Episcopal Diocese of Long Island churches confront their role in slavery
The team helping Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston map its connection to slavery: Marguerite LeBron of Little Neck, left; the Rev. Carl Adair, assistant rector of the church; Christina Shonfeld of Queens Village; the Rev. Lindsay Lunnum, the church's rector; and Tula Lacy. Credit: Danielle Silverman
To wrap her mind around the complex connections between her church and the enslavement of people of African descent, Christina Shonfeld said she had to face her own fear.
Shonfeld, 62, of Queens Village, said she and other volunteers didn’t know what type of news they would uncover about the church and its leaders when they began to research that history.
Along with a handful of other volunteers and leaders at Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, Queens, she studied the church’s winding entanglement with slavery that started near its beginning: Many families who together owned dozens of enslaved people signed the churches’ articles of incorporation.
Sitting in a church pew a couple of feet away from Shonfeld recently, Little Neck resident and research volunteer Marguerite LeBron, 74, said finding out that history was a disheartening revelation, noting: “We want everyone who comes in here to know what happened.”
Zion Episcopal Church is among more than a dozen churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island that are undertaking similar work as part of the Uncovering Parish Histories project. Spearheaded by the Rev. Craig Townsend and helped along by assistant researcher Bryan Clarke, the project has been examining connections to slavery and abolition among Episcopal churches in Brooklyn, Queens, as well as Nassau and Suffolk counties, the Episcopal News Service reported in an earlier story on the effort.
Telling a fuller account of the reaches of slavery, researchers and theologians said, means confronting incorrect assumptions held by some that slavery did not happen in the North.
The diocese has awarded scholarships to students who are descendants of enslaved Africans. And in recent years, the Episcopal Church has made several efforts to examine its complicity in slavery.
The information researched might be known in the historical records, but the work is taking place as the nation grapples to teach a full accounting of its history. Racial justice protests of 2020 that happened while the project was in the conception phase have given way to reparations studies in places like California, but also pushback about how racial history may be taught.
Between 2021 and 2022, more than 40 states introduced measures opposing critical race theory, an interdisciplinary approach that had been used to look at the structure of racism, according to research from the UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program.
Townsend, who is the historian-in-residence for racial justice for the diocese, said the goal of the Uncovering Parish Histories project is to take a stand for racial justice. A step in doing that, he said, is understanding its history.
“You name the past so that you can move into the future. But if you don't name it, then you're trying to pretend it's not there,” he said. “And we don't succeed. I mean that's the American culture story right now, this effort to try to pretend it's not there, to shove it back underground."
“Once you've looked at it,” he noted, “you can't unknow it. But once you know it, you can say, ‘That's not who we want to be.’”
New York passed a gradual emancipation in 1799, freeing children of enslaved women who were born after passage of the law, according to an article by Ned Benton, co-director of the Northeast Slavery Records Index and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1817, another measure passed to free some people who were left out of the earlier effort, he wrote.
By 1827, slavery ended in New York, at least officially. Benton notes slavery continued in the state in other ways, including temporary visits from other states, recapturing people who had fled slavery, and restocking slave ships in the Port of New York.
And for the Uncovering Parish Histories, getting at the truth means volunteers and church officials in this largely white denomination are wading into the role some of its early leaders played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn were separate churches, but St. Ann incorporated the name when they moved into the space that had been The Church of the Holy Trinity, according to the church’s website.
Townsend and high school students found that many of St. Ann's early leaders were enslavers, with most of them holding between one and four people.
Wardens and other leaders of both parishes were probably involved in businesses that supported the South's slavery economy, including banking with plantation owners and merchants who were warehousing and sending cotton to other states and across the Atlantic.
“Donations by all of these persons were fundamental to the founding and early economic well-being of the two churches, which means that the histories of both congregations are stained with direct connections to the institution of slavery,” Townsend said in a video report.
St. John's Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor is grappling with how to deal with its burial ground for people of color that had been unkempt.
Jupiter Hammon, one of the first African American poets to be published in the nation, was enslaved to Henry Lloyd's estate on Lloyd Neck. Lloyd was a major contributor to St. John's Episcopal Church in Huntington. For instance, church records showed he signed a document in the 1700s showing that he would give an estimated 145 pounds for the upkeep and support of a person they wanted at the time to serve in the church.
But there were perceived bright spots in the effort, times when church leaders were people of color or when churches made efforts to get them involved in the church. Zion had a warden who was of Native American descent.
Digging up this history often means digging through church records, said Clarke, the assistant researcher for the Uncovering Parish Histories project.
