Join us for

MARCHING TOWARD THE DREAM

Four Presbyterians share their stories of activism in the Civil Rights Movement

 50 years ago, a movement of committed citizens fought to end racial segregation and create a more equal society. Join us to explore and honor this history, told firsthand by individuals who lived it.

Featuring

Jim Reese – Shirley Satterfield – Bill Marshall – Louis Weeks

and with opening remarks from Executive Director Fred Heuser, Ph.D.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Presbyterian Historical Society – 425 Lombard Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147

5:30pm Wine and hors d’oeuvres

6:00pm Presentation

Please R.S.V.P. by May 21 to Kate Fox at kfox@history.pcusa.org or at 215-928-3895

A suggested $10 minimum donation will cover costs of the event

While Flora was growing up, many Highland clans—both Catholic and Protestant—still supported the Jacobite cause. Jacobites favored restoring the Stuart Kings to the English and Scottish throne and believed that parliamentary interference with monarchical succession was illegal. The Stuart King, James II and VII, had been deposed during the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when he was replaced by his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband and first cousin William III.  Jacobitism drew much of its primary support from the Scottish Highlands, partially because James had been sympathetic to the Highland clans after several centuries of subterfuge by earlier monarchs. Flora’s family supported the restoration of James and later his grandson, Charles Edward Stuart, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Bonnie Prince Charlie led a Jacobite uprising of French and Scottish troops against the Hanoverians in the Battle of Culloden, Scotland, in 1745. The Jacobites were defeated and the movement went into permanent decline. Following the battle of Culloden, the English vowed to capture and torture anyone involved in the uprising. The MacDonald family urged Flora to help Prince Charles escape to safety. Though the act put her in grave danger, the twenty-four-year-old Flora helped the prince, disguised as her maid, evade pursuers on the Isle of Skye and then escape via ship to France.
Once Flora returned home she was arrested and taken to England on a prison ship. On board she was able to charm the crew and the captain, who wrote a letter on her behalf urging leniency in her case. She was allowed to stay in London in a house with her clansman rather than in jail, and she never stood trial for her role in the escape.
Flora married Allan MacDonald, also of the clan MacDonald, when she was 28, and together they had seven children. With the failure of Jacobitism, the clan chiefs and gentry increasingly became landlords, and the clan system fell into decline. The 1770s were a time of famine and oppression in Scotland. Flora and Allan immigrated to North Carolina seeking a new life. They were leaving unrest in the Old World and met with more unrest in the New World.
When they landed in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1774, the colony was on the brink of Revolution. Flora was welcomed by the Highland Scots living in North Carolina, and was viewed as a hero by those who knew of her bravery in helping the prince escape. The MacDonald family worshipped at the Barbeque Presbyterian Church, a congregation which still exists today. The society’s collection includes a painting of Flora MacDonald on her way to worship at the Barbeque church.

Since Allan MacDonald had signed an oath of loyalty to England in order to receive a military commission, the MacDonalds decided to remain loyal to the king when revolution broke out. In 1775, royal governor Josiah Martin tried to raise a small North Carolina Highland regiment to fight the Patriots, and he included Allan MacDonald. In 1776, a small group of Highlanders, along with other Loyalists, departed for the coast to join the British army.  According to local legend, Flora made a powerful speech as the troops departed, rallying them to the Loyalist cause.
However, the American Patriots defeated the Loyalists, and Allan was imprisoned. Flora and her daughter, Fanny, returned to Scotland in 1779, and Allan joined them in 1784. Flora died at Kingsburgh on the Isle of Skye in 1790, at the age of 68.

The Society, he noted, “should have a home of its own [in Philadelphia], designed and fitted for its special use…ready to welcome all visitors and guests.”  Van Dyke added, “Such a house would surely become…a meeting place for people of good will and loyal memories who do not forget the faith and deeds of their forefathers.”

It would take another 55 years for Van Dyke’s dream to become a reality. PHS opened “a home of its own” on 425 Lombard Street in 1967, fulfilling Van Dyke’s hope of “more room for storage and exhibition and study.”

