The Reverand Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry
(1825-1903)
President of the Board of Trustees, Richmond College, 1882-1886, 1890-1897
J.L.M. Curry graduated from Franklin College, now part of the University of Georgia system, in 1843. He studied law at Harvard and received the bachelor of laws degree there in 1845. Curry received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Mercer University in 1867 and from the University of Georgia in 1887. He was awarded an honorary doctor of divinity degree by Rochester University in 1871.
Curry was an ordained minister and loved to preach but was never a regular pastor. He served in the Mexican War and later began a law practice before entering politics. Mr. Curry served in the Alabama legislature three times and was a member of the United States Congress from Alabama from 1857-1861.
During the Civil War, Mr. Curry served as lieutenant colonel of Cavalry in the Confederate Army. He was a member of the first permanent Confederate Congress from 1862–1864. In 1865, Curry was named president of Howard College in Alabama.
J.L.M. Curry held the chair of English in Richmond College from 1868–1881. He also taught moral philosophy and constitutional and international law. Curry was one of the three men who inaugurated the Richmond College Law School in 1870. He resigned from the College’s faculty in 1881 and was elected a trustee. Curry served two terms as president of the College’s Board of Trustees.
Mr. Curry was a trustee of Columbian College and of the Farmville Normal School (now Longwood College), executive officer of the Slater Fund for negro schools in the South, a member of the General Education Board, as well as supervisory director of the Southern Education Board. The Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia was named for him.
Curry was U.S. Minister to Spain from 1885–1889. In 1902, he was Ambassador Extraordinary to Spain and received the decoration of the Royal Order of Charles III from the Spanish government.
Mr. Curry was prominent among Baptists in the South. For five years, he was president of the Baptist General Association of Virginia; for 12 years, he was president of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention; and he was a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.