Home / Full timeline / Nelson W. Trout is elected Bishop of the American Lutheran Church’s South Pacific District, becoming the first Black person ever elected to full-time office among North American Lutheran Church bodies.
Nelson W. Trout is elected Bishop of the American Lutheran Church’s South Pacific District, becoming the first Black person ever elected to full-time office among North American Lutheran Church bodies.
1983 (Jun 17)
Nelson W. Trout, the sixty-two-year-old professor and director of minority studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, was elected Bishop of the American Lutheran Church's South Pacific District (located in California), becoming the first Black person ever elected to full-time office among North American Lutheran Church bodies. The members of the Lutheran Church in the United States have been historically concentrated among Scandinavian and Germanic ethnic groups in the East and Midwest and had little success in attracting large members of Blacks to the denomination. Election of Blacks to positions of "prominence in predominantly-White denominations has been a way of returning the church's focus to Black concerns," according to the National Leader, a Black-oriented news digest. Trout himself said of his election, “It's the one exception that defies the rule. It does not mean that the rapture has come or anything like that. It means that at a certain time and place the Lord was in our midst and He blessed us."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.