Thomas Freeman (debate coach)

Freeman was born in Richmond, Virginia, one of fifteen children born to his father Louis Hyne Freeman, a vegetable peddler, and his mother Louise Elizabeth (Willis) Freeman, who managed the home.^[4] As a child, he farmed vegetables for his father's produce store and became a boy preacher in his Baptist church, delivering his first sermon at the age of nine. At fifteen, he enrolled at Virginia Union University and graduated in 1939 with an English degree.^[4]

In 1942, Freeman earned a Bachelor of Divinity from Andover Newton Seminary, where he enrolled only three years after the school began enrolling African American students. Six years later, in 1948, he earned his doctorate in Homiletics from the University of Chicago Divinity School.^[4]

Freeman taught as a visiting lecturer at Morehouse College in 1947, where a young Martin Luther King Jr. was among his undergraduate students.^[4] In 1949, he arrived at the newly created Texas Southern University (TSU) to teach philosophy, remaining connected to the Houston institution for 71 years. He retired from teaching at TSU in 2013.^[4]

In 1972, Freeman was also appointed as a lecturer in religion at Rice University, where he became the first African American faculty member in the school's School of Humanities and taught regularly until 1994.^[8]

• Thomas F. Freeman Collection of home movies at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image

This article about an American educator is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information.

• v
• t
• e