Rev. Earl B. Scott (1919-1984): Celebrated Leader, UBE Namesake

“Father Earl B. Scott.” Detail from 
“St. Mary’s Episcopal Church joins in New Jersey’s Tercentenary Celebration,”
(1964), 16. Courtesy Diocese of New Jersey archives.

“Earl B. Scott was born on July 11, 1919 in Pleasantville, NJ, to… John H. and Minnie Brown Scott, the eleventh of twelve children… [where he] attended the public schools.”[1] As a young man Scott attended Glassboro State Teacher’s College which, at the time, was subject to state investigations resulting from its segregation practices.[2] Nevertheless Scott graduated from the institution, managing to succeed in spite of significant documented racism.[3] He “received a Bachelor of science degree in Education [from Glassboro],… earned a second baccalaureate degree in Sacred Theology with honors from the Philadelphia Divinity School… and [then] a Master of Divinity from the Episcopal Theological School… [in] Cambridge, Mass.”[4]
            Starting out as a member of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Pleasantville, New Jersey, “in 1950, the leadership of St. Mary’s was assumed by… Scott, who served as Layreader until 1957, when he was ordained to the Priesthood.”[5] Scott was beloved at St. Mary’s being described as having “served efficiently and well,”[6] a testament to the long tradition “of outstanding significance in St. Mary’s history… that Layreaders… [regularly] played a vital role in its growth and then… [continued on] to Priesthood in the Episcopal Church. These men – Father Harris, Father Ferrell and Father Scott – represent the blood, sweat and tears of the history of St. Mary’s Church among the legions of the Priesthood.”[7]
            After his successful tenure at St. Mary’s Rev. Scott was called to St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Red Bank, New Jersey. He “served St. Thomas from April 1962 to June 1979,”[8] starting out as vicar. “Under his leadership, St. Thomas became a self-supporting Parish in 1965, with him… [becoming] the first Rector, after [the congregation having been] a Mission for fifty years.”[9]
            “Fr. Scott…took a great interest in ministry to the young. He started a thriving youth club at St. Thomas, and during his time, the church hosted a Head Start Program for pre-schoolers.”[10] Wherever he went he “he became an advocate for the under-privileged.”[11] “From 1967 through 1971, Fr. Scott served as Social Worker for the Monmouth County Community Action Program working with black, white and Spanish families in the Bayshore area… [and] served as an educational consultant and trainer of aides for the Head Start Program.”[12] As an “effective and devoted community leader, advocate and activist with a long history of service to the various communities in which he resided, Fr. Scott served as the first Afro-American elected[13] to the Borough Council of Red Bank… [and] in 1977 he became the [Council] president.”[14] He also served “as Chairperson of the Board of Red Bank Community Center, [as] a board member of the Monmouth County Mental Health Association, … on the Youth Employment Service, [the] Monmouth County Cotillion Committee, … the tutorial and scholarship committees of the local chapter of the NAACP, the Red Bank Men’s Club, Prince Hall Masons... [on] the Union of Black Episcopalians,”[15]
and “as a Chaplain at Riverview Medical Center, Red Bank, NJ, and Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch, NJ.”[16]
            So beloved had he been in Pleasantville that Rev. “Scott returned [to St. Mary’s] in 1979 after a ministry of 17 years in St. Thomas of Red Bank, New Jersey.”[17] He served with the congregation at St. Mary’s “until his death on August 24, 1984.”[18]
            “Fr. Scott… had a great impact on the life of the Diocese, where he… [served as] a member of the Board of Missions,”[19] as “Dean of the Monmouth Convocation, president of the Monmouth Clericus of Episcopal Priests and [as head of] the Greater Red Bank Council of Churches and the Westside Ministerium.”[20] Rev. Scott was “active as a member of the Division of Urban Concerns, the Bishop Trial Court, [and] the Major Chapter of Trinity Cathedral, Trenton, NJ.”[21] In particular, “he became a catalyst to challenge racism in the church and community.”[22] At one specially memorable “Clergy Conference in 1983 he challenged the Diocese on the issue of race, by telling his experiences of racism in the Episcopal Church. This led to the establishment of the Diocesan Committee on Racism of which he was the first Chairman. He was a founder of the Black Clergy Caucus of the Diocese…. [and] inspired the formation of the [Diocese of New Jersey] Chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians.”[23] Taken too soon from the people he loved, “eight months after his death on August 24, 1984 the UBE chapter was named in memory and thanksgiving for his leadership and service.”[24]

