We’ve Come This Far

Our Racial Justice Working Group publishes this blog of its deliberations from time to time.

UK Marks Black History Month

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We’ve Come This Far By Faith
October 22, 2024

We first learned of the United Kingdom’s Black History Month, which is celebrated in October, from the Episcopal News Service article, “Church of England prepares to mark October as Black History Month.”

In addition to the musical offerings mentioned in the above article, one of the several lectures hosted by cathedrals and churches will be given by David Olusoga, OBE, professor of Public History at the University of Manchester and author of Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016). A BBC documentary of the same name is also posted on YouTube.

This year’s theme for the month is “Reclaiming Narratives,” and the Church of England has a rich page of resources for additional prayer, contemplation, and reflection. Study days, lectures, services, and other events have been planned, listed here:

We were happy to see that a film that we viewed a few months ago is now widely available on YouTube: “After the Flood: The Church, Slavery, and Reconciliation.”

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church October 22, 2024

–Published in

Episcopal Church Summit on Truth-telling and Reparations

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The first summary of the Episcopal Church’s recent Summit on Truth-telling and Reparations has been published in the Episcopal News Service: “Church Summit Deeply Explores Truth-telling and Reckoning with an Eye Toward Reparations”.

The meeting included 106 people representing 34 dioceses who gathered “to share strategies, best practices, and resources and to pray for and encourage one another in their work.” These representatives from parishes across the country have done work in three areas; truth-telling, reckoning, and discernment. “In practical terms, truth-telling means identifying theologies and practices to unearth and name historic and systemic racial injustices; reckoning takes the form of publicly owning and naming harms and injustices; and discernment is coming to a collective, agreed-upon definition of what constitutes healing and repair.”

We recommend this article which includes a helpful link to a page with resources gathered by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC. You will “meet” several of the leaders in the Church that our group has learned from in the
past year of our study in the videos linked therein.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church September 25 & October 2, 2024

Old North Church Reckons with its Links to Slavery

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Old North Reckons with its Links to Slavery

Several years ago, the Episcopal News Service reported on Old North Church’s deepening its research into its connections with the slave trade, “Iconic Boston
Church Reckons with its Links to Slavery.”

Our curiosity about what has been learned since, and how the church tells its stories, led to tour Old North, Boston’s oldest surviving church. Guides lead visitors to the gallery where they narrate the history of individuals and families who were not able to purchase pews and who sat in the balcony of the church. Parishioners’ children sat on the right side facing the altar while free blacks, enslaved persons, indentured servants, and Indigenous peoples were assigned to the left side. After combing through pew records and other materials, the church has been able to piece together stories of community support and relationships that developed in the gallery. The stories are incomplete–many with questions remain–yet some patterns of social interactions are discernable. The results of their inquiries are well-presented in signage placed in certain pews, as well as on their web page, “The People in the Pews.” Continue reading →

Remembering Jonathan Myrick Daniels

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This week we pause to remember Jonathan Myrick Daniels, civil rights activist and Episcopal seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School, who sacrificed his life in the service of voting rights marchers in Selma. He defended Ruby Sales, shielding her from death in an altercation with law enforcement on August 20, 1965.

Daniels was responding to Martin Luther King’s call for clergy of all faiths to support voting rights and the integration of churches. He first attended the Selma to Montgomery March and returned to Selma to assist in a voter-registration project in Lowndes County. Daniels explained his return to Selma in this way: “something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back. I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question…I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.”

The Episcopal Church honors Daniels on August 14th. He is recognized as a martyr and was added to the observances of Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1999. August 14, 1965, was the day he and the other activists were arrested in Fort Deposit, Alabama for protests calling for the integration of public places and voting rights (six days before his assassination). Continue reading →

James Baldwin’s Relevance for Our Time

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August 2, 2024 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth in New York City in 1924. Provocative and controversial during his own time and beyond, Baldwin is being remembered in tributes highlighting his artistry, influences, and the relevance of his work to today’s world.