He said he spent a good deal of time in archives, reading about, for instance, the Town of Hempstead’s history and its population in the 1800s.
Volunteers will look for key names such as founders and significant community members who also attended these churches, he said. The names then go into the Northeast Slavery Records Index.
Volunteers and others then look to see if those people had ties to the slave economy, or whether they had proslavery or abolitionist leanings, and whether they had businesses sourced through the slavery economy.
But Clarke, who is Methodist and lives in Roosevelt, said it is sometimes more challenging to find comprehensive information about people who were enslaved. Other times, he said, when he hears the callous ways that enslaved people’s predicaments are stated, it gives him pause.
“But you understand their suffering in some capacity, and you feel the need to just, like, stop and appreciate that for a moment,” said Clarke. “And, at least, in your mind, reserve them as somewhat significant rather than the people who oppressed them as the ones that were significant.”
Heather Kress, who is taking part in the Uncovering Parish Histories project at St. John's Episcopal Church in Huntington, said she had between six and seven people volunteer.
Many early church records, she said, had been destroyed. But a minister at the church in the late 1800s wrote the annals of the church, using information from parishioners and other sources.
Based on that record, the volunteers could find more than 150 names. Now, she said, they are working through that history, which she described as “slow going” and tedious.
The work, for some, brings up thorny feelings.
Charles Waters, who was of indigenous descent, was a warden at Zion Episcopal Church. Church officials said that role would make him one of the most powerful, influential elected laypeople in the parish.
Today, Harry Wallace, chief of the Unkechaug Indian Reservation on Long Island, is one of his descendants. Waters was his great-great-grandmother’s brother.
Wallace has mixed feelings about Christianity. He has close family buried at Zion. In the 1930s, the remains of some Matinecock people were reburied at Zion’s cemetery. New York City had decided to widen Northern Boulevard, ravaging a Matinecock burial ground.
As for Christianity, he said, the faith has been the mechanism for the “physical, cultural and political destruction of our people.”
But at the same time, as a communal people, the church provided a venue that was acceptable to the outside world, where they could meet and gather without fear of hostility, he said.
“We could speak our language in private, communicate in our certain ways, we could hold on to our long houses in private under the veneer, if you will, of … church doctrine,” he said. “So, I think my ancestors were keen to that ability to” retain “community relations by using the umbrella of the quote-unquote Christian church” as a means of protection.
The Rev. Dr. Kelly Douglas Brown, interim president of the Episcopal Divinity School, said in many ways, many enslaved people of African descent had similar experiences with Christianity, holding clandestine meetings and understanding God in a different context.
Brown noted that they were informed by their own religious heritage. She said, “And as they encountered this other through this oral/aural tradition, this other version of God in the Bible and of Jesus, it is like that was reminiscent of the gods they knew in Africa.”
She said it is necessary to do the work of accountability — and reparations. “To me, true reparations, which our enslaved forebears are fighting toward, is closing the gap between an unjust present and a more just future,” she said.
She said that means the denomination has to do more than just simply apologize and pay money and scholarships. “We have to be engaged in changing systems and structures so that, indeed, this gap no longer exists,” she said. “The gap between the injustice that we know and the justice that we know Jesus was fighting for.”
Back at Zion, the Rev. Carl Adair, the church's assistant rector, and volunteers are looking at how to reflect on their history. Adair called uncovering this history a “profound spiritual experience.”
The church is planning a partnership with the Queens Public Library. And it is working to create a memorial to at least 40 people enslaved by families that signed the church’s articles of incorporation. They will have a service of dedication for this memorial in November.
Still, Adair said the work continues.
“If it was easy for us to synthesize, to incorporate these aspects of our history into the story we had been telling ourselves for the last almost 200 years, we would have done it,” he said.
He added that this work will “continue to reshape self-understanding and an identity.”
To wrap her mind around the complex connections between her church and the enslavement of people of African descent, Christina Shonfeld said she had to face her own fear.
Shonfeld, 62, of Queens Village, said she and other volunteers didn’t know what type of news they would uncover about the church and its leaders when they began to research that history.
Along with a handful of other volunteers and leaders at Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, Queens, she studied the church’s winding entanglement with slavery that started near its beginning: Many families who together owned dozens of enslaved people signed the churches’ articles of incorporation.
Sitting in a church pew a couple of feet away from Shonfeld recently, Little Neck resident and research volunteer Marguerite LeBron, 74, said finding out that history was a disheartening revelation, noting: “We want everyone who comes in here to know what happened.”