As PHS celebrates its 160^th anniversary this year, the “place” for storage, exhibition, and study is being joined by a virtual space. As more and more records begin their lives as computer files, we are expanding our approach to acquiring, managing, and preserving records. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has recently approved an electronic records policy that will help PHS staff capture and provide access to the denomination’s records that are born digital every day. We have also begun making more materials available online.

Like Van Dyke’s dream of a building, the quest for a more virtual PHS will take time, resources and creativity.  But if the past 160 years is any indication, the Society and its users, supporters, and benefactors will work together to meet the challenge.

Our vision for the future is similar to Van Dyke’s in that we will remain a “central fountain of enlightenment for all who wished to study the origin and influence of those great churches of America which have held the Reformed faith and the Presbyterian order.” But PHS will be defined less by a physical structure and more by a virtual presence, making the story of Presbyterian heritage available to new generations both in Philadelphia and anywhere else via the web.

Fred Heuser, Ph.D.

Barb was a part of the PHS family for over 15 years. As our Senior Administrative Assistant, she worked closely with Fred Heuser. From the Philly staff, to the PHS Board, to our colleagues in Louisville, Barb served in many different ways. No matter what project needed to be accomplished, her warm, nurturing, gracious spirit made it a pleasure to do the task.

She received many gifts but one that stood out was a memory book created just for her. We invited Barb’s colleagues to share memories so that they could be compiled into a scrapbook along with images from her time at PHS. We wish only the best for her!

While some items in our holdings have unique needs, for most items most of the time every week is preservation week at PHS. Every week, we provide advice to congregations which want to move their essential records into a climate-controlled environment. Every week, we shoot new microfilm, or we survey the condition of our legacy microfilm collections. We make archival enclosures for rare books, we house archival materials in acid-free folders and boxes, and we mend fragmented paper. Every week.

Among her other duties, our preservation specialist Natalie Shilstut is mending a body of 18th- and 19th-century correspondence called the Ohio ministers’ letters. On the left, the fragments of a letter are arranged in a mylar sleeve. At center and on the right, fragments are bound into pages with transparent mending tissue.

Ohio ministers' letters, mid-mending, 2012.

Among my other duties, I’ve transferred a reel-to-reel tape of an interview with the South Texas pastor Ruben Armendariz to digital audio. At right is our vintage Sony tape deck, and at left is a computer running the freeware sound editor Audacity. In this case, the necessity of preservation informs how we provide access to materials for patrons. In reformatting audio, we bring in a preservation-quality uncompressed audio file, and distribute to patrons a compressed file in mp3 format.

Open-reel audiotape transferred to digital audio.

The unsung hero of our preservation efforts, however, has to be the archives’ air handler unit, which runs uncomplainingly, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, minus a little time off for required maintenance. Without AHU-1, pictured below, maintaining a constant relative humidity and a temperature below 68 degrees Fahrenheit would be impossible.

Our air-handler unit.

For more information about how we handle permanent records here at PHS, or about what we can do for your congregation, send us a line at refdesk@history.pcusa.org.

Christopher R. Schlect

The Presbyterian Historical Society is pleased to announce the two recipients of 2012 Research Fellowship grants.

Christopher Schlect, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University, won for his project, “Battle for the Good Earth: Empire and Gender Meet Fundamentalism and Modernism.”  Schlect will focus particularly on the 1933 clash between novelist (and former Presbyterian missionary) Pearl S. Buck and her most vocal male critic, conservative theologian J. Gresham Machen.

Gene Zubovich

Gene Zubovich, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, also received a grant to support his project, “Protestant Social Consciousness in the 1940s.”  In his work, Zubovich will trace the emergence of a liberal Protestant social and political agenda in the 1940s, focusing on the commitment of Protestant leaders to civil rights for African Americans, their advocacy of the United Nations and human rights, their public statements against Japanese Internment and colonialism, and their general encouragement of increased roles for women.

