An oddly disjointed plaque on the south side of St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral near downtown Memphis commemorates the service to the faith by Bishop Thomas F Gailor, who served as Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee for 32 years, and also served for 6 years as a national organizing president in the Episcopal church hierarchy.
The plaque reads as follows:
"1860 -- This Cathedral – 1926
Was completed Jan. 19 1926
As a testimonial to Bishop Thomas F. Gailor
In commemoration of his services as Bishop of Tennessee for thirty two years and for six years Organizing President of the National Council of the Episcopal Church"
In the course of researching this man, Blasterz learned that he was an early and ardent denunciator of Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jewish people.
From the Summer 2007 edition of the Sewanee Alumni Magazine: (
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"Summer 2007
Knowing the future
By Samuel R. Williamson
The Sesquicentennial History Project has made a number of discoveries, from the mock groundbreaking ceremony for All Saints’ Chapel in the fall of 1904 to the fact that Sewanee and Vanderbilt would have continued playing football, even after Sewanee left the Southeastern Conference. Only World War II finally put an end to the series. But one of the most surprising discoveries is the vigorous public opposition that Bishop Thomas Gailor gave at an anti-Nazi rally held in Memphis in March 1933, just weeks after Hitler’s accession to power in Germany.
Generations of Sewanee undergraduates remember Gailor only for the less-than-effective dining hall named in his memory. Yet his career at Sewanee was unusual, for he is the only person to have been chaplain, vice chancellor and chancellor, serving in the latter capacity from 1908 to 1935. A friend of American presidents, one of the three speakers at the 1907 groundbreaking for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the first interim presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Gailor was the most prominent Southern Episcopal clergyman of his day. He was a persona.
Thus his commitment to help the Jewish community in Memphis meant public attention to whatever was said by him. On March 24, 1933, the Memphis Commercial Appeal announced “Protest Meeting to Hear Bishop Gailor.” He would, the paper reported, be one of the speakers at a “city-wide, non-sectarian mass meeting in Ellis Auditorium in protest of the persecution of the German Jewry by the regime under Adolf Hitler.”
In his diary for March 28, 1933, Gailor wrote simply: “8 p.m. address at meeting to protest against Hitler’s treatment of Jews.”
But the Commercial Appeal on March 29, 1933, was far more fulsome: “Memphians Protest Anti-Jewish Activity: Resolution Condemning Hitler Adopted at Mass Meeting: More than 1,500 Attend: Bishop Gailor Asserts Persecution Has Denied Individual Right to Happiness and Freedom — Relapse Into Savagery.” At the meeting Gailor had delivered the main address and had been “accorded thunderous applause on his introduction by Mayor Overton who presided.”
The bishop had begun by reviewing the German situation. He told the audience “It is impossible to believe that sane men would so indulge their madness. Their acts are sheer and brutal barbarism and a contradiction of the principles of civilization.” Then he went on, well before President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms’ address of January 1941, to proclaim the requirements of and principles for a civilized society:
The right of the individual to freedom and happiness.
Individual, national and international intolerance to human suffering.
Mutual respect and co-operation among mankind.
Repudiation of religious and racial persecution and prejudice.
“Any violation of these principles,” insisted Gailor, meant “a relapse into savagery.” He ended his speech with the ringing declaration: “I stand second to no man in my admiration of the Jews and their accomplishments. I consider it a privilege to be here.”
Gailor’s public stance against the Nazi regime preceded by years that of most American political leaders and even church leaders; indeed, his warnings came even before the first major mass arrest of Jews and dissidents in Germany. His prophetic words were unfortunately forgotten as the 1930s continued and most Americans turned a blind eye to events in Germany. In 1945, a decade after Gailor’s death, Americans would see the realization of his worst fears in the horrors of the death camps and the Holocaust.
Thomas Gailor was a man for all seasons, the longest serving of all the chancellors of the University, whose house once stood on the site of today’s Clement Chen Hall, and whose memory is now more perfectly honored in a renovated Gailor Hall that serves as the center for the humanities. Still, his 1933 words also deserve recognition and remembrance, for they say much about the man and his place in Sewanee’s long history.
Bishop Gailor’s courageous pronouncement, within of weeks of Hitler having taken power, serves as a powerful reminder that many associated with Sewanee over the years have taken courageous stands on issues — social and political — that have had an impact upon American politics and American religious life."