“Carved in Ebony”: In Observance of Black History Month

In December, I received a book from my granddaughter Katrina—and I am happy to report that on February 9 she and her husband Ryan became parents of Nina Irene, a beautiful baby girl and Junes’ and my first great-grandchild. But this blog post is about Katrina’s Christmas present to me. 

Observing Black History Month

As is widely known, February is designated every year as Black History Month in the U.S., and I read the book Katrina gave me partly as a way to learn more about Black history. Let me share with you a little of what I learned from that book.

Carved in Ebony (2021) was written by Jasmine L. Holmes, a youngish (b. 1990) Black woman who lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband Phillip and their three young sons.

Author Holmes’s slim book is about ten outstanding African-American women, all born in the nineteenth century, who have largely been unknown by the general public. Indeed, I didn’t remember hearing even one of their names prior to reading this book.

But they were all notable women—and good for me (and you) to learn about during Black History Month.

“God’s Image Carved in Ebony”

While, fortunately, it is not nearly as true now as when he spoke those words fifty years ago, in the Introduction, Holmes cites these words of Malcolm X: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman” (p. 18).

But writing about ten outstanding Black women of strong Christian faith, Holmes asserts, “black women are made in the image of God. They are that image carved in ebony hues, wrought with a purpose, for his glory” (p. 19). Their exemplary lives should no longer be neglected.

“God’s Image Carved in Ebony,” the fifth chapter, is about Amanda Berry Smith (1837~1915), who even though she was born into slavery, became an evangelist, a missionary to Africa, and the founder of an orphanage for Black children.    

Amanda’s father bought his freedom from slavery and then that of his family when she was still young. But the Berry family was still poor, so Amanda left home to work as a live-in domestic.

She married at the age of seventeen, but that rocky marriage ended when her husband didn’t return from the Civil War. Then her marriage to James Smith ended with his death due to cancer in 1867. Soon afterward, Amanda began to fulfill her calling to be an evangelist.

In 1878, Amanda traveled overseas and preached in Great Britain and in India. Then she served as a missionary in Liberia for eight years, beginning in 1882.

Her final ministry was at the Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned and Destitute Colored Children, which she founded in Illinois in 1899 and where she served until 1912.

At the end of her long, productive life, Amanda was described as a woman in whom “God’s image was carved in ebony.”

The Example of Charlotte Forten Grimké

Charlotte Forten was born the same year (1837) as Amanda Berry and died about seven months earlier (in July 1914). But their lives were vastly different: whereas Amanda was born into slavery, the Forten family were prominent free Blacks in Philadelphia and active abolitionists. 

Although I hadn’t heard of Charlotte before reading the ninth chapter in Jasmine Holmes’s book, I had probably heard of the man she married in 1878, the nephew of the amazing Grimké sisters, the subject of my Feb. 24, 2016, blog post.  

The same year Amanda went overseas as an evangelist (1878), Charlotte married Francis Grimké, pastor of the prominent Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.

In addition to her position as the pastor’s wife at that church until her death, in 1896 Charlotte helped found the National Association of Colored Women, and she remained an active advocate for civil rights until her death.

Yes, although not widely known, there are many outstanding nineteenth-century Black women—and now in 2022 the U.S. will likely have a new Supreme Court Justice similarly “carved in ebony.”

A Tangled Mercy at Mother Emanuel Church

Three years ago on June 17, a white terrorist shot and killed nine African-Americans in the Emanuel African Episcopal Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That tragic event is linked to the early history of that church in an engaging 2017 novel titled A Tangled Mercy.

The Early History of “Mother Emanuel”

Between 1815 and 1818, Hampstead Church was founded in Charleston, South Carolina. Later its name was changed to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and it became the largest African-American church south of Baltimore. Through the years it has been affectionately called Mother Emanuel Church.

Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 was the primary leader of the thwarted slave revolt in Charleston, was one of the church’s founders. Vesey and more than 30 others were executed by hanging on July 2 that year. Soon afterward the church building was burned down.

Mother Emanuel Church was not able to rebuild until after the Civil War. The plans for the new building constructed then were drawn by architect Robert Vesey, Denmark Vesey’s son.

After an earthquake demolished that structure in 1886, the current building, which seats some 2,500 people, was completed in 1892.  

Worship at Mother Emanuel Church on June 21, 2015

The 2015 Shooting at Mother Emanuel

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof went to Mother Emanuel Church and joined a dozen other people in Bible study and prayer.