Each year, PHS awards at least two $2,500 research and travel grants that are made possible by the generous donations of its supporters. Scholars, students, and independent researchers are all encouraged to apply.  For more information about the 2013 application process, click here to visit our website. Interviews with our 2011 research fellows, Shing-Ting Lin, and Beth Hessel-Robinson, are available for viewing on our YouTube channel.

First Presbyterian Church, Lovington, New Mexico

The following is an excerpt from On Holy Ground as featured in the Journal of Presbyterian History, Volume 87, Number 2, 2009.

The fall of 1952 was a busy time for the members of First Presbyterian Church, Lovington, New Mexico. They were erecting a new church building to replace the one-room adobe brick structure which had housed the worshiping congregation, and other denominations, for forty-two years. Built in the summer of 1910, the church had been a well-known landmark in Lovington since its construction.

Prior to the organization of the congregation and construction of the church, the Reverend Gilmore Smith had held worship services in the upper story of Ausley and Robinson Hardware Store on North Main Street. On October 24, 1909, eighteen charter members organized the congregation. With no church building, they held services in a one-room schoolhouse built with lumber brought into the area by wagon freight. The small, original church building from 1910 was demolished in 1952 to make way for the new, larger building, occupying the same site in the north part of town. In 1965, the church acquired the adjacent properties for a manse and education building. They held a special Mortgage Burning Service in November 1974, when they had finally paid off the building’s mortgage.

Entry No. 347
American Presbyterian and Reformed Historic Sites Registry

Living History participants

James Baldwin reminds us that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it and [that it] is literally present in all that we do.”  It is because our history is a living, unfolding force that PHS has created a new program, accessible to all online.

Living History is a multimedia project sharing diverse experiences and stories told firsthand by American Presbyterians. Believing that every one of us shapes history in our everyday lives, we aim to educate and inspire through filmed interviews with Presbyterians, asking: how do we make history together? The videos produced for this project are available on our website and social media channels, and we are also preserving them as part of PHS’s permanent collection.

Living History began as a series of conversations with PHS volunteers (former missionaries) in 2011. New material will be continually added, so check the website for stories of people from all areas of the church. Some of the individuals currently featured are Sue Althouse, Don Black and Connie Thurber, who collectively served the church’s overseas missionary program from the late 1940s to the 1980s.

In the words of William Shakespeare, “There is a history in all men’s lives.” Our lives today not only draw on the past, but comprise the history of the future.  Through the Living History program, we share the stories of those who have shaped, and continue to shape, our church across space and time.

Click here to explore Living History online!

Fred Heuser, Ph.D.

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, was to impact the Congolese region of Africa irrevocably. Major European imperialist powers, including France, Portugal, England, and Belgium, had laid claim to Congolese land and resources in the larger context of the “Scramble for Africa” during the height of the colonial period. The General Berlin Act of February 1885, led to King Leopold II of Belgium taking personal control of the Congo, provided that Belgium assume responsibility for the “protection of the natives” and “help in suppressing slavery.” It is notable that no Africans were present at the conference that was to have such an impact on their fate.

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In 1890, an African-American Presbyterian minister, William H. Sheppard, was appointed by the Executive Committee of Foreign Missions of the (Southern stream) Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) to serve as a missionary in the Congo Free State. This was the first American Presbyterian mission venture into the country. Sheppard, one of the earliest African-American foreign missionaries for the PCUS, and Samuel N. Lapsley, a white minister from Anniston, Alabama, established the first mission station at Luebo in Kasai province.

Enlarging the early church at Luebo 1895. Sheppard with another missionary and young people. Sheppard is holding a saw.

Sheppard and Lapsley set to work learning the local language, building mission churches, administering Sunday school, and venturing to remote regions. It was several years until they had their first convert, but they befriended many of the local people and gained their trust. The missionaries would later establish another station at Ibanche.
After the sudden fever-related death of Samuel Lapsley in 1892, William Sheppard carried on alone until additional missionaries arrived in 1893 and in 1896. William M. Morrison’s arrival in 1897 proved to be crucial to the success of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission. Morrison formalized Tshiluba language study, organized new educational programs, and expanded evangelistic work. 