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

---

[1] Anna Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott,” 1995. MSS held at Diocese of New Jersey archives, Trenton, New Jersey. MSS is nearly identical to Anna Henderson, “The Reverend Earl B. Scott,” 1995: https://www.ebsube.org/earl-scott/.
[2] New Jersey Urban Colored Population Commission, “Annual Report of the Urban Colored Population Commission, State of New Jersey, Year Ending December 31, 1943,” (1944), pp. 82-87 (of the digitized edition): https://dspace.njstatelib.org/items/def4766a-f51d-4e1e-8f52-c4fcb97de98c.
[3] Gary J. Hunter, Neighborhoods of Color: African American Communities in Southern New Jersey, 1638-2000 (Glassboro, NJ: Rowan University, 2002).
[4] Later known as Episcopal Divinity School. Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.”
[5] Maxwell Manning, “From this Humble Beginning,” page 14 in “St. Mary’s Episcopal Church joins in New Jersey’s Tercentenary Celebration,” (1964). MSS of pamphlet held at Diocese of New Jersey archives, Trenton, New Jersey. “On April 27, 1957 he was ordained to the Diaconate in the Diocese of New Jersey and in that same year was ordained to the Sacred Priesthood on November 2, 1957.” Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.”
[6] He was so loved that he was invited back to serve as priest again later in his career. Manning, “From this Humble Beginning,” 14.
[7] Manning, “From this Humble Beginning,” 14.
[8] Historical Committee of St. Thomas Church, “Historical Highlights: St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1891-1991 Centennial,” 14. MSS held at Diocese of New Jersey archives, Trenton, New Jersey.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.”
[13] He served from 1974 to 1977.
[14] Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.”
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Manning, “From this Humble Beginning,” 14.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Historical Committee of St. Thomas Church, “Historical Highlights,” 14-15.
[20] Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.”
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Historical Committee of St. Thomas Church, “Historical Highlights,” 14-15.
[24] Henderson, “A Biography of Earl Brown Scott.” 

Rev. Eugene L. Henderson: First Black Priest Ordained in the Diocese of New Jersey

 Detail of “St. John's Episcopal Church, Broadway and Royden Street, Camden, N.J.” postcard.
St. John's initially supported St. Augustine's, and many decades later ownership of their building
was transferred to St. Augustine’s. Public domain image, courtesy of dvrbs.camdenhistory.com.

Very little published documentation exists about the life and ministry of the Rev. Eugene Leon Henderson, but it seems clear that he was the very first Black priest ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey.

He became a candidate for deacon’s orders on March 22, 1893 in the Diocese of North Carolina,[1] and his formal education occurred at Howard University in Washington D.C.[2]  Ordained to the diaconate by the Rt. Rev. Joseph Blount Cheshire, the Bishop of North Carolina, in 1895,[3] Henderson became canonically resident in the Diocese of New Jersey in 1896,[4] and was installed as the missionary deacon of St. Augustine’s Church, Camden.[5] This mission was started and initially supported by St. John’s, Camden, under Rev. John H. Townsend in June 1888,[6] and had been led by white priests until that point. Bishop John Scarborough of New Jersey, who had long advocated for better support for African-American ministry in the diocese,[7] ordained Henderson to the priesthood on October 7, 1897. The ordination took place in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Camden.[8]

Henderson served St. Augustine’s as their priest, curate[9] through 1898 during this formative period of its growth.[10] He went on to serve in many young congregations across the United States, gaining a “national reputation for developing congregations.”[11] Among other places he served were St. Philip’s, Annapolis, Maryland, St. Luke’s, New Haven, Connecticut,[12] Chapel of the Holy Cross, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania,[13] St. Titus’, Durham, North Carolina,[14] and the Episcopal Church of the Atonement in Washington, D.C. For a time he also held the position of the “archdeaconship of colored work in Georgia,” based in Atlanta.[15] Moreover, he was a very influential priest in the life of Rev. Pauli Murray, who was a congregant of his in both North Carolina and Washington, D.C.

 

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

---

[1] Diocese of North Carolina, Journal of the Seventy-Seventh Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of North Carolina (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1893), 14.

[2] Frederic E. J. Lloyd, ed., The American Church Clergy and Parish Directory for 1905 (Uniontown, PA: Frederic E.J. Lloyd, 1905), 146.

[3] George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1922), 273.

[4] Formally received on September 9, 1896. Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the One Hundred and Fifteenth Convention, Being the One Hundred and Second Year of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1887), 186.

