About Cedrick Bridgeforth
Cedrick D. Bridgeforth, EdD, is an ordained minister, author, educator, executive coach, consultant, public speaker, and the founder of 20/20 Leadership Lessons.
A native of Decatur, Alabama, Cedrick is a U.S. Air Force veteran and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Religion from Samford University, a Master of Divinity Degree from the Claremont School of Theology, and a Doctorate Degree in Organizational Leadership from Pepperdine University.
He is a former District Superintendent in the California-Pacific Conference of The United Methodist Church, served as Director of Academic Programs at the Ecumenical Center for Black Church Studies at the University of La Verne, and is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Prior publications include “Thoughts and Prayers” and “20/20 Leadership Lessons: Seeing Visions and Focusing on Reality.”
Where to find Cedrick
Alabama Grandson: A Black, Gay Minister’s Passage Out of Hiding
Southern. Black. Gay. Fatherless. Air Force Veteran. Ordained Methodist Minister. Master of hiding in plain sight. Cedrick Bridgeforth knows what it means to hold, hide, and wrestle with all of these identities. For years Cedrick had taken great pains to shield his full truth from the world. Then one day, at the height of his career, his entire universe came crashing down.
Equal parts preacher, poet, confessor, and consummate storyteller, Alabama Grandson chronicles Cedrick’s hard-fought journey to come to terms with the hidden and sometimes conflicting parts of himself. Bookended by poignant letters to his grandmother, Cedrick vulnerably depicts the suffering caused by denying his truth:
You were the most influential person in my life. Yet as much as I admired and appreciated you,
I did not trust you enough to say to you: “I am gay.”
Written over three decades after his grandmother’s death and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Alabama Grandson asks as many questions as it answers.
This memoir will bring you along for a compelling and multidirectional journey into the past in order to point the way forward. All the while, Cedrick elegantly models that there are different paths to living a fully authentic life and different ways of being a leader and agent of change in today’s world.