Moses William Howard, Jr. (born March 3, 1946, in Americus, Georgia) is an American cleric, former college president, community and business leader. He is known for his involvement in ecumenical organizations domestically and internationally and in international affairs, especially within the Middle East and Southern Africa. He is the son of the late Laura Turner Howard and the late Moses William Howard, Sr. He attended public schools in Americus before enrolling in Morehouse College, where he graduated in 1968. He earned a Master of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1972. His worldview was shaped initially in response to the racial segregation he experienced in his hometown, where he participated in voter registration drives in the early 1960s. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Morehouse and was heavily influenced by Professors Samuel Woodrow Williams and Lucius M. Tobin (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/lucius-m-tobin-charles-e-batten). His principal academic advisor at Princeton was Professor Edward Jabra Jurgi.
During his tenure at NYTS, the Seminary inaugurated two academic partnerships with area graduate schools in social work and urban studies, doubled its endowment, and won the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations Award for Excellence.
Since 2016, he has worked with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations on issues of governance, management and leadership.
In 2020, Black, Not Dutch was published by Africa World Press. This is Dr. Howard's account of how the Reformed Church in America responded to the Black Manifesto and its demand for reparations to African Americans for slavery and subsequent oppression.
In 2022, Howard joined with other residents of his community in demonstrating how a diverse community can live together, employing values of justice, fair play and mutual respect. They have led the community in conversations related to reparations for the enslavement of Africans in America; protecting public schools from efforts to limit instruction in the history and culture of diverse populations; affordable housing; opposition to book banning; gun safety; the Township’s Master Plan; treatment of local students with different sexual orientation; and recognition of African American history in the region, all topics deemed vital to engagement of the kind that strengthens community.
International engagements
For most of the 1970s and 1980s, Howard played a role in the movement for freedom from colonialism and white minority rule in Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa) and the former Portuguese colonies. From 1975 until 1990, the year of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, Howard was denied visas to enter the Republic of South Africa by the apartheid government. During this period, he chaired the Board of the American Committee on Africa; he presided at the United Nations-sponsored North American Regional Conference for Action Against Apartheid in 1984, and the 1981 United Nations Seminar on Bank Loans to South Africa in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1985, he stood with New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean when he signed a bill divesting State holdings of some $2 billion from companies doing business in South Africa. With Henry F. Henderson, a New Jersey businessman and Commissioner of the Port Authority of NY/NJ, Howard founded Management Futures, an initiative that provided internships to black South Africans in fields from which they had been excluded under the Job Reservations Act.
Howard married Barbara J. Wright in 1970. They are the parents of three adult children.
Jazz aficionado
A jazz enthusiast and collector, Howard has a particular interest in the intersection of Spirituals, Blues, and Jazz. While pastor at Bethany, he inspired the start of a Jazz Vespers, which included world renown jazz musicians in worship.
