How Do I Research My Church's Involvement with Slavery? Part 2: Getting Oriented

Continued from Part 1: Limitations...

PART 2: Getting Oriented
At the outset it is important to familiarize yourself with the general and local history of the period you are researching. Read through the research that has already been done, both by the Diocese and by other researchers. Be sure to read through the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review, especially those articles related to colonial-era history or your local area. There are several helpful books that have been published on the colonial and antebellum history of this region, slavery in this region, and Black history of New Jersey. Familiarize yourself with them. Here are a few to get you started:

Rick Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2021).

James Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Graham Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Madison: Madison House, 1997).

Graham Hodges, Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

(Continued in Part 3: Colonial Era)

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

How Do I Research My Church's Involvement with Slavery? Part 1: Limitations

If you belong to a colonial or antebellum-era Episcopal church in the Diocese of New Jersey and want to begin to investigate your church’s ties to slavery and racism, we want to help. There is so much work to be done to uncover and document this under-acknowledged history and the prospect of beginning the work can feel daunting. Where does one start? What should be considered? Here are a few thoughts and resources to get you started.

Christ Church, Shrewsbury, a historic congregation in the Diocese of New Jersey that has conducted
significant research on its ties to slavery (Dpsherman, Christ Church (Episcopal), CC BY-SA 4.0).

PART 1: Limitations
        It will help to begin by admitting that you are not going to find everything out. There is a lot that happened for which there is no documentary evidence. And even if there once was documentary evidence, a great deal of it has been lost or destroyed, and much that remains has yet to be catalogued (and as a result is very hard to find, or to even know that it exists). Research programs of this kind must admit their own limitations. Any researcher attempting to paint a picture of the past will paint, at best, a partial picture of what happened. That picture may be (and hopefully will be) representative, but it will not be exhaustive. The limitations of the research endeavor are important to acknowledge, and even as the limitations of the process may be disappointing to a beginning researcher, it is nevertheless important to discover and document what can be found. To discover what can be known about what happened regarding slavery and racism, even with the limitations on what can be known, is necessary for the process of repentance and repair. 
        It is also important to understand the limits of your research for knowing how to speak responsibly about your work. Sweeping generalizations have a way of being inaccurate, while carefully caveated and contextualized reporting is inherently more defensible, and therefore, valuable. You are only making a beginning, but a responsible beginning is far better than, on the one hand, inaccurately claiming to give the final word, or, on the other, giving up entirely because you will not be able to give the final word.
Moreover, it is critical to understand the limitations of your context. The vast majority of churches in the Diocese of New Jersey are, and have been, overwhelmingly White. If this is your context you must understand that this is a limited context from which to research. Looking through your parish records, or looking into the actions of historic parish leaders will only get you so far. 
        One of the key dynamics at play in this New Jersey church history of slavery and racism is that White people have often produced institutions, communities, and spaces that have alienated Black people. That means that in the records of Episcopal churches in New Jersey there is often little overt mention of Black people, or the treatment of Black people. That doesn’t mean that there were no Black people, or that nothing can be known of Black people, or that Black people were treated well. It simply means that Episcopal church sources, generally, are under-reporting the Black experience. Thus, as a source for the information on how Black people were treated, Episcopal church records, while a necessary element of the research program, are very limited. White churches are institutions generationally shaped by White ideas, assumptions, biases, and decisions. In order to work to overcome these structural limitations as much as possible, White researchers from White churches will need to look beyond their own experience and institutions. They will need to look for sources and stories from their broader local community, surrounding communities and their larger region, non-Episcopal churches, and secular historical sources. They will need to work to overcome the separation of their church community from the records they need. This separation is the result of generations of unjust actions that have alienated their church communities from the people they have hurt. Much of this story is housed outside the church, and if one is to uncover and attempt to tell this story, and to admit the church’s role in that hurt, a great deal of humility is required. It is not only your story. It is not even primarily your story. Tread lightly. Be sensitive. Be willing to learn. Be willing to apologize. Know that your own biases limit your understanding and caveat the products of your research accordingly.