Mission printing presses for the publications of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (William Sheppard Papers).

Meanwhile, Belgians had established commercial ventures in the Congo. Beginning in the 1890s, King Leopold received growing international criticism for his treatment of the indigenous people. State-sponsored soldiers committed atrocities against the Congolese, and colonial rubber companies used forced indigenous labor to harvest rubber.  Rubber was plentiful in the Kasai region where some of the American Presbyterians were stationed.  Morrison took the lead in speaking out against human rights abuses perpetrated by the Belgians under King Leopold’s absolutist rule. Photographs in the William Sheppard papers, held at the Presbyterian Historical Society, document some of these crimes.  Sheppard noted in his reports that the crimes violated the 1885 General Berlin Act.

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In the United States, Presbyterians helped to lead the public outcry against Leopold.  Morrison and Sheppard used their mission newsletters report crimes they witnessed. Their accounts were published on a printing press at the mission and distributed through Presbyterian networks. The missionaries also reported crimes to Roger David Casement, an Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary, and nationalist, who was instrumental in establishing one of the world’s first humanitarian organizations, the Congolese Reform Association (CRA).

Issue of the Kasai Herald, Sheppard’s mission newsletter, 1908 (william Sheppard Papers).

Some Swedes and other Europeans in the region also spoke out against the crimes of Leopold’s rule, and the press in Europe and America helped expose the situation. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness describes a trip down a river in Africa, which some presume to be the Congo River during this troubled period, since the date of publication (1903) and the events of the novel coincided with the political and humanitarian situation in the Congo Free State.

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One critical report that William Sheppard published in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) newsletter in January 1908 led to Sheppard and Morrison being sued for libel by the Kasai Rubber Company, a Belgian rubber contractor in the area.  Later that year, public pressure and diplomatic maneuvers led to the end of King Leopold II’s rule, and the Belgian Parliament formally annexed the Congo as a colony, known as the Belgian Congo. The Kasai libel case went to court in September 1909, and the two missionaries were acquitted.  Morrison’s case was dismissed on a technicality. Sheppard stood trial and called many indigenous Congolese men, who were his personal friends, as witnesses. He was acquitted on the basis that he had spoken out against many smaller subsidiary rubber companies and had not libeled the Kasai Rubber company.

Morrison (left) and Sheppard (right) with their witnesses in the Kasai Rubber trial (William Sheppard Papers).

There is reason to believe that the acquittals were partly political. By the time the two were brought to trial in 1909, the United States and Europe had successfully challenged Leopold’s legitimacy in the Congo Free State, and the missionaries also had support from the CRA and the Congolese resistance movements. Other public figures, including Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell, had done much to draw international attention to the crimes in the years leading up to 1909, and public opinion was with the missionaries.  Sheppard’s lawyer, who successfully argued his case, was Emile Vandervelde, a prominent Belgian statesman.

Chief Njoka, one of Sheppard's principal witnesses at the trial at Leopoldville.

It is admirable that Morrison and Sheppard took a stand against the injustice they encountered, even though it frequently put them in harm’s way. The missionaries’ reports, culminating with the international coverage of their 1909 trial, helped lead to reform and the annexation of Congo by Belgium. This was only after King Leopold II had finally given up any hope of maintaining a large part of the Congo Free State as separate crown property.

Sheppard resigned from the Congo mission after the trial in 1909 and returned to the United States. Morrison and many multi-generational families of Presbyterian missionaries continued the work there throughout the twentieth century. Their labors are documented in the Society’s holdings.

Sources:
William H. Sheppard Papers, 1875-1933. Record Group 457.
Presbyterian Church in the U.S. Congo Mission Records, 1891-1980. Record Group 432.
Morel, E.D. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906. New York, NY: The Nassau Print. 1906.
Axelson, Sigbert. Culture Confrontation in the Lower Congo. Falkoping, Sweden: Gummessons, 1970.
Sheppard, William. Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo. Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication. 1917. (Internet Archive scanned books original editions).