he never accumulated much personal wealth. Sledd died deep in debt, having lost the family home to foreclosure after the salaries of Candler professors were cut when financial support of the school fell during the Great Depression in the 1930s. His creditors obtained a deficiency judgment for the unpaid portion of his debt after the foreclosure and, following his death, forced the sale of some of his furniture and parts of his personal library in partial satisfaction of his remaining debts.
  The faculty of the University of Florida awarded Sledd the university's first honorary degree, a Doctor of Divinity, at the spring 1909 commencement ceremonies. In 1933, John J. Tigert, the university's third president, invited Professor Sledd to be the university's baccalaureate speaker. After his death, the university honored him again, renaming one of its early residence halls as Sledd Hall in 1939. The small state university, which Sledd had been instrumental in creating and organizing, is now one of the ten largest single-campus universities in the United States, with a total enrollment of nearly 50,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.
  Sledd and his wife Annie had nine children. Eight of their children graduated from Emory, seven with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a fact newsworthy enough to be picked up by the Associated Press wire service when youngest daughter Antoinette graduated from Emory the year following Sledd's death. Two of their sons followed in their father's footsteps, earning doctorates and becoming university professors: James H. Sledd became a Rhodes Scholar and noted professor of English literature at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas; Marvin B. Sledd was a professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech.
  In 2002, after almost a century of ignoring its role in the "Sledd Affair," Emory University sponsored a presentation entitled "Professing Justice: A Symposium on the Civil Rights Legacy of Professor Andrew Sledd." In holding the inter-disciplinary symposium, Emory University acted to "right a wrong committed a century ago by revisiting the 'Sledd affair' and reflecting on its meaning for Emory today."
caption: Passageway through Sledd Hall, a student residence hall of the University of Florida which was known as New Dormitory from its completion in 1929, but was renamed after Andrew Sledd's death in 1939
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