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The fact of the matter is that so far as the Negro problem is concerned, the southern branch of the [Episcopal] Church is a moral dead weight and the northern branch of the Church never has had the moral courage to stand against it and I doubt if it has it now.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, Letter to The Rev. Samuel H. Bishop, The American Church Institute for Negroes (1907)
St. James ', Baltimore. ..called into being by a Negro born in New York, but sent into the ministry from Pennsylvania, was situated in the midst of both poverty and ignorance, among a people in the land of darkness and the shadow of death. Its only boast is that out of weakness came its strength.
- The Rev. George Freeman Bragg, Jr., The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil (1909)
At the 1 877 General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, white delegates adopted a "separate but equal" policy as the answer to their "Negro problem" long before the U.S. Supreme Court codified segregation in its 1 896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Delegates disbanded the Commission of Home Missions to Colored People, which had been established during Reconstruction to stem the "wholesale exodus of colored people" from the Church, and reassigned outreach for African Americans to the Board of Missions (Bragg, The Episcopal Church 12). By 1878, the Church had opened a segregated theological seminary for African Americans at the St. Stephen's Church in Petersburg, Virginia, and appointed the Rev. Giles Cooke, a former Confederate officer, as its administrator. But as church leaders continued to debate the future of African American Episcopalians, they grew increasingly reluctant to grant them official status within ecclesiastical polity. During the 1883 Sewanee Conference for white Southern bishops, priests, and laity at the University of the South in Tennessee, attendees reaffirmed segregated worship services by proposing colored convocations governed by white bishops. The plan fractured the Church, however, immediately winning the nearly unanimous backing of the House of Bishops but failing to gain the support of the House of Deputies at the 1884 General Convention. Nevertheless, several Southern dioceses, notably South Carolina and Virginia, implemented a segregation policy and disenfranchised black communicants.
Black Episcopalians, under the leadership of...