By the Rev. Rhonda Lee, Ph.D
When Bishop Sam Rodman arrived as our bishop in 2017, one of the first things he and I talked about was the need for the Diocese of North Carolina to explore reparations for our complicity in slavery, segregation and white supremacy. In February 2020, he asked me to do two things to start this process: to research our history, and to call together a team of people from across the diocese to guide the work of reparations and restitution. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed our start, but with the help of a core group of committed people, we got going.
Four years after I submitted this first report on our history to the bishop, it’s important to know a few things about it. They build on each other.
First, the report is not exhaustive. It doesn’t offer a list of, for example, all the Episcopal clergy and laypersons of our diocese who enslaved people; it doesn’t offer a dollar amount for the proceeds of slavery that built and maintained white churches. Slavery was so woven into the fabric of U.S. (not just southern) society and The Episcopal Church (and those of other denominations) that the kinds of records that would have been kept, if slavery had been acknowledged as sinful, aberrant behavior, were not in fact kept. Many questions we might pose today can’t be fully answered. But they can still be addressed.
Second, the report was called the “initial” report because it wasn’t meant to be the last word. The committee hoped people and congregations across our diocese would offer stories from their own memories and records, maybe passed down through oral history, maybe kept in family Bibles or church registers.
Many of the stories I shared are well known to Black members of our diocese, less so to white members. The committee hoped historically white congregations would become curious about where the funds and land to establish and sustain their churches had come from. We hoped they might do research, share what they found and reflect on how to respond to those findings.
Finally, the committee’s greatest fear, when I submitted this report, was that it would (metaphorically) gather dust: that no one would read it, or that (especially white) Episcopalians who did read it would lament our past and leave their response at that.
The fact that you are here, checking out this initial installment of reporting on our history, mitigates that fear. Thank you. Let’s keep going.
