Kermit Overton (1972)

Kermit Everett Overton was born in June 1924 in Austin, Texas, and served in the United States Marine Corps from 1942 to 1945. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1951 and completed a Divinity degree at Lincoln University in 1958. A member of Berean Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia, Pa.), in the fifties Overton worked at YMCAs in New Jersey, was a case worker for the Philadelphia Department of Welfare, and was a chaplain to migrant workers under the auspices of the New Jersey Council of Churches.

From 1964 to 1967 he served as a pastor and industrial chaplain of the Presbyterian Church of Nigeria, working in Port Harcourt at the beginning of the Nigerian-Biafran War. Returning to Philadelphia in 1968, Overton worked at the John Gloucester House, an experimental ministry project of the presbytery in South Philadelphia, before taking the pastorate at First African Presbyterian Church in 1970. Overton was moderator of the Presbytery of Philadelphia in 1979. He retired from First African in 1989, and died in 1996.