PHS staffers Luci Duckson-Bramble and David Staniunas were in and around Charlotte, North Carolina in late June to join the biennial gathering of the National Black Presbyterian Caucus. Our thanks go out first to the organizers of the event, especially to our colleague Lynne Foreman. Here’s a snapshot of our time there.
For six months PHS had laid the groundwork to bring in archival material and oral histories from African American churches in greater Charlotte and from prominent church workers, and we did not fall short. David’s first excursion away from Charlotte after landing was to Columbia, South Carolina, to meet with Richard Dozier, long-serving member of the old Fairfield-McClelland Presbytery, and organizer of the planned community Harbison.
David and Richard had spent time documenting the Harbison development last year, and on this visit Richard was prepared to deliver records of his ministry. A self-described “country boy” from Saluda, South Carolina, Richard went to college and seminary at Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte. After a stint as associate pastor helping to organize the Church of the Reconciler in Clearwater, Florida, he was called to Northminster Presbyterian Church in Columbia in 1968. During this period he served on the boards of the local branches of the National Urban League and Planned Parenthood, and started work on Harbison.
Harbison was a planned community, supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, built on 1700 acres once owned by the Presbyterian Board of National Missions. Among a dozen or so HUD New Communities nationwide, Harbison was designed for a population of 23,000, and was meant to address inequity in the housing market. Black residents of northern Columbia were locked in to substandard housing conditions, and locked out of the white suburbs. Harbison’s acres of pines, recreation centers, and dedicated bicycle paths offered a path out.
After a driving tour, David and Richard spent time in the Dozier basement – ultimately identifying 3 cubic feet of correspondence and reports on the community development, and printed sermons, audio and video from Northminster, bound for the archives. David got back to Charlotte about 10 that night, and packed and shipped Richard’s personal papers the next morning.
Our work staffing a booth at Black Caucus began in earnest on Thursday and Friday. We spent time with new friends and old, including PHS Board of Directors member Debra Love and PHS Advisory Council members Rev. Dr. Oscar and Kathy McCloud, and gradually received records at the table – including from CN Jenkins Memorial Presbyterian Church in Charlotte and Second Presbyterian Church in Sumter, South Carolina. We continue to encourage African American churches to join us and take care of their original session minutes and registers.
One congregation that took us up on the offer of an archivist’s site visit was Ryburn Memorial Presbyterian Church, about an hour away from Charlotte in Shelby, North Carolina. Organized in 1884 by the all-Black Presbytery of Atlantic as Colored Presbyterian Church, Ryburn’s present building goes back to the early 1970s. Their earliest extant minutes date from 1955, and were carefully stowed in a filing cabinet by church historian Mrs. Ezra Bridges. They are now in Philadelphia for imaging and return to the congregation.
Coming back from Shelby, we barely were able to set back up at the table before moving in to recording oral histories – first with Paul Roberts of Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, and then with James Ephraim of First United Presbyterian Church of Forestdale, in Birmingham, Alabama. Stay tuned for the release and publication of these interviews.
Further conversations with other attendees helped more fully flesh out our understanding of how the Presbyterian Church reckoned with the Freedom Movement of the 1960s. One presbytery in the southeast, at the behest of its clerk, held three votes in one meeting on the admission of Black clergy, each growing in favor, until after a final 90 to 4 vote in the affirmative, their clerk reported the tally with regret, calling it “a grave and monstrous sin against God almighty.” The work of reconstructing the church after formal, legal segregation is arguably ongoing, and living memories are still fresh.
In all, we learned a great deal and made new connections across the denomination. We look forward to joining the Caucus again in 2027!
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