Advertisement At 10:30 a.m., Episcopalians from across the country will meet at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in West Philadelphia. Founded in 1792 by the Rev. Absalom Jones, a former slave, it is the nation’s oldest black Episcopal church — a poignant setting for a “service of repentance and reconciliation.”
Open to the public, the ceremony will be led by Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, who will be joined by 15 other bishops.
“The liturgy will be similar to what we use on Ash Wednesday, when we seek forgiveness, reconciliation and repentence,” the Rev. Martini Shaw, pastor of St. Thomas, said earlier this week. “We’re looking on this as a sacramental event. It’s an extreme honor.”
From colonial days until the Civil War, many Northern port cities, including Philadelphia, thrived on trade in textiles, tobacco and other products dependent on slave labor. The merchant classes who reaped the bounty included many an Episcopalian.
At its 2006 general convention, the 2 million-member denomination voted to “acknowledge its history of participation in this sin.” Several other Protestant denominations, including the 15-million member Southern Baptist Convention, have made similar apologies.
One of the catalytic forces behind the resolution was Katrina Browne. A former Philadelphian, she produced and directed the celebrated independent film, “Traces of the Trade,” examining her own ancestors’ role as America’s largest slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries.
She will participate in a series of discussions on slavery Friday afternoon, from 1 to 5 p.m., at St. Thomas.
“My family was an extreme case,” Browne, 41, said in a telephone interview en route from her home in Boston.
She grew up in St. Peter’s parish in Society Hill — a church that once had a segregated “slave balcony.”
By the early 19th century, her ancestors, whom she calls a “slaving dynasty,” owned 47 ships and transported thousands of slaves from Africa to ports in Cuba, the Caribbean and the American South.
“And yet many more people in the North were complicit in slavery than most of us realize,” she said. “Middle-class people would buy shares in slave ships, and many people — not necessarily the wealthiest, but artisans, ministers and merchants — had one or two or three slaves.”
The Diocese of Virginia concluded that in 1860, 84 percent of its clergy owned slaves, according to Browne.
“Traces of the Trade, which Browne showed at the 2006 general convention, did much to win approval for the apology resolution, said the Rev. Lloyd Cassen, interim dean of the Philadelphia Cathedral.
“People — especially white people — started standing up,” Cassen said, “and reflecting on their own family’s history and how they benefited from slavery.”
The resolution that launched the apology had three parts, according to the Rev. Jayne Oasin, program officer for anti-racism and gender equality at the Episcopal Church Center in New York.
“The first asks for all the Episcopal dioceses in the United States to research those instances where they were complicit in, or profited from” the slave trade.
Eight dioceses have so far complied, Oasin said.
The Diocese of Pennsylvania, which comprises Philadelphia and the four surrounding Pennsylvania counties, has not yet reported in.
The second part of the resolution called on the presiding bishop to designate a “day of repentance,” in which the church as a whole would apologize for slavery, Oasin said.
The final part asks each diocesan cathedral to hold a service of repentance similar to the Philadelphia service.
“We understand that some of the western dioceses don’t have the same issues with African slaves that we have in the East,” said Oasin.
“But their wronged people — the people on whose backs they profited — might be some other group. Let’s say the South Dakota diocese needs to look at how it treated native Americans. Or in California, dioceses might look at its treatment of Japanese.”
Oasin said she hoped the Episcopal Church’s apology might “set a pattern for other churches and faith traditions who want to make apologies.”