[5] Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the One Hundred and Fifteenth Convention, 11, 79.

[6] Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the One Hundred and Seventeenth Convention, Being the One Hundred and Fourth Year of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1889), 72.

[7] See, Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “Bishop Scarborough’s Convention Address of 1890,” DNJRJR (January 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/01/bishop-scarboroughs-convention-address.html.

[8] Diocese of New Jersey, Journal of the Proceedings of the One Hundred and Twenty-Sixth Convention, Being the One Hundred and Thirteenth Year of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1898), 180. Eventually, the congregation of St. Augustine’s, Camden moved into St. John’s, Camden when the mostly white parishioners of St. John’s abandoned the church during the period of “white flight” that plagued Camden during the 20^th century.

[9] Lloyd, The American Church Clergy and Parish Directory for 1905, 146.

[10] David R. King, Forward with Christ: A Bicentennial Historical Book (Trenton, NJ: The Diocesan Bicentennial Committee, 1985), 48.

[11] The Episcopal Church of the Atonement, “Our History,”: https://atonementepiscopaldc.org/our-history/.

[12] Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 108.

[13] Diocese of Pennsylvania, “Journal of the 136^th Convention,” 284.

[14] The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, “Pauli Murray,”: https://www.episdionc.org/about-us/our-priorities/formation/north-carolina-saints/pauli-murray/.

[15] Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church, 109.

EVENT: 3rd Annual Stations of Reparations Service, March 15, 2025

The Reparations Commission of the Diocese of New Jersey invites you to a family event during Lent: the third annual Stations of Reparations service, a moving liturgy with congregational reflections on our racial history. The service will occur on Saturday March 15, 2025 at 3pm at Christ the King Episcopal Church, (40 Charleston Road, Willingboro, New Jersey 08046). The service will also be live-streamed on YouTube:  @christthekingepiscopalchur3073.

VIDEO: NJ Reparations Council Public Session #9 - Public Education

 

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) has posted video from the ninth of nine public sessions sponsored by the New Jersey Reparations Council, held on February 12, 2025. The content deals with the work of the Committee on "Public Education and Narrative" in New Jersey.

Diocesan Reparations Commission Members on Pilgrimage in New Jersey

Members of the Reparations Commission at the Perth Amboy Ferry Slip. Photo, Jolyon Pruszinski.

Members of the Reparations Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey used the first day of Black History Month to take a pilgrimage visiting sites related to Anglican and Episcopal slavery in New Jersey. The pilgrimage was produced through the research of the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review. Sites included the Perth Amboy Ferry Slip, the Tinton Falls African Burial Ground, Marlpit Hall in Middletown, and Sandy Hook. You can take the pilgrimage too!

Episcopal Sympathy for the KKK in New Jersey: Initial Observations

The Ku Klux Klan, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

Between World War I and World War II many New Jersey residents became enamored of, sympathized with, and participated in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. While exact membership and numbers are difficult to ascertain (as all Klan researchers acknowledge),[1] there is significant evidence of Episcopalian cooperation with and sympathy for the organization in the state.

After the racist film Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, spinning the myth of an unjust Civil war and Reconstruction, and casting the Ku Klux Klan as the noble defender of the South, several individuals were inspired to reinvigorate the Klan. This movement hit New Jersey in earnest around 1920, and the Klan grew dramatically there for the next several years. 

 

Conjectural Episcopal Involvement

Hundreds of thousands of residents of New Jersey either formally joined, collaborated, or sympathized with the Klan. Though detailed documentation is sparse, in many municipalities the sheer number of participants in Klan rallies and events suggests the likelihood of some Episcopalian involvement.

            For instance, “in Flemington, it was common for the Klan to have as many as 800 marchers in full regalia in parades on Main Street.”[2] As it was such a small town, it is very likely that some Episcopalians participated. Similarly, the Klan was so popular in Red Bank that there had to be Episcopalians involved: 

In March 1925… the Red Bank Business Men’s Association decided to hold a “popularity contest” for local organizations… the month-long contest ended with the fire department in first place with 100,286 votes, followed by the Klan with 76,845. The Knights of Columbus and the Ladies’ Hebrew Society came in third and fourth, respectively.[3]

