The Ministry of Mitzi Budde
Mitzi Budde, D.Min, Head Librarian and the Arthur Carl Lichtenberger Chair for Theological Research, retires after 33 years. The Rev.
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Together we make The Episcopal Church stronger
Together we make The Episcopal Church stronger
At the 20th Anniversary Symposium of the African American Episcopal Historical Collection, speakers shared how they had uncovered their church’s past and what they were doing to promote reconciliation.
The Rev. Natalie Conway remembers sitting at the back of Memorial Episcopal Church, Baltimore, MD, where she was serving as a deacon, and seeing two plaques commemorating the people who had enslaved her great-great-grandmother. “I sat in the back of the church and looked up at those plaques and said, ‘I can’t stay here! I’m going to call Bishop Eugene [Taylor Sutton, XIV Bishop of Maryland] and have him move me,’” she said.
Conway’s great-great-grandmother, Harriet Cromwell, had been enslaved at Hampton Plantation, now the Hampton National Historic Site, in Towson, Maryland. When she was manumitted in 1828, she had a one-year-old son, who was still young enough to be allowed to go with her. Conway found out about her great-great-grandmother’s history when she and her brother were looking into their genealogy and discovered that members of the Cromwell family were among the 450 slaves who worked at the plantation.
It led to what she describes as the “aha moment” when she realized that two plagues in the church in which she served were dedicated to the people who had enslaved her relative. “If I looked up, I could see the plagues. They were dedicated to Charles Ridgely Howard, the founding Rector of Memorial, and his mother Sophie Ridgely, who was born here, and married James Howard and they lived here at Hampton Plantation. Sophia gave a gift of $5,000 to build the church.”
When Conway told the Rev. Grey Maggiano, the rector at Memorial, about her discovery, he asked her if she would share her story with the congregation. Conway remembers praying about it: “I have a plaque in my bedroom that says: Be still and know that I am God. And God said, ‘Why do you think I put you there.’ So, I went back, and I told the story and people were shocked, and amazed, and asked, ‘What can we do? How can we help to heal this place?’”
The Rev. Natalie Conway and Steve Howard, a member of Memorial and a descendant of the Howard family, pour water together to represent the healing and restoration of the relationship between two very different families.
One of the plaques in Memorial Episcopal Church, Baltimore. Both photos courtesy of Memorial Episcopal Church.
Conway’s sharing led to the church holding a healing ceremony, and a unanimous decision was made to remove the plaques from the church. Memorial also took a close look at its own history and started a five-year reparations initiative, committing $100,000 a year to it.
Conway believes more needs to be done to help people understand the past. “We still need to uncover more of it, or we won’t heal, we won’t be one diverse community and we won’t be that Beloved Community of love. So, I keep telling this story. I really did want to take a sledgehammer to those plaques, but they’re part of the history of the church, and they’re now placed outside the church, in a position where they won’t be damaged, and we’re still working toward reconciliation,” she said.
Manteo by Suzanne Schleck.
Bishop Henry Beard Delany by Suzanne Schleck.
Elizabeth Duncan Koontz by Suzanne Schleck.
William Wilberforce by Suzanne Schleck.
The Transfiguration by Kelly Latimore. All photographs courtesy of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
Pentecost by Kelly Latimore.
The Rev. Robert Black ’09, Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Salisbury, NC, told the Symposium about a project at his church to understand its past better and increase the diversity of people represented in its icons.
He explained that St. Luke’s was established by an act of the Colonial Assembly in 1753, and is located in downtown Salisbury, next door to the county jail and the county courthouse, as well as a number of lawyers’ offices.
“Our neighbors are the criminal justice system, and so, as we got to know our neighbors better, we started to learn a lot about the racial inequities in that system. It was about the same time that our former Diocesan Bishop, now Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, and his office were talking about the paradigm of becoming Beloved Community, and so we picked that language up and have been running with that ever since.”
The church started by recording an oral history with several African American members of the congregation who grew up in Salisbury during the Jim Crow era. “We wanted to capture their stories in their own voices so that they would be preserved for future generations,” Black said.
