This month in Presbyterian history
A repatriation ceremony, a trip to space, a sacred concert and the birth of the UN
The Charter of the United Nations, the foundational treaty of the intergovernmental organization, went into effect on October 24, 1945. United Nations Day, or UN Day, is celebrated annually on that date as a reminder of shared values and an opportunity to come together.
This pamphlet from the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society commemorates the American Community School in Iran’s celebratory events on UN day in 1956. The day's program of events consisted of performances presented by the students that correlated with a specific geographical area. Grade Seven and Eight Choir, for example, sang an "Arabian Folk song" in honor of "Arabian Countries." A "Danish couple folk dance" was performed by "Grades Five & Six" in honor of Scandinavia. The High School Speech class recited poems by Alfred Tennyson in honor of British culture. To celebrate American culture, Grade Nine danced the square dance.
The Community School was a Presbyterian boarding school from 1935 through 1980. Originally a school for the children of Presbyterian missionaries, it eventually expanded to Americans of all backgrounds and English-speaking students of different nationalities and faiths. By the 1960s, Iranians constituted the larger part of the student body. The Community School had 1,500 enrolled students at its height in the 1970s.
On the first of October, 1972, the Presbyterian Church of Madison welcomed famed artist Duke Ellington to the stage at its 225th anniversary event. Its first congregation was formed in 1747, making the church the oldest in Madison, New Jersey.
Ellington and his orchestra were performing a special concert — a sacred concert. Ellington penned his “sacred concerts” in the later stages of his life, during a time in which he was grappling with mortality and faith. Through his lyric and melody, he entered into a dialogue with the Divine in an effort to share his vulnerability with his God and his fellow human beings. Of his sacred concerts — he composed three in total, the first premiering in 1965, and then 1968 and 1973 — Ellington said, “Every man prays in his own language.”
On the introductory page of the program from this event, Ellington says, “I think of myself as a messenger boy, one who tries to bring messages to people, not people who have never heard of God, but those who were more or less raised with the guidance of the Church.”
Crowds gathered across the nation on October 29, 1998, to watch the launch of the space shuttle Discovery. This moment awarded John Glenn, the astronaut on board, the title of “first American to orbit the Earth” as well as the oldest person to have flown in space. Glenn, along with being a NASA astronaut, was also a lifelong Presbyterian.
The Glenn family attended Westminster Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Ohio, where John’s mother was the first female ruling elder ordained. Additionally, after his retirement from NASA and the Marine Corps and during his time as a U.S. senator of Ohio from 1974 to 1999, Glenn attended National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where he served on the session. Toward the end of his senatorial service, Glenn returned to space at the age of 77.
On October 13, 1991, an item previously held within the archives at the Presbyterian Historical Society was repatriated to the Lenni Lenape Historical Society, now the Museum of Indian Culture. A video recording of the event allows viewers to relive this hopeful and honorable moment in PHS’s history as the Lenni Lenape health guardian figure is given back to its people.
The repatriation event began with a spokesperson from the Lenni Lenape Historical Society sharing a brief introduction and history of the community, followed by a performance by numerous tribe members in traditional dress as they welcomed their historical item back home.
The Museum of Indian Culture was founded in 1980 as a nonprofit resource center for people of all ages to learn about Native American cultures. The mission of the institution, which is member-supported and volunteer-run, is to preserve and perpetuate the authentic histories and cultural heritage of Native American peoples — past, present and future.
The spokesperson for the museum says of this repatriation, “Today is very important because now what we have is … a religious 'give back.' It is a doll that is now to be repatriated back to its own people. And, not only that, it is given of its free will by the people that reclaimed it. There was no legal action, no court battles, no nothing. This is a voluntary give back, which makes this extremely important to us … This is the ceremony of repatriation.”
This event was a historic moment in PHS’s history, and the ripples of this early repatriation continue to spread into its work today, as staff make an effort to encourage reconciliation, continued repatriation, and the reworking of previously harmful or misrepresentative language within the collections.
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