Episcopalians and Race: One Slice of a Complex Story

By coincidence, the scripture assigned to Episcopalians for April 3 was also the text for a sermon I'd just read by Duncan Gray. An Episcopal priest in Mississippi in 1954, Gray was responding to the Supreme Court's then-recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I was following up on information new to me about my church's historical stances on racial equality in Stephanie Speller's book The Church Cracked Open when I ran across Gray's sermon.

I encountered Duncan Gray often when I lived in Jackson, MS. I walked my dogs past his house and sometimes parked in front of it to attend my church two doors down. Bishop Gray officiated when I was received into the Episcopal Church around 1985. I retain the sensation of his hands pressing on my head.

[PHOTO: James Meredith in 1962 and Bishop Gray as I remember him years later.]

I also knew Duncan Gray from hearing that he accompanied young James Meredith in 1962 when the younger man defied a racial ban to enroll at Ole Miss that year. During the 1980s, I also sang at St. Andrews Cathedral in downtown Jackson for midday concerts that Gray had instituted to bring mixed-race audiences together The church offered free admission and free sack lunches to make the concerts feasible for workers on their lunch break and for homeless people.

Gray came to mind because I've been reading The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers, the Presiding Bishop's Canon for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation. For her, this time of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and dwindling membership is a time of vulnerability and crisis for the church, a "crack" that may lead to new growth in new directions.

One of her messages is that the Episcopal Church has long been complicit in enslavement and colonization of peoples outside of its white Anglo-Saxon base. The University of the South, Sewanee, whose extension program Education for Ministry (EfM) assigned her book, was itself established by Bishops who not only wanted slavery to continue, but who wanted research to support their belief that all non-white peoples of the world were inferior to, and should be subordinated to, whites (Spellers 82). As the 20th century heated up, she writes, the Episcopal Church maintained silence, and did worse: black clergy were not seated at conferences, and black congregations were ruled by white vestrymen from other parishes.

My experience in Mississippi in the 1980s gave me the opposite impression. All (ALL) the people I knew in my Episcopal Church had flocked there to get away from other churches where segregation was enforced. My friends Joe and Linda were literally kicked out, pushed and dragged out, of their church because they re-enrolled their children in the newly-integrated public school system. They showed me a newspaper they'd saved from the mid-1960s in which people I knew had paid for a full-page ad listing their names in favor of an end to racial segregation.

Gray's sermon takes off from I Corinthians 14.1-19. (Read the sermon.) Gray doesn't get to race until several pages in, when he says matter-of-factly that the Supreme Court decision was the right one. But he leads up to that by observing that Paul downplays speaking in tongues. It may be a gift, but it's not intelligible, not helpful, not persuasive to observers. From this, Gray derives the principle that what the church says should be relevant to the society. Too often, he says, our religion is self-centered.

Gray's sermon could be chapter in Spellers' book. She decries self-centrism -- concern with individual self, preoccupation with the preservation of the institution itself. That this idea is still so relevant is sad; that the Episcopal Church has not been quite so blasé about injustice as the recent book suggests is reassuring.