This month in Presbyterian history
The Head Start Program, an impactful oral history, and a new network announced in Augusts past
On a mid-August day in Mississippi in 1967, a group of Black children donned graduation caps and celebrated their completion of the Head Start Program.
Three years prior, in February 1964, Eugene Carson Blake (1906-1985), Stated Clerk of the UPCUSA and chairman of the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race, presented a proposal for a long-term civil rights project in the Mississippi River Delta. In 1965, the newly created Delta Ministry played a central role in the creation of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a statewide Head Start program.
The students enrolled in the Head Start program received meals, medical care and preschool education. The children weren’t the only ones who benefitted from CDGM — the teachers and staff who tended to them each day did, too. Many of those involved with the program were working-class Black women with little formal education who struggled to find employment elsewhere.
Just five months before this photograph was taken, four Klansmen set fire to an eight-foot cross in the driveway of the Mount Beulah Conference Center — the Delta Ministry’s headquarters. Despite this event, and the opposition from the segregationist leaders of the area’s predominantly white churches, the CDGM counted many high-ranking Presbyterian clergy amongst its supporters, who rallied to their defense. The program continued until 1968, when CDGM ceased operations.
Though its existence was but a brief three years, the creation and perseverance of the Head Start program, and the dedication of its supporters and staff members serve as a reminder of the Presbyterian Church’s role and influence in the struggle for civil rights.
In late August 1985, the first Asian American woman ordained in the PC(USA) sat down with Alice Brasfield to share her story. The Rev. Perla Belo’s oral history interview is digitized and available in Pearl. Belo (1938-2020) was ordained by Seattle Presbytery in July 1983 at University Presbyterian Church, where she served as an associate pastor.
She and her husband, Gasat Maza Belo, founded University Presbyterian’s International Friendship House, a ministry focused on students enrolled at the University of Washington.
From 1990 to 2004, Belo was director of Asian Ministries for the American Baptist Church, headquartered in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
In her interview with Brasfield, Belo speaks about the barriers to full participation felt by Asian Americans at seminaries in the US. She notes that, rather than hire an Asian American professor to teach church history, or Greek, or ethics, seminaries were more likely to pigeonhole Asian professors into teaching Asian studies.
Belo also recounts the moving scene of her own ordination: “It was … one of the highlights in my own life, being ordained. And … for me the highlight was when … I was kneeling and all the elders and all the ministers came to visit and put their hands on me. And I, I thought that was ... a unique experience. I cried.”
On August 15, 1997, a press release was published announcing the formation of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians. The names of the organization’s co-moderators can be found in the top corners of the document: Robert W. Bohl and John M. Buchanan.
This foundational announcement lives in the records of the Covenant Network, held at PHS. The Covenant Network’s mission and aim was the creation of a more inclusive church for LGBTQIA+ members and their families. Another key facet of its mission was a focus on creating unity amongst Presbyterians who disagreed.
The creation of the Covenant Network stemmed from the 1996 General Assembly’s approval of Amendment G.60106b — also known as the “fidelity-chastity” amendment — to the Book of Order. The amendment was meant to bar LGBTQ Presbyterians from ordination by explicitly naming fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness as ordination requirements.
Members of the Covenant Network were committed to fighting for the replacement of the “fidelity-chastity” amendment with Amendment A, or the “fidelity-integrity” amendment. They hoped to change the wording, swapping in integrity where chastity had been stressed: "Among these standards [for ordination] is the requirement to demonstrate fidelity and integrity in marriage or singleness and in all relationships of life.”
The organization fought for Amendment A from its founding in 1997 until 2011, when it was approved by the General Assembly. It then turned its focus toward marriage equality in the church by drafting and working to pass Amendment F, which would revise the section on marriage in the Book of Order to include same-sex relationships. Amendment F was passed in 2014, and the Covenant Network of Presbyterians remains active today.
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