Reverend Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker

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 yea