At this time, “the Rutgers Klan attracted a sizable number of New Brunswick’s white, native-born, protestant community. The Daily Home News estimated that nearly 500 members attended the group’s first outdoor meeting.”[4] This would certainly have included some New Brunswick Episcopalians.[5] Also during this period Bernardsville News reporting suggested that the overwhelming “majority” of residents, numbering in the many thousands, in the vicinity of “Basking Ridge, Bernardsville, Liberty Corner, Millington, Far Hills, Bedminster and Peapack-Gladstone”[6] joined a Klan Easter Sunrise Service on April 17, 1927 at Sunset Hill in Somerset County. As there was a very great density of Episcopal Churches in this area it would seem likely that at least some of the participants were Episcopalian.[7] And in another instance of likely association, The Rev. Paul Fenton of St. Luke’s, Metuchen was reported as having conspicuously attended the funeral of likely Klan member Edwin Smith,[8] along with many attendees who came robed in Klan garb and who performed various Klan ceremonies during the funeral.[9]

 

Episcopal Collaboration 

But beyond conjectural involvement, there is evidence of actual Episcopal involvement and collaboration with the Klan as well. In 1925 the Ministers Association of Plainfield, New Jersey, which included priests from Grace (Episcopal) Church, Plainfield,[10] collaborated with the Klan on efforts to curb showings of Sunday movies.[11] In 1924 the Civic Church League, a pan-Protestant organization of Asbury Park, worked hand-in-glove with the Klan to attempt to discredit the mayor over an alleged indiscretion at a party.[12] “There seemed to be close coordination between the pronouncements of the Klan and Asbury Park clergy, as the ‘orgy’ was simultaneously damned from Protestant pulpits across the city.”[13] New Jersey historian Walter Greason believes that Episcopal clergy were intimately involved.[14] But regardless of whether that was so, as one of the main Protestant churches in town, it is likely that some parishioners at least from Trinity Church, Asbury Park, the largest White Episcopal congregation, were involved in these actions of the Civic Church League. In 1925 priest at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Bloomfield was openly supportive of the Klan,[15] and during this period “every white church” in Atlantic City hosted Klan rallies.[16] This would include the Episcopal congregations at the time: St. James’ Church, Church of the Ascension, All Saints’ Church, and possibly the Good Shepherd Mission.

Episcopal-affiliated politicians cooperated with the Klan as well. T. Frank Appleby of Asbury Park, a Republican Congressman from a New Jersey Episcopalian family,[17] openly accepted the political support of the Klan during his campaigns.[18] Even more directly, Basil Bruno, a politician from Long Branch, New Jersey with some Episcopal affiliation,[19] “introduced the Klan’s ‘Bible in Schools’ legislation” in the New Jersey General Assembly.[20]

 

Episcopal Sympathy

            More than overt links to the organization, however, it is clear that New Jersey Episcopalians during this period sympathized with the Klan and with many of its stated beliefs.

            In 1926, renowned women’s health advocate, and Episcopalian, Margaret Sanger spoke at a KKK meeting at the Klan compound in Elkwood Park, Wall Township.[21] “While there is no evidence that she held membership in the Klan, she embraced some of the tenets of the eugenics movement, including ideas on who should and should not reproduce.”[22]

            Woodrow Wilson, now well known for his persistent racism[23] and embrace of the racist “Birth of a Nation” ideology,[24] worshipped at times at St. James, Long Branch, a fact which was long-celebrated by the parish in its accounts of its history.[25] Long Branch was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s, and it does not seem accidental that St. James, Long Branch is one of the Episcopal buildings in the state that was decorated with swastika tiles for decades after that period.[26] Similar tiles still adorn the primary meeting space at the Diocese of New Jersey headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey.[27]

            Elsewhere “down the shore,” interviews with Asbury Park residents[28] suggest that Trinity, Asbury Park fell into decline in the mid-20^th century, following the local disintegration of the Klan, in part, as a result of its racist attitudes, only to be rescued and revived by the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s: “Black Asbury Parkers built their own Episcopal Church on the other side of town because of the segregation of Trinity [Episcopal] and the church’s refusal to allow Black congregants. As a result, that church flourished while Trinity foundered.”[29] This development fits the pattern of “White flight” racism that led to decline in many historically White urban Episcopal churches in New Jersey, as is being documented by the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review.[30] Refusal to live alongside, let alone worship with, Black Christians was commonplace among White Episcopalians in the mid-20^th century.

