Verna Josephine Dozier was a teacher of English literature at high school level and a noted Episcopal religious educator who focused on Bible study claiming the authority of laity. Dozier was in 1917 in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington, D.C. the oldest of two daughters of Lonna and Lucie E. Carter Dozier. She attended Washington’s Dunbar High School, where she skipped two grades and prepared to enter college when she was 15. She received her B.A. in English from Howard University in 1937 and an M.A. in English literature in 1938.
Ms. Dozier had always wanted to be a teacher, and her first career was dedicated to the public schools. After receiving her master’s degree, she taught for a year in Baltimore, then moved back to serve the rest of her career in the Washington schools, first at Brown Junior High School, then Cardozo High School, and finally at Ballou High School. For 34 years she worked for the Washington, D.C. Board of Education, where she served as an administrator, and worked to develop innovative curricula. Dozier may have been the first black person to head a department in the area’s newly integrated school system. In June of 1975, Dozier took early retirement.
She received two honorary doctorates: a Doctor of Humane Letters from the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Virginia, and a Doctor of Divinity from the University of the South in 1988. Dozier’s primary intellectual and religious influences were grounded in her closely knit family. Her early religious faith was shaped by her agnostic father and her Baptist mother. When she began college, Dozier stopped going to the local Baptist church and began going with her father to the Howard University Chapel to hear the preaching of its noted theologians – Dean Howard, Dr. Benjamin Mays, and others.
Thurman’s writing, theology, and worldview would influence Dozier throughout her life. She was fond of quoting his vision of God’s desire for creation: “A friendly world of friendly folk, Beneath a friendly sky.” At Howard, she also grew interested in other denominations and religions, and was active in an ecumenical movement, the Washington Federation of Churches. In 1950, she joined the multi-denominational, highly disciplined community founded by Gordon Cosby, the Church of the Saviour.
By the 1950s, Dozier was becoming well known in educational circles for teaching scripture. She taught at national Episcopal Youth summer conferences and at Washington’s Diocesan School of Christian Living, held in Chevy Chase, Maryland. There she came to know Bill Baxter, a social activist who invited her in 1955 to join the Episcopal parish where he served, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill.
Later in life, she remarked, “When I discovered the Episcopal Church, it was as if I had been waiting for that all my life. Dozier was confirmed at St. Mark’s. For many years she taught classes at the parish about the Bible to people who initially did not seem to know much about the Christian story. She served on the vestry as the parish’s first woman Senior Warden, consulting with clergy and lay readers, and holding, toward the end of the life, an honorary appointment as Warden Emerita.
In 2003, she received the first Bishop’s Award in the Diocese of Washington for extraordinary contributions to the diocese. What she styled as her “second career” and her “continuing ministry” was serving as a freelance consultant in Bible Study and the ministry of the laity. Over two decades, Dozier was an invite speaker, retreat and workshop leader in all of the provinces, most of the dioceses, and many of the parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and the Episcopal Church at the national level.
Verna Josephine Dozier died on September 1, 2006, at Collington Episcopal Life Care Community in Milwaukee, MD
Source: Union of Black Episcopalians