C. Richard Cox, a former resident of Wyndmoor, retired vice president for programs at the William Penn Foundation, civil rights activist, Methodist minister, passed away on Friday, July 25, of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 91.
“The Rev. Cox spent most of his adult life, beginning in the late 1950s, striving for civil rights, preaching and serving in Methodist churches, and administering a wide array of social, faith, and educational programs that benefit underserved children, students, families, neighborhoods, and others around the world,” his obituary said.
He went on to join the William Penn Foundation in 1980, retiring in 1998 from the Philadelphia-based grant-making organization. During his tenure, he oversaw projects that “provided daycare services to parents and free smoke detectors to businesses and homeowners, connected urban young people with summer jobs, prevented child abuse and crime, and addressed all kinds of community tensions,” his obituary said.
Reverend Cox’s obituary continues:
In the 1950s and ’60s, he worked alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Fred Shuttlesworth, and other civil rights leaders in Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere as they registered voters, marched, and protested. He was part of the notable 1963 Children’s March in Birmingham, Ala., and told stories later of being jailed and beaten by police.
The Rev. Cox earned service and faith awards from the New York NAACP, Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, Family Planning Council, and other groups. He wrote grants, hosted leadership workshops for community organizers, mentored young people in all kinds of things, and wrote heartfelt letters about politics and current events to the editor of The Inquirer.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania in 1956 and a master’s degree in urban sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He also studied in New York at the Union Theological Seminary and Jewish Theological Seminary, and at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University.
Services are to be at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 27, at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, 6001 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, 19144. Live online here.
Donations in his name may be made to the Children’s Justice Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation, Box 826728, Philadelphia, Pa. 19182; and the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, 6001 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19144.
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Photo: Courtesy of the family via The Philadelphia Inquirer