They also commissioned a historian to research the parish’s history in relation to slavery and race. More controversially, they commissioned a set of four icons for the church. “One of the things that we’ve gotten a lot of notoriety for recently is the icon project. We have a lovely and historic space, but the stained glass windows, most of which went in in the late-1800s, early 1900s, as you can imagine, do not depict people in the most historically accurate way, and so we decided to add several icons,” Black explained.
One icon depicts Manteo, the first person to be baptized into the Church of England in the Western hemisphere, to honor indigenous peoples. Another shows Bishop Henry Beard Delany, Bishop Suffragan of NC from 1918 to 1928 and one of the first black bishops to serve in The Episcopal Church. Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, a champion for equity, education and justice, as well as being a member of St. Luke’s, is featured in another icon, as is William Wilberforce, who spoke out against the slave trade. Black said: “They add diversity and, in William Wilberforce, an example of someone who used privilege and power to help those without as much of a voice.”
On the back wall of the church’s sanctuary are two large icons measuring 5ft by 7ft depicting the Transfiguration and Pentecost by iconographer Kelly Latimore, which aim to help people see each other in a new way. Panels were also added to the chapel that depict deeper diversity and representation. “Whoever walks into this church should be able to find someone in that icon that they can connect with,” Black said.
St Luke’s also hosts forums by the police department and is part of an organization that hosts racial equity workshops. Black explained: “We try to not only tell that story and seek reconciliation in our worship space but also in how we are involved and active in the community as well.”
Informal gravestones in a burial ground for people of color at St. John’s Episcopal Church Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Both photos courtesy of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Cold Spring Harbor.
The Reverend Gideon Pollach, Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, has started a project to care for a neglected historical burial ground for people of color, which is thought to be the final resting place for up to 200 people in informally marked graves.
He explained that his church sits on a large campus which includes a 14 acre freshwater pond and six acres of the inner harbor of Cold Spring Harbor. “When I first arrived, as part of my orientation, I had a tour of the grounds which took most of the day. As we were driving down one of the roads that’s parallel to the church, the person giving me the tour sort of waved vaguely and said, ‘Over there is our slave cemetery.’”
Pollach said his knowledge of the burial ground only increased when an African American woman, Denise, came to his office one day looking for the burial place of her ancestors. At first, Pollach directed her to two historic cemeteries, but she said they were not there. He finally told her about the slave cemetery.
He recalled: “She looked at me and she said, ‘Well, they wouldn’t be there either. They were never enslaved.’ That’s when I realized that our institutional knowledge of who might be buried in our cemetery was sorely lacking and probably incorrect. It turned out it was very incorrect.”
Later, work began to clear the site, which was covered in discarded refuse. After a few hours of clearing, informal gravestones, which were mostly rocks, were uncovered, as well as two headstones with names and the year 1900.
“The burial mounds were very different to other burial areas and clearly pointed to a different burial practice, which made us realize there was a more diverse collection of people buried here,” Pollach said.
After clearing away leaves, they could see that the cemetery was arranged in rows and there were around 200 people buried there. After consulting the church’s baptism and marriage records, they realized the congregation in the 19th century was significantly more diverse than it had been in the 20th century. They have since recovered the names of 35 people who are buried there. The cemetery is now maintained, and every year on All Souls Day, prayers are held on the site and those buried in the informal graves are remembered.
“We invite the families, many of which are still on Long Island, to join us. When you look at the headstones, there are no markings at all, except for some informal hatchet marks or carvings. It’s really moving to be there, and it’s been amazing for us to be connected to folks who were a deep part of our community in a time that has since been erased from memory,” Pollach said.
Mr. Christopher Pupke, Historian at St. Paul’s Centreville, MD, address the Symposium.
Mr. Christopher Pupke, Historian at St. Paul’s, Episcopal Church, Centreville, MD, has spent time trawling through the parish records and historic editions of local newspapers to uncover the stories of African Americans at the church.