When the small group began to pray about 9 p.m., Roof pulled a gun from a fanny pack and began shooting those around him. He fatally wounded nine people, including Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor who was also a state senator.

Roof was soon apprehended. He confessed that he committed the atrocity at Mother Emanuel Church in the hope of igniting a race war. Before the shooting, a website showed him posing with emblems associated with white supremacy and with photos of the Confederate battle flag.

As was widely reported, not long after that tragic shooting the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds.

Early last year Roof was sentenced to death. He is now waiting on death row in a federal prison in Indiana. 

There has, for good reason, been fear of Islamist terrorists in the U.S. since 9/11/01. But between 2001 and 2015, more Americans were killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamist terrorists.

Even though it may be the worst act of domestic terrorism since 2001, Roof’s is just one of many terrorist acts committed by white supremacists in the U.S. in recent years.

A Tangled Mercy  

Thanks to Jason Edwards, my friend and former pastor, I heard about A Tangled Mercy, a new novel by Joy Jordan-Lake, a friend of Jason’s since his seminary days at Baylor. Soon after learning about Joy’s book, I began reading it and found it to be quite intriguing. 

In alternating chapters, she told the story of events in Charleston in 1822 and in 2015, skillfully weaving the stories together.

Part of the 1822 story was about one of “the amazing Grimké sisters,” as I called them in a 2016 blog article (see here), and about Denmark Vesey (whom I also introduced in that article).

The chapters about 2015, of course, lead to the shooting in Mother Emanuel Church.

If you are looking for a good novel to read this summer, I recommend A Tangled Mercy. (I chose it as the best of the 23 novels I read last year.)

One of my favorite quotes in the book is near the end: “A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears” (p. 425).

The Amazing Grimké Sisters

February each year is designated as Black History Month here in the U.S. For my contribution to this year’s emphasis on Black history, this article is mainly about two white women who were significantly involved in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In spite of long knowing about and being appreciative of other women abolitionists, such as Lucinda Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for some reason I had never known about Sarah and Angelina Grimké until fairly recently.

Last November I read The Invention of Wings (2014), Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful historical novel about the Grimké sisters. I was both greatly informed and impressed.

Sarah Grimké was born in 1792 in Charleston, South Carolina, and her little sister Angelina was born in 1805. In the 1830s they became the first female antislavery pioneers and activists in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

Charleston, S.C., was founded in 1670 as Charles Town in honor of England’s King Charles II. By 1690 it was the fifth-largest city in North America. Charleston, as it was called after 1783, became the nation’s slave trade capital, the place where 40% of slaves brought from Africa first landed. The city was built on slave labor and thrived under a slave economy for nearly 200 years.

Soon after Lincoln was elected President, in December 1860 South Carolina was the first state to secede. The Civil War, then, began on April 12, 1861, when troops in Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, which was on an island at the entrance of Charleston Harbor.

Growing up in Charleston, the Grimké sisters certainly knew about slavery firsthand. Their father, a lawyer, politician, and judge, was also a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of slaves.

Kidd’s book begins with a chapter about Handful, the slave girl who is given as a personal slave to Sarah on her eleventh birthday—and the book is as much the story of the fictional Handful and her mother as it is about the historical Grimké sisters.

In a significant subplot of the novel, the life of Handful’s mother becomes entangled with that of a black man with the improbable name of Denmark Vesey—a historical figure I was also glad to learn about.

Vesey won a lottery in 1799 when he was 32. He used some of that money to purchase his freedom—but he also wanted to help slaves in Charleston, and elsewhere, obtain their freedom. To that end he began to draw up plans for a slave revolt.

Vesey’s plot, though, was thwarted, the revolt crushed, and he was executed in July 1822. (Remarkably, in 2014 a monument to Vesey, which you see part of in the picture, was placed in a Charleston city park.) 

Having seen the evils of slavery even in their own home, Sarah and then Angelina a few years later moved north to escape it. The Grimké sisters became Quakers and increasingly became involved in the fight against slavery in Philadelphia and surrounding areas.

Other abolitionists could give stirring speeches about the need to abolish slavery, but the Grimké sisters from personal knowledge could testify to slavery’s evil impact on human lives. Through most of the 1830s they spoke in many public meetings, pleading for the abolition of slavery as well as for women’s rights—the first single women in the nation to do so widely.

The amazing Grimké sisters took very seriously the words a Quaker man spoke to Sarah when they first met: “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”