Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church Senior Pastor Scott Black Johnston remembers the audible gasp that came from the congregation on a Sunday in early autumn 2018.
In his sermon, he recounted some church history that longtime members knew well: Their church had started out in lower Manhattan in 1808. Their first pastor, John Brodhead Romeyn, had been called from Albany to lead the new church. Their 26 founding members were some of New York City’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens – along with one woman of color, identified in church records simply as “Betsey Jackson, household slave.”
Betsey’s status as a slave wasn’t what caused a shock. That information was known by most, but there had been a development — A newly released database of New York State slavery records included a manumission record documenting Jackson’s freedom, dated 1811 and signed by Romeyn. That detail – that their founding pastor was a slave owner – no one knew. And it left them gasping.
“That’s when the conversations began,” Black Johnston recalled. “People reacted with disappointment and shame. Many were surprised. Others were not surprised. But the overriding question was, ‘How do we reckon with this history?’”
Years of conversation, years of reckoning, led to a historic Sunday at Fifth Avenue. On May 21, the church rechristened its boardroom the Betsey Jackson Boardroom. It unveiled a new portrait of Jackson, along with framed copies of historical documents, including her record of manumission. Sunday School classes learned Jackson’s story and children colored their own versions of Jackson, using a coloring-book version of the portrait.
The news appeared in The New York Times, and a number of first-time visitors came to Fifth Avenue that Sunday to witness the proceedings firsthand. In his remarks to the congregation, Black Johnston called Jackson “an individual on whose broad shoulders we all stand here in this church. Getting to a moment like this has involved a lot of healthy, challenging, grace-filled conversations, and a lot of hard work.”
For Fifth Avenue, the path from 2018 to today is marked by three milestones. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd compelled many American congregations to examine their own history with racism. For Fifth Avenue, this examination brought new urgency to the Jackson story. In 2021, Black Johnston appointed a task force to advise how the church should address its historical association with slavery. In 2022, the church commissioned a Norfolk, Virginia, artist, Clayton Singleton, to create a portrait of Jackson.
2020: The Anti-Racism Response Team
The Anti-Racism Response Team began as the response to three questions posed by Fifth Avenue’s former executive pastor, Charlene Han Powell, in a sermon shortly after Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020.
“Does America have a race problem?” she asked. She then urged congregants to ask themselves, “Do I have a race problem? Does the church have a race problem?” She challenged the congregation to commit to talking about these questions “three weeks from now, three months from now, three years from now, for as long as it takes.”
Jane Hong, an elder of the church and the incoming clerk of session, took on the challenge and turned to Black Johnston for counsel. “[He] encouraged me to do what Presbyterians do best,” Hong said. “Gather people together to pray about, discuss and discern a way forward.”
In its first year, the team created a podcast series called “Courageous Conversations” that featured members of the congregation sharing their personal histories with race and racism.
“We asked ourselves when we were aware of our race,” Hong said. “We shared stories of our experiences, and we dreamed about how the good news of Jesus disrupts racism and racist structures.”
In year two, these conversations turned to Jackson and revealed that many members remained unsettled by the history between Jackson and Romeyn.
2021: The Jackson-Romeyn task force
The task force (which included the church’s archivist, Dale Hansen) looked deeply into history to better understand the context of the Jackson-Romeyn relationship. Black Johnston had already asked Hansen to examine Romeyn’s writings to determine if he was an apologist for slavery, and if he was, had he had a change of heart when he freed Jackson?
According to Hansen, Romeyn appears to have mentioned slavery only once in his sermons during his 17 years as senior pastor. “He did call it a sin,” Black Johnston told The New York Times. “This was after she was freed. He’s not a hero in this story, but he’s also not quite the villain that some might want him to be.”
After several months of discussions and prayer, the task force brought forward a slate of recommendations to the governing boards of the church. Fifth Avenue could no longer remember Romeyn without remembering Jackson, they said.
“We didn’t want to rewrite history,” said elder Erica Moffett, who chaired the task force. “But we do want to promote a greater awareness of the circumstances of the time. To rename the boardroom the Betsey Jackson Boardroom is to give this once-enslaved woman of faith a presence – you might even say a voice – as one of the founders of this church. In a way, over 200 years later, she will help us have conversations we need to have.”
2022: Commissioning the portrait
The boardroom that would become the Betsey Jackson Boardroom is adjacent to another room named for John Romeyn, which features a portrait of the founding pastor. A portrait of Jackson was clearly in order.
For Clayton Singleton, the artist the church commissioned last August, it was an unusual assignment: to create a portrait of a historical figure of whom no images exist.
Singleton is a full-time teacher and sometimes actor who grew up among people who were “always creating, always educating.” He drew on his roots and his local connections to help him envision who Betsey Jackson might have been. Fellow teachers, actors and other theater people all had a hand in the process. He enlisted a retired teacher and fellow actor to be his model for Betsey. For Singleton, “she had the tenacity and steel” that he imagined Betsey shared.
As he prepared to unveil the portrait on May 21, Singleton asked the assembled crowd to imagine a woman who, despite hardship, expressed a love for living.
“When you look at her hands,” he said, “her hands look as though they’ve been worked, but her hands are gentle. At the same time, when you look at how she sits upright in her seat, her strong-backed chair, the dignity that she bellows across the land is there, the dignity with which she walked through [the Romeyn] home is there. I’d also like for you to find that slight hint of joy that lives between the crevices of her mouth. My prayer is that you are able to feel her, not just see her, for to be seen is to be loved.”
The conversations continue
Fifth Avenue pastors and members mark the celebration of Jackson as a milestone in their history. But they insist that their work is not done. Black Johnston notes that, as a Matthew 25 congregation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Fifth Avenue is committed to dismantling structural racism. He hopes that by reckoning with the racism of its past Fifth Avenue has taken a meaningful step toward that goal.
“The response of the congregation has been joyful,” he said. “That was the predominant feeling in the halls on that Sunday. We hope other churches will see that this work does not have to be acrimonious. We fear that, but the result for us was positive. People understood that this was a good and right thing to do.”
“One of the hopes we had when starting the anti-racism response team was that members of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church would be willing to engage in the hard work of asking questions,” Hong said. “Questions of our history as a church and a denomination, of how to build faithful and meaningful dialogue in our congregation, of how we might then build relations with those outside our church community. What struck me during the commissioning is that we’ve come full circle, and yet we continue on. Betsey Jackson’s portrait will preside over the questions we ask ourselves as we continue to do the church’s work.”
