Virgil Wood

Virgil Alexander Wood (April 6, 1931 – December 28, 2024) was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. Ordained as a minister in his late teens, Wood served various churches in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Virginia for over 50 years. He served as pastor of the Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg between 1958 and 1963, where he established the Lynchburg Improvement Association, a local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As a close associate of Martin Luther King, Wood helped organize the state of Virginia for the 1963 March on Washington. He spent the next 10 years in Boston, where he was heavily involved in civil rights activism, particularly against school segregation. He later moved to Texas after retiring from pastoral duties in 2005, and continued to promote the cause of Civil Rights.