            That “Klan adjacent” White racism was a typical feature of Episcopal leadership of the diocese in the 20^th century can be seen in a number of ways. Nelson Burr, the celebrated church historian[31] who served regularly on the Standing Committee of the Diocese of New Jersey, seems to have held reactionary views.[32] 

To his mind, influxes of non-Anglo “stock,” as he called it, into the state represented an obstacle to the growth and success of the diocese. He was joined in this opinion by fellow prolific historian Walter Herbert Stowe, who served for concurrent decades as a priest in the Diocese of New Jersey and as the editor of the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church.[33]

 Stowe actually allowed the publishing of Klan sympathetic articles in HMPEC during his tenure as editor.[34] Moreover,

it is hard to think of Bishop Banyard [himself] as anything other than reactionary as well when he is best remembered in the diocesan bicentennial history by David R. King[35] as having railed against what Banyard called “ultra-liberal extremism, the aberrations, the actions, behavior and questionable pronouncements of our Clergy and lay leaders on the National, Diocesan and local levels.”[36]

Banyard was instrumental in promoting the “White flight” mission of the diocese during this time, which prioritized mission support for White suburban churches and shifted funding away from urban churches. The process of funding the building of Christ the King, Levittown (now Willingboro) involved both pulling funds from Black churches,[37] and excited collaboration with Levitt corporation developers, whose recent development across the river in Pennsylvania was the location of highly publicized KKK cross-burnings to keep out potential Black residents.[38] Reporting on these events was widespread at the time, and diocesan officials had to know that they were active participants in what was clearly a Klan-enforced, racially segregated development. Moreover, “Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, the long-serving priest of St. Wilfrid’s, Camden was publicly and openly Nazi-sympathetic” and hosted Nazi-sympathetic speakers.[39]

Aífe Murray, who conducted interviews in the Hillsdale, New Jersey region,[40] summed up some of the dynamics that led to Klan affiliation as follows: “It has been said that the Pascack Valley did not like Catholics and some, to get ahead professionally and avoid a consumer boycott, joined the town’s Episcopal Church. Others took it a notch up and joined the Klan.” It would appear that in the imagination of those involved, that the Episcopal Church was similar enough in terms of associations and appearances that it could be considered just a step removed from the Klan on a spectrum of social affiliations.

 

The Overall Picture

The evidence suggests that overt support of, or membership in, the Klan among Episcopalians in New Jersey was more modest than among, say, Methodists, though, as we have seen, it appears that there is solid evidence to suggest sympathy with many of the Klan’s perspectives and attitudes among Episcopalians. The White members of the (mostly White) Episcopal Church, not only generally viewed their church as a White church essentially by and for those of British heritage,[41] but also shared many of the Klan’s racist views. As stated by Bilby and Ziegler, anti-immigrant anxieties, anti-Black racist beliefs, and affinities for eugenic ideology “were quite common at the time, even in progressive and academic circles” and “aligned with the Klan’s views.”[42]

Where Episcopalians likely most dramatically took exception was over the vaudevillian antics, populist fervor, and vigilante rhetoric that typified the Klan public persona.[43] It was a similar division over emotive style and approach to decorum that produced the Anglican-Methodist split, and can perhaps partly explain why the Klan was clearly more openly popular with Methodists than Episcopalians. Nevertheless, Episcopalians in many parts of the Garden State sympathized with, collaborated with, and likely participated in the Ku Klux Klan.[44] Even after overt support for the Klan had waned in New Jersey,[45] many Episcopalians continued to hold racist beliefs similar to those espoused by the Klan, and failed to remove racist symbolism from diocesan and parish buildings that continued to intimidate non-White visitors.[46] Unfortunately, outright, wholesale rejection of racist Klan ideology still cannot be said to be universal among Episcopalians in New Jersey.[47]

            

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

---

[1] The organization was very secretive, almost all internal records have been destroyed, and the Klan’s own public press releases were notoriously inaccurate and exaggerated.

[2] David Cochran, “When the KKK Came to Blawenburg,” Tales of Blawenburg (April 1, 2019): https://www.blawenburgtales.com/post/16-when-the-kkk-came-to-blawenburg; See also Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, If These Stones Could Talk (Lambertville, NJ: Wild River Books, 2018), 259.

[3] Joseph G. Bilby and Harry Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2019), 80-81.

[4] “Rutgers Klan No. 44” at Rutgers’ Scarlet & Black Digital Archive: https://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu/archive/exhibits/show/klan/rutgers.

[5] Especially since the Klan made such a public point of its work to bring to justice those responsible for the murder of Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall, Episcopal priest of St. John the Evangelist, New Brunswick. Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 32.

[6] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 99.

