Jefferson City church celebrates first black priest, former member

From Missouri-

Grace Episcopal Church on Sunday commemorated the lives of two African Americans whose contributions shaped both the Episcopal Church in general and Grace Episcopal specifically.

Sunday's special service honored Absalom Jones, the first black ordained priest of the Episcopal Church, and Julia Cooper, a former member of Grace Episcopal Church.

Jones, who was disappointed with racism/discrimination at Methodist Church in 1787, founded the Free African Society — a mutual aid society for blacks — with Richard Allen. Jones went on the found the first black Episcopal congregation in 1794, and in 1802, he became the first priest to become ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

More here-

https://www.newstribune.com/news/local/story/2020/feb/17/area-church-celebrates-first-black-priest-former-member/817017/

Absalom Jones’ vibrancy lives on at St. Thomas, Philadelphia

From ENS-

Feb. 13 may be the church calendar’s official recognition of the life and ministry of the Rev. Absalom Jones, but for Mary Sewell Smith and others at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia, every day is founder’s day.

Jones – the Episcopal Church’s and the nation’s first black priest – founded St. Thomas in 1792 as the country’s first historically black church of any denomination, and “that spirit that permeated the early church has come down through the years and is still alive and well and thriving,” Smith said.
“A guiding force in our church is the life and legacy of Rev. Jones. It is just part of my life,” said Smith, a lifelong parishioner and current member of the church’s historical society. “We try to live up to the principles he espoused: freedom, liberty, education, worship, community service.”

Besides St. Thomas, 90-some historically black Episcopal churches remain today, congregations created by blacks not welcomed in mainline Episcopal churches post-slavery and during racial segregation throughout the United States, according to the Rev. Harold T. Lewis, a former staff officer for black ministries at the Episcopal Church Center in New York and the author of “Yet With a Steady Beat: the African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church” (Trinity Press International, 1996).

More here-

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2014/02/13/absalom-jones-vibrancy-lives-on-at-st-thomas-philadelphia/

Underground Railroad re-enactment celebrates Absalom Jones Day

From ENS-

he Rev. Karen Eberhardt’s first face-to-face encounter with racial discrimination still resonates, half a century later.

She was visiting the North Carolina drug store where her aunt worked when an African-American woman entered with a boy, two years at the oldest. He made a beeline for the seats at the soda fountain and began spinning around on them.

Because he was black, “my aunt had to say to the woman, ‘You know he can’t do that,’ and I was devastated,” Eberhardt recalled. Her aunt told her: “I don’t own the store, and it’s the owner’s policy, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I need to keep my job.”

“It has stayed with me all my life,” said Eberhardt, now a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.

More here-

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2012/02/13/underground-railroad-re-enactment-celebrates-absalom-jones-day/