On this day in 1930 Charles Evans Hughes joined one of the Baptist churches in Washington, D.C., but sadly I’m not sure which. Much earlier, Charles had graduated from Brown University, the Baptist’s first school of higher learning in this country. He went on to other schools, and then he began to practice law, before becoming Governor of New York State. For a while after that he was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, after which he ran for the presidency, but he was defeated by Woodrow Wilson. Eventually, he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by President Herbert Hoover. This brought him back to Washington.
Charles Evans Hughes was the son of a Baptist pastor. I don’t know when he was born again, but by the age of five he was reading the Bible during family devotions. On his eighth birthday his father gave him a Greek New Testament. Throughout his life, in addition to showing great intelligence, he gave a consistent testimony of God’s saving grace.
On the day of his joining the church in Washington, several others stepped forward to join and to give their testimony. One prospective member was a Chinese laundryman who had moved from San Francisco. As several people stood close to the pulpit, Ah Sing stood by himself at the far side, next to the wall. When famous Charles Evans Hughes stepped up, he deliberately walked to the side of the stage in order to stand beside the oriental man. When everyone was assembled, the pastor said, “I do not want this congregation to miss the remarkable illustration of the fact that at the cross of Jesus Christ the ground is level.”
– Source: “This Day in Baptist History II” by Cummins and Thompson