[7] Episcopal churches in the area at the time, according to the records of the Diocese of New Jersey Convention Journal of 1926, included St. John’s-on-the-Mountain, Bernardsville, St. Bernard’s, Bernardsville, St. Mark’s Chapel, Basking Ridge, Far Hills Mission, and St. Luke’s, Gladstone.

[8] Even though he was not officiating, and even though Smith does not appear to have been a member of his church.

[9] Metuchen Recorder, March 7, 1924; Tyreen A. Reuter, “African-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Metuchen,” Metuchen-Edison Historical Society (2000), 35-37: http://metuchen-edisonhistsoc.org/resources/MetuchenKlan-for+website.pdf. 

[10] Then a very large and wealthy Episcopal parish.

[11] David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, NC: Buke University Press, 1981), 248.

[12] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 62-63; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 247-248; Walter Greason,Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 96; Donna Troppoli, “The Invisible Boardwalk Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Monmouth County During the 1920s,” Garden State Legacy 28 (2015):9; Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK:The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017), 86.

[13] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 63.

[14] Though it has been difficult to confirm that explicitly. Greason, (Suburban Erasure, 96).

[15] Chalmers, Hooded Americanism), 248. As a result, his vestry removed him from his post. The Rev. Ellis Parry (also spelled “Perry”), had a very short tenure as rector, being received into the diocese and installed in Bloomfield in 1924 as indicated by the Diocese of Newark Convention Journal of 1925 (p. 21), and having been replaced by the following year by the Rev. G. Warheld Hobbs (priest in charge) according to the Diocesan Convention Journal of 1926 (p. 20). The Convention Journals do not mention anything about the affair, which was reported in 1925 in the March 25^th edition of the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1925/03/25/archives/denies-split-over-klan-but-bloomfield-minister-refusing-to-quit.html).

[16] In 1924. Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 166, and the Baltimore Afro-American, National Edition, May 23, 1924. 

[17] “Appleby Family,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 13.1 (1928): 116-117.

[18] Troppoli, “The Invisible Boardwalk Empire,” 9.

[19] Rev. Herbert L. Linley, rector of St. James, Long Branch did his funeral, as reported in the Red Bank Register, March 24, 1955. See also https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/88022162/basil-b_-bruno. 

[20] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 96-97.

[21] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 92-93; Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK, 56, 114-15)

[22] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 92.

[23] See, for example, Dylan Matthews, “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist—even by the standards of his time,” Vox (November 20, 2015): https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9766896/woodrow-wilson-racist. 

[24] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 149.

[25] David R. King, Forward with Christ: A Bicentennial Historical Book (Trenton, NJ: The Diocesan Bicentennial Committee, 1985), 96.

[26] More research into the history of these tiles at St. James is needed, but they likely date to the first half of the 20^th century, and their recent presence has been confirmed by multiple members of the diocesan Reparations Commission.

[27] The Reparations Commission has requested their removal, and their removal has been promised, but as of over a year after the initial request the swastika tiles have still not all been removed.

[28] Conducted by Katherine Ritter,  “Greetings from the Anthropocene: queer ecologies of Asbury Park, New Jersey,” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2003), 126-128.

[29] Ritter,  “Greetings from the Anthropocene, 126.

[30] See Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “‘White Flight’ and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey,” DNJRJR (October 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/white-flight-and-mission-in-diocese-of.html; and Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “Christ the King, Levittown: An Example of the ‘White Flight’ mission,” DNJRJR (October 8, 2024):  https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/christ-king-levittown-example-of-white.html.

[31] For whom the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church names one of their annual prizes, who served on its Board for many years, and who was a prolific historian writing, among other texts, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954). For a review that considers his inadequate treatment of slavery and racism see Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “REVIEW: The Anglican Church in New Jersey, by Nelson R. Burr (1954),” DNJRJR (November 20, 2023): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2023/11/review-anglican-church-in-new-jersey-by.html. 

[32] From Pruszinski, “‘White Flight’ and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey,” DNJRJR (October 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/white-flight-and-mission-in-diocese-of.html: “He was not the only one in the leadership of the diocese. When the official public documents of your institution specifically deny being reactionary (see The Journal of the 176^th Annual Convention of the Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, 152), it means they are addressing the appearance of being reactionary.” 

