Honoring Black History Month 2024

PROFILE: the History of the Black Church

It is impossible to talk about Black History without talking about the Black Church.

In the 1780s, a slave  by the name Andrew Bryan preached to a small group of slaves in Savannah, Ga.  White citizens had Bryan arrested and whipped. Despite persecution and harassment, the church grew, and by 1790 it became the First African Baptist Church of Savannah.

Later, in 1787 in Philadelphia, the black church was born out of protest and revolutionary reaction to racism. Resenting being relegated to a segregated gallery at St. George's Methodist Church, Methodist preachers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and other black members, left the church. In 1794 they formed the Free African Society and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) the first independent Black denomination in the US.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, the black church found its political and prophetic voice in the cause of abolition. Black ministers took to their pulpits to speak out against slavery and warned that any nation that condoned slavery would suffer divine punishment.

It should be noted that the Civil Rights Movement gained significant strength because of the participation of black churches. They became meeting centers for the organization and strategic planning of the effort for equal rights.  Important leaders were Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock.

Introducing:

Alexander Crummell (born 1819 - New York, NY)

A scholar and an ordained Episcopal priest, Crummell went to Cambridge University with support from abolitionists. He spent the next 20 years in Liberia as a missionary. He returned to the US in 1872, and by 1875 he started St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, the first independent black Episcopal church in Washington, DC. He led the congregation until 1894. His work in Pan-Africanism and the abolition of slavery were both fused by the Christian call for redemption and grace.

In a sermon titled “Building Men” (I Cor. 3:10), he says, “There are people who would fain convince themselves that it is possible to stand in a place of utter indifference in spiritual matters; devoid of all moral responsibility. Never was there a more deceptive error framed by Satan for human ruin. There is no neutral line between the two great principles of good and evil; no intermediate point or party between the strong hosts of goodness, on the one hand, and the leagued bands of wrong and evil, on the other. In the universe of God there are two great principles ever antagonistic, one to the other; that which conserves, and that which destroys.”

Crummell was the most prominent rationalist of the Black American enlightened thinkers in the nineteenth century.

PROFILE: St. Philips’s Episcopal Church

St. Philip’s Episcopal Church is the oldest black Episcopal parish in New York City. 

Historically, St. Philips was located in lower Manhattan and then relocated as a church in Harlem.  Many of the members of St. Philip’s were influential leaders in the black community. (W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes)

St. Philip's Episcopal Church is a historic Episcopal church located at 204 West 134th Street.  Initially the Free African Church was located in the Five Points neighborhood of New York City. 

The congregation was founded in 1809, after the parishioners worshipped for almost a century under the supervision of Trinity Church on Wall Street (*attending segregated Sunday services at Trinity) - a group of free African Americans in New York City established the Free African Church of St. Philip.

The church became known as St. Philip's Episcopal Church in 1819.  The Church’s 1st rector Rev. Peter Williams, (1826-1840) was a leading abolitionist and the 1st African American Episcopal priest in New York.   The church relocated several times, gradually moving further uptown until March 25, 1911 when the current church building (neo-Gothic), designed by the prominent African American architecture firm Tandy & Foster, was dedicated in the Harlem neighborhood.   St. Philip's Church was designated a New York City Landmark (1993) and on the National Register of Historic Places (2008).

From its beginning in the 19th century, St. Philips took a strong, important stance in challenging injustices such as slavery, racial discrimination, inadequate city services, and quality of life issues.