An extraordinary gesture across racial lines, 200 years ago in Baltimore

My Sun column this day tells of a young Black clergyman, William Levington, who went south to establish the first Episcopal church for African Americans in a slave state with the help of a white benefactor, James Bosley. It’s a piece of Baltimore history that comes to us as the church, St. James Episcopal, celebrates the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1824. The celebrations include the return to Baltimore of a rare needlework sampler that Levington later made for Bosley to thank him for his extraordinarily generous gift across racial lines.

Here are comments of Lawrence Jackson, professor of English and history at the Johns Hopkins University who worked with others to get the 1832 sampler loaned to the Baltimore diocese from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection:

“The 1832 Sampler, an embroidered tapestry from the hand of our church’s founder, inspires us to continue the work of St. James today — the after school programs, the food pantry, the jazz concerts, the scholarships and so on. Furthermore, the oldest known relic connected to our earliest years stimulates a powerful historical curiosity about the church’s abolitionist founding and the obligations of the ‘descendants of the African race,’ as Levington wrote in the early documents. 

“I never knew to know about that. When I was growing up in St. James in the 1970s, I had a presentist, perhaps futurist outlook. I mean, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838.  But, lo and behold, educated, erudite, abolitionist-minded William Levington came to it in 1824. He left the North, where slavery was outlawed, and moved to the South. Born in 1793, Levington gave his life to a land  that his forbears had probably never even known.

“The Sampler brings alive a portion of that story. We have created an exhibit at the Episcopal Diocesan Center of Maryland to fill out some other chapters of the story. The exhibit, along with the sampler, will be on display through July 7.

“On a whole, the tapestry reminds us of the difficult origins of a Black institution that has shaped this city for 200 years. Father Michael B. Curry, the current presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S., was the first person I ever heard mention slavery in the context of the hymns we sang, or the interpretations of the gospel at St. James Church. That was in the 1980s.

“The Sampler also shows us something about the spirit of generosity and interracial community that made the life of the church possible.”

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