[33] Pruszinski, “‘White Flight’ and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey,” DNJRJR (October 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/white-flight-and-mission-in-diocese-of.html, who draws on the following sources for these conclusions: Re: Burr, see Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New Jersey: Protestant Episcopal, 63. Stowe voices a number of concerns of this kind in Walter Herbert Stowe, “Immigration and the Growth of the Episcopal Church,” HMPEC 11 (1942): 330-61. While Burr was publishing with the WPA on New Jersey, it is hard to know how much he influenced the work generally, or how much his perspective was simply typical among the researchers. For example, someone (probably not Burr) working on the WPA New Jersey material at this time, as described in Bilby and Ziegler (The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 150), wrote that citizens of mixed-race Gouldtown, New Jersey “refuse to accept a Negro status but cannot be classified as whites.” See also the Federal Writers’ Project, New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past (New York: Viking, 1939), 637. Bilby and Ziegler see this as evidence of racist concerns over “mongrelization.”

[34] He edited the journal from 1950-1961, and publishing, for instance, H. Peers Brewer “The Protestant Episcopal Freedman’s Commission, 1865-1878,” HMPEC 26.4 (1957): 361-81, who stated that “Klan attacks were not without justification,” here p. 370.

[35] King, Forward with Christ, 10).

[36] Pruszinski, “‘White Flight’ and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey,” DNJRJR (October 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/white-flight-and-mission-in-diocese-of.html.

[37] Most, significantly, St. Monica’s in Trenton. See Pruszinski, “Christ the King, Levittown: An Example of the ‘White Flight’ mission,” DNJRJR (October 8, 2024):  https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/christ-king-levittown-example-of-white.html.

[38] See Pruszinski, “Christ the King, Levittown: An Example of the ‘White Flight’ mission,” DNJRJR (October 8, 2024):  https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/christ-king-levittown-example-of-white.html: When the first Black family moved in to the Levittown across the river in Pennsylvania in 1957, the neighbors called in the Ku Klux Klan to organize the protest and local police did not stop it (even as it included cross burning and rock throwing). This was all well reported and the racialized nature of Levitt developments was well known. See Jerry Jonas, “60 Years Later, the Levittown Shame That Still Lingers,” Bucks County Courier Times (August 12, 2017).

[39] See Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, Nazi Sympathizer and Priest of St. Wilfrid’s, Camden (1930-1962),” DNJRJR (January 25, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/01/rev-dr-william-ridgeway-nazi.html, and Stephanie Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church: Fragments of the Soul of an Urban Church,” Capstone Project (2019), MSS held at Rubenstein Library, Duke University, and https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18575.”

[40] Aífe Murray, “The Ku Klux Klan at Home in Hillsdale,” New Jersey Studies 3.2 (2017): 210, http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/njs.v3i2.87.

[41] There were, of course, exceptions to this, but it was the prevailing attitude.

[42] Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 92.

[43] To use a modern idiom, it seems that the main reason Episcopalians usually did not overtly support the Klan is that the Klan was “saying the quiet part out loud.” It seems less to have been an issue of content, and more one of style, or decorum. 

[44] If anything, this cursory summary of readily available documentation suggests the necessity of further, more detailed, research into the available archival print-news records available, cross-checked against parish and diocesan records to better determine the scope of Episcopal involvement in the Klan. Local churches must look carefully into this history and reckon with it. Some places to start: research library accessible digitally archived newspaper searches on “Klan,” “Episcopal,” and “Jersey;” checking Somerset county cross-affiliations (including those noted in Buck & Mills, If These Stones Could Talk, 259-60, 276); checking Palmyra/Riverton area cross-affiliations as the Klan was active here, see e.g. https://rivertonhistory.com/2023/02/; checking all shore community cross-affiliations, especially from Atlantic City northward; examination of Rutgers University’s Bernard Bush Collection on the Klan (this will involve combing through their physical files).

[45] Many Episcopalians in New Jersey, at least ultimately, rejected the Klan (as shown by the election of Bishop Spong, who, before he was elected Bishop of Newark, was voted “enemy #1” by the Klan in the 1960s: https://chqdaily.com/2016/06/kkk-enemy-no-1-john-spong-returns-to-chautauqua-to-argue-jewish-origins-of-matthews-gospel/), but generally speaking, there has been a great deal of institutional toleration for racist beliefs.

[46] See Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “White Supremacist Symbols at the Diocesan Headquarters (1943-Present),” DNJRJR (March 5, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/03/white-supremacist-symbols-at-diocesan.html. 

