Reverend Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker: Philosopher Born Enslaved

From slave to Doctor of Philosophy to preacher, Thomas Nelson Baker exemplifies the struggles and rewards of becoming and being an educated Black man in Jim Crow America. His biography is both a lesson in history and a source of inspiration. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker was the first known African American to receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy in the United States. Born a slave in 1860 in Eastville, Virginia, Dr. Baker spent his youth and early manhood as a farm laborer, sporadically attending schools for freed people until he was 12 years old.Abbreviated as his education was, he nonetheless gained from it an unquenchable love of learning, dreaming of once more sitting in a classroom.The opportunity to do so came when he was 21 years of age at which time he entered Gen’l.George Chapman Armstrong’s Hampton Agricultural & Normal School, graduating in 1885.After teaching for one year in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, he attended Mount Hermon Boys’ School in Massachusetts, coming under the influe