(Continued in Part 2: Getting Oriented)

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

NEWS: The Church Pension Group Publishes Slavery Audit of Episcopal Church Funds

The Church Pension Group (CPG), which runs the pension funds for the Episcopal Church, has published the results of its recent audit of the historical links to slavery of CPG funds. The report can be found at the CPG website. Reporting on the release appears in the Episcopal New Service. The Church Pension fund endowment is one of the largest fifteen endowments in the world, and third largest if university endowments are excluded. The audit is a response to a general convention resolution calling for a forensic audit of the fund. However, the initial ENS reporting on the methodology employed in in the audit suggests that it is perhaps overly generous to suggest that it was "forensic." The researchers themselves admit that they did not research the majority of donors, ostensibly because their donations were small and it would have been a time-intensive process. That means that the official findings of "no" direct connection to slavery, and comparatively greater but still modest indirect links slavery, should be taken with a grain of salt. The producers of the study also readily admit that the donors were, almost without exception, White, and that the economic structures of society that enabled the accumulation of wealth by White Americans prior to and following the Civil War were deeply racist. As Patric Favreau, the Executive VP of CPG, noted (according to ENS reporting), "wealth accumulation for much of the 19th century cannot be separated from the economics of enslavement." This means that even as the overt connections to slavery discovered in the audit appear modest, the White wealth that provided the foundation for the Church Pension Fund, and its predecessor funds associated with the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, should be understood to be inextricably linked to racist processes of White wealth accumulation which functioned to prevent wealth accumulation by Black Americans.

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

VIDEO: Reparations Webinar Sponsored by NJ Faith Allies for Reparations, April 25, 2024

 

On April 25, 2024, the Diocese of New Jersey hosted a reparations webinar organized by New Jersey Faith Allies for Reparations entitled "Journey Toward Reparations: New Jersey's Opportunity to Learn from New York & California." Led by Reverend Charles Wynder, Jr., the panel discussion included insights from NY State Senator James Sanders, Jr., the Reverend Dr. Darrell Armstrong, and the Reverend Charles Boyer. 

NEWS: Stations of Reparations Service, St. Augustine's Asbury Park, NJ March 16, 2024

Figure 1: Stations of Reparations service, St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, Asbury Park, NJ, March 16, 2024.
Photo by Jolyon Pruszinski.

