Tag Archives: reconciliation

Faith Communities in the Historic West End

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June 10, 2025

On our June 8th Chapel Camp tour of the Vilna Shul, we learned that the synagogue purchased the building occupied by the Twelfth Street Baptist Church in 1906. The Twelfth Street pews were kept at the site, 43-47 Phillips Street, and were used by the synagogue until 1919 when they moved to 18 Phillips Street. Services are still held once monthly and on the High Holydays and the building is now a center for Jewish Culture.

Twelfth Street Baptist Church was known as “The Fugitive Slave Church” — many of its congregants were abolitionists and self-emancipated slaves, Lewis and Harriet Hayden and Anthony Burns among them. The Reverend Edward Grimes, pastor from 1848 to 1874, led the congregation with vibrant advocacy and energetic activism. The church grew steadily, mobilized by Grimes to raise funds for those who sought freedom. A notable celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation was held January 1863. Frederick Douglasss attended and wrote glowingly about the event.

For more about the history of these communities of faith, see the West End Museum site: The Vilna Shul and Twelfth Street Baptist Church.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

 

The Green Book Tour of Boston’s South End

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May 26, 2025

A reprise of the Green Book Tour of Boston was offered on May 17, 2025. The tour was organized by The Reverend June Cooper, social justice educator, activist, and Theologian in the City at Old South Church.

She invited Byron Rushing to be our guide. Byron was Massachusetts State Representative for the South End from 1983-2019 and has been lay deputy to our General Convention since 1973. The tour was supported by the Boston Faith and Justice Network.

Victor Hugo Green, a postal worker, created the first Green Book in 1936. It was published until 1966 (with the exception of the years 1940-1946). A guide to establishments open to black travelers during the Jim Crow era, it served as an essential tool in welcoming them to many U.S. towns and cities.

Included on the Boston tour are the Union Combined Parish, the Columbus Avenue AME Zion Church, and Harriet Tubman Park, along with jazz club locations, other  community gathering places, and Slade’s, operating since 1929. We also stopped at the home of Julia Henson, 25 Holyoke Street, which was the first Harriet Tubman House, founded to provide housing for black women who were excluded from college dormitories and rooming houses. Henson founded the African American Northeastern Federation of Women’s Clubs and was active in the settlement house movement. Harvard’s Houghton Library acquired a copy of the 1949 edition of the Green Book, and it is freely accessible via this link.

The chapter on Massachusetts lists 50 businesses open to Black travelers in Boston, including hotels, restaurants, beauty parlors, barber shops, tailors, and one jazz club. In the Introduction, we read: “There will be a day sometime when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes, we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.”

—Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

Suzanne Hiatt & Pauli Murray

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Emmanuel Church dedicated its third pulpit statue this past Sunday to the Rev. Dr. Suzanne Radley Hiatt (1936-2002), priest, theologian, prophet, professor, and advocate. Sue Hiatt was ordained as one of the Philadelphia 11 (July 29, 1974), and served as an inspirational mentor to many, including our rector.

Pam’s sermon on Sunday included examples of Hiatt’s devotion to equality and justice; as “bishop to the women,” Pam said that she was “pressing the Church to deeper inclusion and fuller love.”

It was interesting to learn that Suzanne Hiatt wrote about her connections to Pauli Murray (1910-1985), who had discerned from our parish and in 1977 became the first African American woman to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. In April 1970, they attended the Graymoor Conference, an important event in the history of women’s ordination, attended by about 60 women and numerous male supporters. One of the organizers, Hiatt was stalwart in her advocacy of the movement.  After years of experiences as a civil rights lawyer, professor, and Women’s Movement activist, Murray attended Graymoor.   After the conference, she and Henry Rightor, a former lawyer and professor of pastoral care at Virginia Theological Seminary, studied the Church’s Canons and Constitutions. Their report presenting their findings after the conference set the stage for persuasive arguments for women’s ordination.

Sue Hiatt’s admiration for Pauli Murray was expressed in an article she wrote in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.* She noted that she had learned a lot from delving into Pauli Murray’s writings about her unceasing dedication to the pursuit of justice. Hiatt considered Murray a “foremother, not only to be proud of, but also to learn from and emulate.” Those who came before Hiatt’s generation “shook the foundations so that we could topple the walls.” Hiatt deeply admired Murray’s contributions: “Pauli believed above all in justice, and despite a lifetime of disappointments and tragedies, she never stopped seeking it. She just never quit.”

May we be inspired by the women who now live on in our sanctuary, and, as Pam said in her Eastertide sermon: “Arise, wake up, come alive to become who and whose you are called to be.”

*Hiatt, Suzanne, “Pauli Murray (1910-1985): May Her Song Be Heard at Last,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (Fall 1988), 69-73.

See also the chapter of the same title in The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me: The writings of Suzanne Hiatt, ed. Carter Heyward and Janine LeHane (New York: Seabury, 2014). This compilation of Hiatt’s writings is a wonderful tribute to her.

—May 15, 2025.  Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

Thoughts of Reparations in Lent

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April 15, 2025

“Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, “Restorer of ruined dwellings.” Isaiah 58: 9–10, 12

Reparation is not a task or a moment; it is a process and a movement. As the prophet Isaiah and at least one diocesan mission statement make more clear, reparation, and its sibling “restoration”, line the path which leads from remembrance to reconciliation and, I would add, redemption. No matter recent, lawless chaos and profuse oppression, I believe that it is important to remember that this path persists and we have made a covenant to labor on.