WHAT TO KNOW
- The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island is working with churches across Nassau, Suffolk, Brooklyn and Queens to examine its connections to slavery and abolition.
- The Uncovering Parish History project's work continues in the face of some national pushback to how racial history is taught in schools.
- Some parishes have found that some of the early church's leaders either owned enslaved people or benefited from the slave economy.
Zion Episcopal Church is among more than a dozen churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island that are undertaking similar work as part of the Uncovering Parish Histories project. Spearheaded by the Rev. Craig Townsend and helped along by assistant researcher Bryan Clarke, the project has been examining connections to slavery and abolition among Episcopal churches in Brooklyn, Queens, as well as Nassau and Suffolk counties, the Episcopal News Service reported in an earlier story on the effort.
Telling a fuller account of the reaches of slavery, researchers and theologians said, means confronting incorrect assumptions held by some that slavery did not happen in the North.
Zion Episcopal Church research volunteer Marguerite LeBron of Little Neck said learning about the church's involvement in slavery was disheartening. Credit: Danielle Silverman
The diocese has awarded scholarships to students who are descendants of enslaved Africans. And in recent years, the Episcopal Church has made several efforts to examine its complicity in slavery.
Work done as nation struggles with how to teach racial history
The information researched might be known in the historical records, but the work is taking place as the nation grapples to teach a full accounting of its history. Racial justice protests of 2020 that happened while the project was in the conception phase have given way to reparations studies in places like California, but also pushback about how racial history may be taught.
Between 2021 and 2022, more than 40 states introduced measures opposing critical race theory, an interdisciplinary approach that had been used to look at the structure of racism, according to research from the UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program.
Townsend, who is the historian-in-residence for racial justice for the diocese, said the goal of the Uncovering Parish Histories project is to take a stand for racial justice. A step in doing that, he said, is understanding its history.
“You name the past so that you can move into the future. But if you don't name it, then you're trying to pretend it's not there,” he said. “And we don't succeed. I mean that's the American culture story right now, this effort to try to pretend it's not there, to shove it back underground."
“Once you've looked at it,” he noted, “you can't unknow it. But once you know it, you can say, ‘That's not who we want to be.’”
New York passed a gradual emancipation in 1799, freeing children of enslaved women who were born after passage of the law, according to an article by Ned Benton, co-director of the Northeast Slavery Records Index and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1817, another measure passed to free some people who were left out of the earlier effort, he wrote.
By 1827, slavery ended in New York, at least officially. Benton notes slavery continued in the state in other ways, including temporary visits from other states, recapturing people who had fled slavery, and restocking slave ships in the Port of New York.
And for the Uncovering Parish Histories, getting at the truth means volunteers and church officials in this largely white denomination are wading into the role some of its early leaders played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Members of Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, Queens, including Christina Shonfeld, researched connections between the church and the enslavement of people of African descent. Credit: Danielle Silverman
Research finds early leaders of Brooklyn church owned slaves
St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn were separate churches, but St. Ann incorporated the name when they moved into the space that had been The Church of the Holy Trinity, according to the church’s website.
Townsend and high school students found that many of St. Ann's early leaders were enslavers, with most of them holding between one and four people.
Wardens and other leaders of both parishes were probably involved in businesses that supported the South's slavery economy, including banking with plantation owners and merchants who were warehousing and sending cotton to other states and across the Atlantic.
“Donations by all of these persons were fundamental to the founding and early economic well-being of the two churches, which means that the histories of both congregations are stained with direct connections to the institution of slavery,” Townsend said in a video report.
St. John's Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor is grappling with how to deal with its burial ground for people of color that had been unkempt.
Jupiter Hammon, one of the first African American poets to be published in the nation, was enslaved to Henry Lloyd's estate on Lloyd Neck. Lloyd was a major contributor to St. John's Episcopal Church in Huntington. For instance, church records showed he signed a document in the 1700s showing that he would give an estimated 145 pounds for the upkeep and support of a person they wanted at the time to serve in the church.
But there were perceived bright spots in the effort, times when church leaders were people of color or when churches made efforts to get them involved in the church. Zion had a warden who was of Native American descent.
Looking through Town of Hempstead records from the 1800s
Digging up this history often means digging through church records, said Clarke, the assistant researcher for the Uncovering Parish Histories project.
He said he spent a good deal of time in archives, reading about, for instance, the Town of Hempstead’s history and its population in the 1800s.
Volunteers will look for key names such as founders and significant community members who also attended these churches, he said. The names then go into the Northeast Slavery Records Index.
