Master’s student is Utica’s youngest-ever elected official and the youngest elected Black official in New York State
Delvin Moody had an early vocation. Growing up in the Pentecostal-Holiness Church where his grandmother preached, he was compelled to follow her path. “I felt called to impart a message, to become a minister,” he says. By 13, he was leading services and was profiled in his hometown paper, the Utica Observer-Dispatch.
“That foundation later would turn into not just preaching about a social revolutionary — a Palestinian Jew by the name of Jesus — but moreso, as [the theologian] Walter Rauschenbusch would put it, preaching the social gospel, and seeing how faith was a precursor of social activism,” Moody says.
Today, combining his faith, intellect, and personal drive to revitalize his community, Moody is pursuing a master’s in political theology at Colgate while also representing his Cornhill neighbors on Utica’s Common Council. He’s the youngest- ever elected official of the city and the youngest elected Black official in New York State.
“I felt that people were missing a heavy component in the conversation of, how do we transform the inner city? I had a few ideas, and I earnestly felt I was the best person to represent Cornhill,” he says. “Together with meditation and prayer and talking with family, [I knew] it was time to step forward and become a public servant.”
In Colgate’s Department of Religion, he’s researching the interplay of politics and religion “through the lens of the African American experience, particularly looking at the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina as well as Africanized slave religions in the Antebellum South,” he explains.
Moody’s graduate adviser, Professor Harvey Sindima, says: “Delvin’s view that religion is a liberating force, especially within the prophetic tradition of Black Christianity in America, is not simply a matter of intellectual interest, but the very embodiment of his being.” A well-known figure in Utica since his youth, Moody benefited from three regional programs, Young Scholars Liberty Partnerships Program, Junior Frontiers of the Mohawk Valley, and On Point for College. The latter honored him with its student Star Award at its banquet last year, where he offered the opening and closing prayers.
Now he’s paying those
opportunities forward through
his day job as a program
specialist for Mohawk Valley
Community College’s Gear
Up program, helping middle
schoolers prepare for high
school, explore college options,
and become career ready. “From
9 to 5, I help kids become viable
citizens, and then from 5 to 9 I
help their parents,” he chuckled.
In all his pursuits, Moody goes by the motto: “The worst anybody can tell you is no. If I have a vision that I feel strongly about, my faith tells me there are going to be provisions somewhere down the road. I live by that.”