Some Vermont religious leaders are asking the state to confront its role as a location where Black people were once held as slaves and remember those individuals — like Lavinia and Francis Parker, a mother and son enslaved by Ethan Allen’s daughter Lucy Caroline Allen Hitchcock.
At least 180 individuals were enslaved by William & Mary from the college’s founding in 1693 until the Civil War. On Tuesday (Aug. 25), the school approved a final design for a memorial to them and announced that it had secured all of the funding
A northern Virginia congressman is pursuing legislation to remove Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s name from the official designation at the historic mansion where he lived before the Civil War. The home, overlooks the nation’s capital and is surrounded by Arlington National Cemetery.
On the 401st anniversary of the start of Black enslavement in the American colonies, Word&Way Editor Brian Kaylor offered a time of confession and lament at the tombstone of the first pastor of his Baptist church, a man who enslaved three persons while serving as
Davidson College issued a public apology Wednesday for its support of slavery during the school’s first 30 years and unveiled plans to address a variety of problems ranging from building names to relations with Black people in the local community.
University of Virginia unveiled a Memorial to Enslaved Laborers this month. The memorial acknowledges the estimated 4,000 enslaved people who lived and worked at the university from 1817 to 1865. Read full piece
Senator Kamala Harris of California could become the fifth Baptist to serve as U.S. vice president. She would stand in stark contrast to other Baptist VPs — especially the first one, a slaveholder who was open about his enslaved common-law wife and their children.b
In addition to increasing diversity in leadership, some Southern Baptists also want the convention and its entities to reconsider how they honor their early slave-holding leaders. Read full piece
It is long past time for religious congregations to begin again — to dredge up their history in order to confront it and begin anew. Congregations cannot begin to move forward with the work of racial justice until they face their past complicity in white
As the country is once again facing a reckoning on racial justice, perhaps the biggest obstacle to White Christians’ full participation in the movement for racial equality is an unshakable commitment to our own innocence.