As stated in the Diocese of Washington’s commission on reparations mission: “It [reparations] involves a process to remember, repair, restore, and reconcile historical and continuing wrongs against humanity that can never be singularly reducible to monetary terms, but must include a substantial investment and surrender of resources.

”This reminds me of another covenant we are in the midst of, namely to keep a holy Lent, to engage in the process of prayer, fasting and almsgiving that we might deepen our relationship with God and offer compassion and mercy to one another in more profound ways.

Not only might the process of engaging Lent be reparative of self and soul, it also might lead us to a new understanding of how we might become repairers of the breach and restorers of ruined dwellings.

For me the agents of repair and restoration are mercy and compassion. They are the compass which identifies brokenness and the glue which joins jagged edge to jagged edge.

Goodness knows jagged, shattered edges surround us in this wilderness. And I believe there is another agent which assists us in finding the courage and hope to even tackle the work of reparation and restoration when we have almost given up on grace…almost. It is memory.

Remembering is the agent which precedes restoration and reparation, catalyzes and inspires us toward action.

In my own quest I am remembering Bishop Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral on January 21, 2025, when she courageously reminded the newly inaugurated president of his and our mandate to be merciful. In that reminder I felt some, albeit thin, thread of grace reenter political discourse repairing frayed hope.

Remembering, summoning our life stories of mercy and justice, is the first step toward the grace of redemption.

Remembering can be as a light which shines on possibility in the face of what seems impossible.

Remembering called us into the wilderness and will sustain us in our summoning of mercy and compassion, in our beloved communal work toward reparation and restoration.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. It is in returning, re turning, that we know God’s whole and perfect grace.

— The Rev. Dr. Martha Tucker

Reckoning with History: The First Step toward Racial Reparation

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Addressing the historical harms of slavery starts with facing up to a good deal of uncomfortable truth. What does this mean for white Americans like me or for members of an historically white American church like ours?  We must acknowledge first that the truth has been hidden from us. Participants in the “Stolen Beam” course on reparations, which Connie Holmes and I teach, will sometimes say, “Why was I never taught this?” We must seek information from unaccustomed sources, which requires effort and research. Continue reading →

Boston’s Home for Aged Colored Women

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March 3, 2025

To honor women’s history this month, we turn to a story of little seen women in Boston at the time Emmanuel was being founded. The Boston Globe published an article about the discovery of a marker for the Home for Aged Colored Women (1860-1944) in Dorchester’s Cedar Grove Cemetery (“From a mass grave in Boston, unearthing Black women’s lives” by Karilyn Crockett (February 3, 2025)

The Home, founded in 1860, was among the Boston institutions that offered shelter and support to women who did not have financial or other family support. In the case of the Home for Aged Colored Women, historical news accounts and the organization’s records (located at the Massachusetts Historical Society) state that women of color applied to the Home after not being welcomed at almshouses and other benevolent institutions.

We discovered that Emmanuel parishioners were benefactors of the Home from the 1860s onward (among them was Susan Coombs Dana (Mrs. Wiliam R. Lawrence).

We invite you to explore these sites which explore the Home’s history in more detail

—The West End Museum site.

—The National Park Service’s page about the Home.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

For the Next Generation

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February 17, 2025

During Black History Month, we invite you to read some of the works written by authors speaking to the next generation. Our suggestions include:

–Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son” (first published in 1922 in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); in 1926, the poem was included in his Hughes’s poetry collection, The Weary Blues)

–James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew” (published as “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” in The Fire Next Time (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013)

–Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). Perry offers a layered meditation.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015)

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin

A Reflection on Reparations for Holocaust Remembrance Day

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February 3, 2025

We met Constance Holmes when we participated in the last fall’s Stolen Beam program.

Connie is a founding member of the Reparations Interfaith Coalition and serves on the Episcopal City Mission Reparations leadership team. Here is Connie’s meditation for us on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 28, 2025. Continue reading →

The Work of Christmas: A Season of Darkness & Light

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December 26, 2024

At our exquisite Christmas Eve service, a service of dark and light, love and grace, concern and care, Reverend Pam recalled the words of Howard Thurman, minister of, and to, the disinherited:  “When the song of the angel is still, when the star in the sky is gone, when kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their sheep, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among people, to make music in the heart.” Continue reading →

Nikki Giovanni, Poet of Joy

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December 16, 2024

With poet Nikki Giovanni’s passing, the tributes continue to flow. Kevin Young, poet, essayist, and Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture paid tribute in a recent New Yorker article, “Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love.”

Young observes that often contrarian Giovanni wrote “across the decades” about ecopoetics, family, and justice. She also “preferred to remind readers that ‘Black love is Black wealth,’” and her love spread throughout the Black Arts Movement and beyond.

The Guardian’s article emphasizes her accessible poetry about liberation, gender, love, and the small pleasures of daily life.

We send greetings for the season with a perhaps lesser-known poem, “Christmas Laughter,” a glimpse of her family’s enjoyment of the varied “senses” of the holiday.

–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church December 16, 2024