Friday, September 13, 2019

In slavery, her family was owned by his. Now they attend a Baltimore church seeking to atone for its past.

From Baltimore-

The Rev. Natalie Conway’s tenure as the new deacon of Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill was by all accounts going well last year when she received news that sparked a personal crisis and sent shock waves through the congregation.

One of Conway’s siblings, who was conducting genealogical research on their family, told her that some of their forebears had been slaves on a local plantation — and the people and the land were owned by none other than the extended family of Memorial’s founding pastor, 19th-century cleric Charles Ridgely Howard.

If that weren’t disorienting enough, a current parishioner at Memorial — a man Conway had known for years and respected — was a descendant of the slaveholding clan.

The cascade of revelations at first overwhelmed the lifelong Episcopalian and native of Baltimore.

More here-

 https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-church-slavery-atonement-20190912-3tllerewzzh7nnqsa5entffssy-story.html

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