Volunteers and others then look to see if those people had ties to the slave economy, or whether they had proslavery or abolitionist leanings, and whether they had businesses sourced through the slavery economy.
But Clarke, who is Methodist and lives in Roosevelt, said it is sometimes more challenging to find comprehensive information about people who were enslaved. Other times, he said, when he hears the callous ways that enslaved people’s predicaments are stated, it gives him pause.
“But you understand their suffering in some capacity, and you feel the need to just, like, stop and appreciate that for a moment,” said Clarke. “And, at least, in your mind, reserve them as somewhat significant rather than the people who oppressed them as the ones that were significant.”
Heather Kress, who is taking part in the Uncovering Parish Histories project at St. John's Episcopal Church in Huntington, said she had between six and seven people volunteer.
Many early church records, she said, had been destroyed. But a minister at the church in the late 1800s wrote the annals of the church, using information from parishioners and other sources.
Based on that record, the volunteers could find more than 150 names. Now, she said, they are working through that history, which she described as “slow going” and tedious.
Some researchers find history can be unsettling
The work, for some, brings up thorny feelings.
Charles Waters, who was of indigenous descent, was a warden at Zion Episcopal Church. Church officials said that role would make him one of the most powerful, influential elected laypeople in the parish.
Today, Harry Wallace, chief of the Unkechaug Indian Reservation on Long Island, is one of his descendants. Waters was his great-great-grandmother’s brother.
Wallace has mixed feelings about Christianity. He has close family buried at Zion. In the 1930s, the remains of some Matinecock people were reburied at Zion’s cemetery. New York City had decided to widen Northern Boulevard, ravaging a Matinecock burial ground.
As for Christianity, he said, the faith has been the mechanism for the “physical, cultural and political destruction of our people.”
But at the same time, as a communal people, the church provided a venue that was acceptable to the outside world, where they could meet and gather without fear of hostility, he said.
“We could speak our language in private, communicate in our certain ways, we could hold on to our long houses in private under the veneer, if you will, of … church doctrine,” he said. “So, I think my ancestors were keen to that ability to” retain “community relations by using the umbrella of the quote-unquote Christian church” as a means of protection.
The Rev. Dr. Kelly Douglas Brown, interim president of the Episcopal Divinity School, said in many ways, many enslaved people of African descent had similar experiences with Christianity, holding clandestine meetings and understanding God in a different context.
Brown noted that they were informed by their own religious heritage. She said, “And as they encountered this other through this oral/aural tradition, this other version of God in the Bible and of Jesus, it is like that was reminiscent of the gods they knew in Africa.”
She said it is necessary to do the work of accountability — and reparations. “To me, true reparations, which our enslaved forebears are fighting toward, is closing the gap between an unjust present and a more just future,” she said.
She said that means the denomination has to do more than just simply apologize and pay money and scholarships. “We have to be engaged in changing systems and structures so that, indeed, this gap no longer exists,” she said. “The gap between the injustice that we know and the justice that we know Jesus was fighting for.”
The Rev. Carl Adair of Zion Episcopal Church is one of the leaders investigating the diocese's involvement in enslaving people. Credit: Danielle Silverman
A 'profound spiritual experience'
Back at Zion, the Rev. Carl Adair, the church's assistant rector, and volunteers are looking at how to reflect on their history. Adair called uncovering this history a “profound spiritual experience.”
The church is planning a partnership with the Queens Public Library. And it is working to create a memorial to at least 40 people enslaved by families that signed the church’s articles of incorporation. They will have a service of dedication for this memorial in November.
Still, Adair said the work continues.
“If it was easy for us to synthesize, to incorporate these aspects of our history into the story we had been telling ourselves for the last almost 200 years, we would have done it,” he said.
He added that this work will “continue to reshape self-understanding and an identity.”
Education: Howard University
Tiffany Cusaac-Smith came to Newsday in 2023 after being a race and history reporter at USA TODAY, where she wrote enterprise and spot articles examining how the past shapes the present. Previously, she worked as the race and justice reporter at the USA TODAY Network of New York, covering issues such as criminal justice reform, housing, environmental justice, health care and politics. At The Journal News/lohud.com in Westchester County, she covered Yonkers, the state's third-largest city. She also worked at The Associated Press in Atlanta.
Honors and Awards: Criminal justice reporting fellowship with the National Press Foundation; New York News Publishers Association award for distinguished investigative reporting; Contributed reporting for Best of Gannett honor; Member of Table Stakes, a program funded by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund and managed by the American Press Institute to transform local news.
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