The BBC released several broadcasts in this vein last month. Among them is the “Front Row” podcast of July 29, 2024, which hosted Colm Tóibín, author of On James Baldwin (Brandeis University Press, 2024). Tóibín noted that Baldwin was a careful reader, a masterful writer, and one who drew upon the ritual of religion to craft soaring and serious prose. Another contributor, Bonnie Greer, noted that Baldwin’s rhythmic sensibility had roots in the craft of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, one of Baldwin’s at DeWitt High School. Continue reading →

Pauli Murray’s Reflections on Issues Dividing the Church

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Following our Chapel Camp on the eve of the ordination of the Philadelphia 11, we turn to listen to Pauli Murray’s reflections on the issues that were dividing the Church at the time. From her March 18, 1977, conversation with Heather Huyck (on audiotape streamed by the Schlesinger Library), we learn about her activism prior to the vote on ordination in 1976.

She regularly supported the women seeking ordination, attending the major events from 1973-1976, writing letters to bishops, and participating in the conferences and discussions leading up to the 1976 General Convention. Pauli said that she chose not to attend that convention. She had just entered seminary and was refreshingly candid about her position. She said she told herself, “It’s your business to prepare yourself for the priesthood… and then when you’re prepared you have something to say… I thought the best thing was for me to stay home and pray.” Continue reading →

Pauli Murray on Women’s Ordination

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July 24th, 2024

Our upcoming Chapel Camp on July 29, 2024, will mark the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. The first ordination of women took place on July 29, 1974, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.

The litany written by our Assistant Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Carol Gallagher, for this commemorative year emphasizes both the struggles and firmness of faith of the Philadelphia 11 and the brave women who followed the path to ordination.

We write today about Pauli Murray’s contributions to the movement for women’s ordination a few years leading up to 1974. Pauli actively championed women’s issues before considering her own ordination as the first African American woman to become a priest in 1977. She described her efforts in this way:

“The burgeoning women’s movement absorbed much of my energies, for I was serving on a faculty committee to improve the status of women at Brandeis, on the national board of the ACLU to win support for the ERA, and on the Commission on Women organized by Church Women United and chaired by my good friend Thelma Stevens.” (Song in a Weary Throat, p. 545) Continue reading →

Juneteenth Reflection

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We thank Alden Fossett, seminarian at Yale Divinity School and postulant in the Diocese of Massachusetts for this meditation. It was written with Juneteenth in mind and is a worthy reflection for any day of the year.

And since it is because within this sheet of paper you now hold the best of the South which is dead, and the words you read were written upon it with the best (each box said, the very best) of the new North which has conquered and which therefore, whether it likes it or not, will have to survive, I now believe you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.

— From the fourth chapter of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner

First, there was the Watch Night service. December 31, 1862, also known as Freedom’s Eve: that vigil held in secret and sustained by profound faith. Enslaved people huddled and alive, praying in the sanctuary or else in the brush, keeping watch on the threshold, waiting for the sun to rise and usher in 1863, when “all persons held as slaves …  are, and henceforward shall be free.”1 Continue reading →

The African Meeting House

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“The simple brick building nestled in Smith Court on Boston’s Beacon Hill reveals little to the passerby to indicate its grand place in history. Yet, not only is the African Meeting House the only extant church building for blacks in America; for nearly a century it was also the political, social, educational, and religious epicenter of the black community in Boston and throughout New England.”
–Robert C. Hayden, “The African Meeting House in Boston,” 1987.

The Chapel Camp tour of the African Meeting House took place last Sunday. The stories of community building, witness, and activism are told there in the letters, articles, books, historical photos, and cultural artifacts as well as by welcoming guides. We took the regular tour of the building that served as schoolhouse, community meeting space, churches of various denominations, and public meeting hall in which speakers communicated their passion for freedom and equality, justice and education. Continue reading →

Juneteenth

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Juneteenth, June 19th, was declared a Massachusetts state holiday in 2020 and a federal holiday in 2021. The number of commemorations and offerings for celebration in community have grown over the years. This year, we note the variety of events in Boston and the Episcopal Church, and local churches, which are described in the links listed below our signatures.

Our column this week focuses on how two people of color have described and thought about Juneteenth. Kevin Young, poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021, called the holiday a mix of family, freedom, music, and food (his Louisiana family saw ice cream as its way of feeding the body as well as the soul). For Young, Juneteenth also means history and thinking about the legacy of slavery. The news of Juneteenth was met with both jubilation and reflection on the “delays of freedom.” Continue reading →