Separation, marginalization, collaboration - St. Augustine's Slave Galleries

Sometimes we compartmentalize our lives.  Work, school, home, church - we divide our resources between the activities and demands that call us.  Sometimes the lines blur, but often we work to keep them separate.


During today's morning routine of coffee and laptop, I skimmed the headlines of Episcopal Life Online and found a historical example of such separation.  Fairly front and center is a story on the recently renovated and interpreted slavery galleries in St. Augustine's Episcopal Church on New York's Lower East Side.  The church, built in 1828 (a year after slavery was abolished in New York State) collaborated on a renovation project with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on the historic building's slave galleries, two small rooms behind the organ where blacks were allowed to worship - out of site and separated.  


This is the second recent project (within my awareness) where an Episcopal congregation has dedicated resources to understanding their own past in terms of slavery.   Why the Episcopalians?  On the modern end of the timeline, we've done a lot of soul searching of late (complete with hard work and loss) about owning differences and removing separations.  On the other end of the timeline, if one generalizes about Colonial congregations, Episcopalians tended towards possession of wealth, status, and in some cases, slaves.  The rooms existed in St. Augustine's because there was a (perceived) need.  Some congregants owned slaves (or had free blacks in their households depending on the date) as did some of the founding fathers who attended Christ Church in Philadelphia, another congregation putting commendable effort into revealing its past associations with slavery.  The Christ Church Preservation Trust sites a "mandate from the 2006 General Convention of the Episcopal Church to give a full, faithful, and informed accounting of its history" as the impetus for delving into their past and designing a tool for engaging that past in the present.  Sarah's Story is a 30 minute interpretive experience offered at Christ Church during the summer months.  An interpreter portraying a young, black, female slave shares stories of several historic figures, black and white, in a deliberate review of "early Philadelphia and its silent past." 


I remain proud of the Episcopal Church's work to own who we are and choose whom we will be.  Issues of segregation and marginalization are not only in our past. May we continue to find the strength to own and discuss past examples in our efforts to remove such obstacles from our present and our future.  Also continuing to "do good history" in the process - well, that's a delightful benefit.  Road trip to New York, anyone?