[47] As is clear from Bishop French’s message in the first issue of Good News in the Garden State following the January 2025 presidential inauguration in which she indicates her awareness that many Episcopalians in the diocese are happy about the initial executive orders: “some feel relief at clear and decisive actions.” Sally French, “The Bishop’s Corner,” Good News in the Garden State (January 31, 2025): https://mailchi.mp/dioceseofnj/good-news-in-the-garden-state-january-31-11259010?fbclid=IwY2xjawINvq5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHexPgqqQky4dm9v_STx1CPA5Aw2tSULoGewEoBvQTtfmSXOY-ifixp789Q_aem_nBUcEFVC8ZwCHXrIgDUQXQ. 

Rev. Peter Williams Jr. (1786-1840): Second Ordained African-American Episcopal Priest

Detail of "Rev. Peter Williams [Jr.].” 
From Woodson, The History of the Negro Church, 94­–95 
(courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Peter Williams, Jr. was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey (in the Diocese of New Jersey) in 1786. His family moved to New York soon after, where his father was involved in the founding of the AME Zion Church. Williams attended the African Free School as a child and received tutoring from the Episcopal priests Thomas Lyell and John Henry Hobart. In New York he attended Trinity Church[1] as a young man until he helped to found St. Philip’s African Church, which was the second founded Black Episcopal church in the United States.[2] He published extensively on abolition,[3] jointly founding the first African American newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal,[4] and regularly argued against the racist positions of the American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1808 he delivered an abolitionist address in the City which was to become one of the first published Black abolitionist writings. In this speech he said:

 

Review, for a moment, my brethren, the history of the Slave Trade, engendered in the foul recesses of the sordid mind, the unnatural monster inflicted gross evils on the human race. Its baneful footsteps are marked with blood; its infections breath spreads war and desolation; and its train is composed of the complicated miseries, of cruel and unceasing bondage...[5]

 

Oh, God! We thank thee, that thou didst condescend to listen to the cries of Africa’s wretched sons; and that thou didst interfere in their behalf. At thy call humanity sprang forth, and espoused the cause of the oppressed: one hand she employed in drawing from their vitals the deadly arrows of injustice; and the other in holding a shield, to defend them from fresh assaults: and at that illustrious moment, when the sons of ’76 pronounced these United States free and independent; when the spirit of patriotism, erected a temple sacred to liberty; when the inspired voice of Americans first uttered those noble sentiments, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and when the bleeding African, lifting his fetters, exclaimed, “am I not a man and a brother;” then with redoubled efforts, the angel of humanity strove to restore to the African race, the inherent rights of man.[6]

 

He was ordained to the priesthood in 1826, the second Black man ordained in the Episcopal church, and became the first rector of St. Philip’s. White leaders of his diocese often sought to control or prevent his abolitionist work,[7] but he remained a persistent voice for equality and freedom. When, following a riot instigated by the ACS in 1834 against abolitionists, in which Williams’ own home was burned and his church temporarily closed, and Bishop Onderdonk exhorted Williams to dissociate himself from the American Anti-Slavery Society,[8] Williams wrote the following firm response:

 

In regard to my opposition to the Colonization Society… that Society has held out the idea, that a colored man, however he may strive to make himself intelligent, virtuous and useful, can never enjoy the privileges of a citizen of the United States, but must ever remain a degraded and oppressed being. I could not, and do not believe that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gospel of Christ, have not power sufficient to raise him…[9]

 

For more online about the great Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. see:

 

Peter Williams, Jr., “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/16/

 

"The Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., 1786-1840" at Episcopal archives

https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/clergy/williamssp 

George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1922), especially pp. 81-89:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/History_of_the_Afro_American_Group_of_th/RIfZAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

"The Reverend Peter Williams, Jr." at Black Presence

https://blackpresence.episcopalny.org/person/the-reverend-peter-williams-jr-3/

 

"Peter Williams, Jr." at Black Past

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-peter-jr-1780-1840/

 

"Peter Williams, Jr." on wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Williams_Jr.

 

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

 

---

[1] Now known as Trinity Church, Wall Street.

[2] First organized in 1809, and formally admitted to the Episcopal Church in 1819. See George F. Bragg, History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1922), 81-89. The Church has moved location northward to Harlem since its founding.

[3] See, for example, his speech “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” delivered in 1808: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/16/.

[4] See Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lexington Books, 2007). See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom%27s_Journal.

[5] Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 12.

[6] Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 19.

[7] See D.C. Heath, “The coercion of a black priest: Peter Williams, 1834,” in David B. Davis, ed., Antebellum American Culture (Lexington, MA: 1979), 295-98.

[8] Williams was on the board of the organization.

[9] Heath, “The coercion of a black priest,” 297.