On Saturday March 16, 2024 the Reparations Commission of the Diocese of New Jersey sponsored its second annual Liturgy of Stations of Reparations, a Lenten service of repentance. Originally conceived by the Commission’s history working group, the service was a well-attended, broadly collaborative effort hosted by members of the influential, historically Black church, St. Augustine’s, Asbury Park, New Jersey. 
The first “Stations” service was held in March 2023 at St. Peter’s, Freehold, NJ, and brought together testimony from several churches that had researched their parish involvement with slavery. This second service focused on the Post-Civil War history of systemic racism and featured testimony from local Monmouth County Episcopal churches. This focus on systemic racism is itself rooted in New Jersey’s history of enslavement. A video recording of the service is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_AvkWiK8ks. 
The core of the service was modeled on the traditional Stations of the Cross, in which, at each Station, a portion of the story of Jesus’ Passion is told within a repeating structure of prayer. However, instead of featuring the stories of Jesus’ Passion, the service lifted up stories related to systemic racism and injustice, as well as achievement and lived faith in the context of historically Black congregations. Interspersed with presentations of parish histories were poems that fostered reflection on the Black experience of racism and a sung refrain from “There is a Balm in Gilead.” Dr. Bennett Craft (organ and piano) and Sheila Harris Jackson (soloist) led the music for the service, while the Rev. Dr. William Ndishabandi, Priest in Charge at St. Augustine’s, the Rev. Chase Danford, Rector of Trinity, Asbury Park, and the Rt. Rev. Sally French, Bishop of the Diocese of New Jersey, presided.
The first station featured testimony from Ms. Linda Shomo of St. Augustine’s, Asbury Park, past president of the New Jersey chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians. She told about the recent history of racism in Asbury Park through an explanation of governmental development choices and their economic and social impacts. She further detailed her experience of the strained racial relationship between St. Augustine’s and Trinity, Asbury Park. Her moving descriptions of the nurturing parish life at St. Augustine’s that sustained her through the difficulties of growing up in a town beset by racism were a testament to the faithfulness and persistence of the congregation.
The second station’s historical presentation came from Rev. Danford of Trinity Asbury Park. He described some of the early racist laws in Asbury Park, and noted that the initial benefactor of the church, James Bradley, created many of these policies. He described modest early ministry to local Black people in the late nineteenth century, but also the lack of relationship with St. Augustine’s throughout the twentieth century. Lately Trinity has formed a Racial Justice Audit team to examine its history of racism. While much work remains to be done, Danford described new policies in hiring, improved relationships beyond the White community of Asbury Park, and the diversification of depictions of Jesus in the sacred art at Trinity.
The third station was presented by Charles Hughes of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Red Bank whose wife’s grandparents were among the founding members of St. Thomas. That first generation began meeting in a chapel which had fallen into disuse which was then owned by the White congregation of Trinity Episcopal Church, Red Bank. In the mid-twentieth century, when St. Thomas had grown dramatically and looked to expand, many neighboring White residents sought to prevent their building. The congregation prevailed against this racist resistance and managed to build their new church in Red Bank in the 1950’s, continuing to bless the community that had resisted its presence. St. Thomas has had a thriving ministry there ever since, including founding “Lunch Break” (https://lunchbreak.org) a critical social service organization in Red Bank providing food, clothing, job training, and more to those experiencing financial insecurity.
The fourth station featured a description of the larger diocesan history of racism occurring following the civil war and throughout the twentieth century by Reparations Commission Research Historian, Jolyon Pruszinski, Ph.D. This racism included long-standing White refusal to worship with Black Episcopalians, underfunding of Black churches, and even the closing of Black congregations to fund White ones. Then, during a time of quiet reflection and prayer, participants were invited to consider the stories told by the presenters and possible steps the Holy Spirit might be prompting in response. The Rev. Kevin Thompson, Deacon, St. Thomas, Red Bank closed the service saying: “The journey of reparations is long. Today we have taken one small step. Let us go forth in the Name of Christ to walk towards justice and healing.” A hearty reception afterward, hosted by St. Augustine parishioners, allowed for continued conversation and the sharing of personal stories.
        The Commission believes it is essential that these stories be told in many ways, not least in the context of worship. Further services are being planned for other regions of the diocese in subsequent years, and many churches in the diocese are beginning to look into the ways they have participated in enslavement and engaged in or benefitted from racism. Updates from the Reparations Commission can be found at https://dioceseofnj.org/commissions/reparations-commission/ and research updates concerning the diocese’s history regarding slavery and racism can be found at the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review website: https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com.

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

EVENT: Reparations Webinar Sponsored by NJ Faith Allies for Reparations, Thurs. April 25, 2024, 7pm

Check out this upcoming reparations webinar, Thursday April 25, 2024 at 7:00 PM: "Journey Toward Reparations: New Jersey's Opportunity to Learn from New York & California."

Featuring guest speakers: NY State Senator James Sanders, Jr.; Reverend Charles Boyer; and Reverend Dr. Darrell Armstrong, Moderated by Reverend Charles Wynder, Jr.

Organized by NJ Faith Allies for Reparations, hosted by Diocese of NJ Reparations Commission.

Register here. After registering you will receive webinar Zoom link by email.

VIDEO: Stations of Reparations Service, St. Augustine's Asbury Park, NJ March 16, 2024

This is a Zoom video recording of the second annual "Stations of Reparations" Lenten service of repentance, sponsored by the Reparations Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, and hosted by St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, Asbury Park on Saturday March 16, 2024. The service focused on the Post-Civil War history of systemic racism in the diocese and featured testimony from members of Monmouth County Episcopal churches including Charles ​Hughes of St. Thomas' Episcopal Church, Red Bank, Rev. Chase Danford of Trinity Episcopal Church, Asbury Park, and ​Linda Shomo of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, Asbury Park, as well as testimony about the general history of racism in the diocese from Commission historian Jolyon Pruszinski.