He discovered that his church had played a significant role in sending free African Americans to Liberia in Africa. He told the audience that he knew one of the rectors of St. Paul’s was called Robert Goldsboro. “When I read the June 23rd, 1832, edition of the Centerville times, I found the Reverend Goldsboro mentioned in a meeting of the Queen Anne’s County chapter of the Maryland Colonization Society. This was a chapter of the National Society that helped established the country of Liberia. This was an effort in Queen Anne’s County driven in part by our Rector at St. Paul’s.” When he dug further, he came across the name Harriet Harper, who was enslaved by an individual in the parish, and who later made the journey from Baltimore to Cape Palmas in Liberia.
After studying reports the church made to the Diocesan Convention in 1844, Pupke realized St Paul’s was more diverse than had previously been assumed. He found that in the four-year period from 1841 to 1845, St. Paul’s baptized 110 African Americans, and 106 African Americans were married there. “It was a diverse community. This has not been part of our history. We talk about how we became a segregated church, it’s because we took these individuals and told them, you’re not welcome here.”
He added that in many cases, the names of the African Americans who were baptized were not recorded. “It just said four colored children at Judge Earle’s, or two colored children at the parsonage. We did not honor them by recording their name in the parish register. Their names are lost to history.”
Pupke said St. Paul’s also had a first-hand account of the period in the form of a narrative written by J.D. Green, who was born into slavery on a plantation owned by Judge Earle in Queen Anne’s County. His account details his three escapes, including his first one from Centerville in 1839. He was recaptured twice, but remained free after his third escape.
In his narrative, Green also details being separated from his mother as a child. “When he was about 10 years old, his mother came up to him and said, ‘We need to pray.’ That was the last time he saw her. She was praying with him because she was being sold away. He would never see his mother again. Years later, he was sent on an errand into town about four miles distant from where he was enslaved, and when he came back, he found out that his wife and children had been sold away. He would never see them again and that is when he resolved to himself to make an escape,” Pupke said.
Pupke has also found the Deeds of Manumission for a man called James Taylor, who was enslaved by a member of St Paul’s and went on to serve in the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War. “I’ve identified 64 individuals who were enslaved by St Paul’s congregation members that served in the United States Colored Troops. There’s a list of their names and we dedicated a plaque in memory of Mr. James Taylor in the back of our church last year,” he said.
Stations of the Cross by D.C. Christopher Gosey (L and R). Pauli Murray (C) by Fr. David Holland. All photos courtesy of St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh.
The Reverend R. Jermonde Taylor, Rector of St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh, NC, spoke about how his church started an environmental justice movement in southeast Raleigh in the 1990s in response to community flooding.
He explained that St. Ambrose was founded in 1868 in Smokey Hollow. “Smoky Hollow was where freed black people lived during institutional slavery. It got its name from its proximity to the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad because the noxious gases and smoke from the train would go into this low-lying area.”
After a very conservative Democratic party was elected to the General Assembly in 1898, the church was forced to vacate the land it was on. The church was put on logs and rollers and moved a mile south to Rochester Heights, which in 1956 became one of two neighborhoods that the City of Raleigh zoned for Black people to live in. It was also where the city had dumped raw sewage for 70 years.
Taylor said when Black people purchased homes in Rochester Heights, they were promised that their homes would not flood, but they did flood, and flooding continues to be an issue to this day.
“It was out of this that we began the environmental justice movement in southeast Raleigh, responding to environmental racism. We started an environmental movement called Partners for Environmental Justice in 1995 to deal with the flooding in southeast Raleigh, and that organization still exists today,” he said.
The church’s newest endeavor began in 2021. Taylor explained that when he first arrived at St. Ambrose in 2012, an environmentalist who was a member of the church, told him about growing up in southeast Raleigh smelling the raw sewage that the city dumped in the area and dreaming of a better time.
