Frank Kingdon Collection

Dr. Frank Kingdon, educator, Methodist minister, and radio commentator, was born in London and came to the U.S. in 1912 and became minister of a small Methodist church in Maine. He received a BA degree from Boston University in 1920 and went on to do graduate work at Harvard. His doctorate in Divinity was bestowed by Albion College in 1927.

He moved to New Jersey to take the pulpit of a prominent Methodist church, and became a Trustee of Dana College in Newark. In 1934 he became president of the College. When the New Jersey Law School, Seth Boyden Business School, and Dana College merged in the 1930s to become the University of Newark, Kingdon was chosen as the University's first president (1936). He was the author of "John Cotton Dana, A Life" (1940), written with the encouragement of Dana's assistant and successor, Beatrice Winser, and of a number of other books on progressive theology and New Deal politics. He was deeply involved in the civic affairs of Newark, through the Newark Welfare Foundation and the Newark Community Chest, among other organizations.

In the months leading up to the United States' entrance into the World War II, Kingdon pressed for U.S. entry into the war through his membership in the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the Fight for Freedom Committee, and other organizations. In 1940 he left the University of Newark to chair the Emergency Rescue Committee, which assisted European artists and intellectuals seeking to flee Nazi-dominated countries. In this work, and in later years, he became closely associated with Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many other progressive leaders and intellectuals. He took an active role in the New Jersey Joint Council on International Relations, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the Union for Democracy. In the late 1930s Kingdon gave weekly addresses as part of the Newark Museum Program on Newark's WOR radio station; after the War, he was a commentator for programs produced by radio stations WMCA and WINS in New York. As a daily columnist for the New York Post in the 1940s and 50s he attempted to influence the Democratic Party from the left, but he broke with the organization Progressive Citizens of America in 1947 over the issue of running Henry Wallace as a third-party candidate, a move which he opposed.

Frank Kingdon died at his home in New York City in 1972.