Charles Lawrence Evans (2 May 1908–17 August 1984), Baptist leader, was born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, and was the son of Charles Lawrence Evans and Florence Anna Gray Evans. He graduated from Pleasantville High School and in 1933 from Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania. Three years later he received a master of theology degree from Lincoln University Seminary and in June 1937 moved to Virginia to be pastor of First Baptist Church in Suffolk. On 29 August of that year Evans married Alice Priscilla Rasin, daughter of a clergyman, in Pleasantville. They had one daughter.

C. L. Evans, as he was often known professionally, remained in Suffolk until early in 1942, when he became pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Petersburg. During four years in Petersburg he published a regular column entitled "Sunday School Lesson" in the weekly Norfolk Journal and Guide that circulated widely in eastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. In 1946 Evans moved to Richmond to begin more than thirty years as executive secretary of the Baptist General Convention of Virginia with offices at Virginia Union University, where he occasionally taught. He became a well-known denominational leader and frequently spoke and preached throughout Virginia and increased the convention's membership from 207 to 278 congregations with an annual budget of more than $300,000.

For ten years beginning late in the 1940s he hosted a Sunday-morning radio program, the Baptist Hour, on a Richmond radio station. In 1976 he traveled to Helsinki, Finland, to participate in the World Peace Council. By the time Evans retired from the largest African American Baptist organization in the state in December 1977, he had made eight trips abroad with the Baptist World Alliance, four of which were to the Holy Land. Shortly after his retirement he told an interviewer that he thought of his forty years in the ministry "not so much in terms of religion as in racial progress. That's what it's been from the start."

When Evans was in Suffolk late in the 1930s he helped found a Boy Scout troop for African Americans. Local scouting officials refused to cooperate, and he had to appeal to scouting's national office for permission, but he had to accept an embarrassing and humiliating proviso that scouts in his troop not wear scouting uniforms for the first six months so as not to alienate local white scouts. He nevertheless supported scouting for three decades.

In 1948 Evans founded the Virginia Baptist Children's Home in Petersburg and was its first secretary. He served as an officer and on the board of local and state chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and early in 1956, less than two years after the Supreme Court of the United States declared mandatory racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, joined other African Americans in Virginia who spoke out against a proposal to allow tax money to be used to fund private schools for white students. In a letter to the Washington Post Evans denounced it as a subterfuge to avoid desegregation and objected that it would require everybody to pay taxes for schools that many people could not attend and as a scheme that would force taxpayers "indirectly to support hate groups."

Evans served on the board of Virginia Union University, which in 1958 granted him an honorary doctor of divinity degree. In 1970 he became one of the earliest African Americans elected president of the Virginia Council of Churches. Charles Lawrence Evans died of cardiac arrest at his Richmond home on 17 August 1984 and after a funeral at Second Baptist Church was buried in the city's Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates in Death Certificate, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; feature article in Richmond News Leader, 11 Feb. 1978 (first quotation and portrait); marriage date in Baltimore Afro-American, 4 Sept. 1937; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 18 Sept. 1937, 18 June 1938, 3 Jan., 21 Feb. 1942, 14 Jan. 1956, 20 Jun 1970; Washington Post, 8 Jan. 1956 (second quotation); obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 18 Aug. 1984, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 Aug. 1984, and Richmond Afro-American, 1 Sept. 1984.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Lisa Clemmer.

How to cite this page:
Lisa Clemmer, "Charles Lawrence Evans (1908–1984)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Evans_Charles_Lawrence, accessed [today's date]).

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