Taylor said: “As he was talking, I began to have a vision of four demarcations of time. The first was when the environment was pristine, when the indigenous people were in communion with the natural environment. The second phase was the engagement of Europeans and the dumping of sewage and the ravaging of the wetland. The third phase was when the City of Raleigh forced Black people to live in this community and it was the Black residents who helped bring about the restoration of the environment. Then I envisioned a fourth phase where the environment that was now healed would bring about the healing of the Black community.”
In 2021, St. Ambrose launched a podcast about environmental racism in southeast Raleigh. The church has also created an Ethiopian inspired labyrinth and a healing garden which offers horticultural therapy to help address mental health issues suffered by people in southeast Raleigh’s Black community. “The science behind it is as people engage in the environment through the planting, the weeding, the taking care of plants, it helps them deal with their trauma and overall mental health,” Taylor explained.
He added that St. Ambrose, as a congregation, was also committed to disrupting white supremacy in the liturgy. “I argue that, as Episcopalians, the thing that we do most often that thwarts the reconciliation work is our liturgy. Our liturgy can be fraught with white supremacy if we are not intentional about what we sing, preach, read and even the images in the church.”
To address this issue, the Church commissioned an Ethiopian iconographer to redo its Stations of the Cross in the Ethiopian iconographic tradition. “Our stations were of an Italian Jesus and there was a disconnect between a white Jesus on the walls and the Black people sitting in the pews,” Taylor said. Icons of the first African American woman to be ordained as a priest in The Episcopal Church, Pauli Murray, who preached at St. Ambrose in 1978, Anna Julia Cooper, the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris, and Henry Beard Delany, who was a member of St. Ambrose before his ordination and went on to become the first African American to be elected Bishop Suffragan, were added. Ethiopian traditions were also incorporated into the church’s Palm Sunday procession.
“One of the things that I’ve learned is that we have to learn our history before we can start to talk about our truths,” Ellen Weig, Archivist at St. Paul’s, Episcopal Church, Wilmington, NC, told the symposium.
She said that while there were many published histories about Wilmington, and these histories often included church histories, they rarely included St. Paul’s. “Howard Thurman wrote In Jesus and the Disinherited that we should examine the religion of Jesus against the background of his own age and people and think about it with reference to the disinherited and the underprivileged. His words made me reconsider how we should approach learning our history,” Weig said.
Ellen Weig, Archivist at St. Paul’s, Wilmington.
Weig said St. Paul’s was fortunate to have a body of significant records and papers, as well as a previously written history which followed the usual format of the period, noting clergy, architectural transformations, music and other milestones. “It was important not to stop there but to embark instead on a new pilgrimage of research. Our second parish register documents the beginning of St. Paul’s as a Black church and school after the Civil War.”
St. Paul’s was established in 1858 by Bishop Thomas Atkinson and his wife, growing out of a dwindling Methodist Protestant chapel, with Black and white members worshiping together. Weig said the first people to worship at St. Paul’s were “some of Wilmington’s disinherited and underprivileged people with their backs against the wall of slavery and poverty and hunger.” Later Black members of St. Paul’s established St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, having outgrown St. Paul’s, and white members of the church reorganized the parish.
She said it was important to acknowledge the congregation’s strength and growth and achievements in the five years they spent becoming St. Mark’s congregation at St. Paul’s. “Equally important, we are part of the history of the people of Wilmington, North Carolina, and the South, and years of violent and deeply disturbing events of slavery, the Civil War, the Wilmington coup of 1898, the years of Jim Crow and the city’s racial violence during the 1960s and 1970s. These are histories that are only recently being seen and its truths are somewhat difficult for Wilmington,” she said.
The church held a six-week adult form series that probed deeply into its 165-year history. “It was a time of epiphany, a moment of an unrealized truth for many people who were sitting there listening, and a reminder of the promises that we make in our Baptismal Covenant. It’s hard work to search out hard truths but we’re committed to seeing the reality of racism in our parish stories, telling these stories and working toward racial healing,” she said.
Mitzi Budde, D.Min, Head Librarian and the Arthur Carl Lichtenberger Chair for Theological Research, retires after 33 years. The Rev.
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