By Leo Baudhuin, Staff Editor
2019 marks the close of yet another decade, days upon months upon years to be boiled down into history books. Ironically, it is history that makes this year particularly significant; it marks the anniversary of the 1619 arrival of African slavery in the American colonies. To commemorate the occasion, Bryn Mawr’s Africana Studies Program, along with the History, International Studies, and Political Science Departments, hosted a conversation between Reverend Natalie Conway and Steve Howard.
Conway, a deacon at Memorial Episcopal Church, is a descendent of slaves. In 2018, her brother’s genealogical study revealed that their ancestors had belonged to Charles Ridgely Howard, one of the foundational members of Memorial. Conway discovered this summer that Steve Howard, a member of the church, was descended from her ancestors’ master. Conway and Howard’s story gained attention when The Baltimore Sun published an article about them. “I was so taken by the extraordinary way in which their lives were hooked in the past and in the present,” said Linda-Susan Beard, who organized the event. Beard is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr.
“For too many people, slavery is an abstraction,” Beard went on. “They read their four paragraphs about it—very sanitized, very amnesiac—and never put a human face to the story. In terms of groups that have been othered, once you can put a human face to that story, that person’s history, everything changes.” She explained that the event allowed for one “to put two human faces onto the story of slavery,” faces who—despite their polarized histories—are both deeply entangled in the same system.
Beard emphasized that Conway and Howard’s presence is especially important at a school like Bryn Mawr. “Coming to this campus is very significant in terms of its own racist history,” she said, referring to countless instances of blatant discrimination that were swept under the rug for years. Although on-campus events such as the Black at Bryn Mawr Tour and Community Day of Learning create a space for these stories to be told, Bryn Mawr is still working to fully reconcile with its past. “I don’t think we can go into any future without coming to terms with slavery… [and the] things that slavery gave birth to,” Beard explained.
It was Beard who opened the event, introducing both guests and emphasizing the importance of their visit. “Slavery is a metastasis in our very own bone marrow, about which we have yet to come to terms with,” she said. “Yet slavery’s avatars—from Jim Crow to segregation to African-American mass incarceration—continue to damage the body politic, because slavery is not only something that happened to the African-American community. We have all been shaped by this yet unchecked disease.”
Instead of beginning with her own story, Conway asked those in the audience to stand and pair up with another member who didn’t look like them. She referenced a 1968 installment of Charles Schulz’s comic stip “Peanuts,” in which an African-American character was first introduced. In the panel she displayed, the boy introduces himself to a white child the audience knew as Linus. “Hi… I’m Franklin.” Franklin says, to which Linus replies, “I’m very glad to know you.”
Conway asked a person of color in each pairing to recite the line of Franklin, while the other took on the role of Linus. She then had them repeat the dialogue, this time playing Mr. Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and black policeman Officer Clemmons, whom he shared a wading pool with in an episode that aired in 1969. Both the show and comic were seen as revolutionary at the time that they were released.
“That’s the beginning of racial reconciliation,” Conway explained, “to turn to someone that you don’t know and just say, ‘Hello’ and ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ and to begin to learn about each other.”
Both Conway and Howard went on to describe their backgrounds and the events that led them to one another. Howard described his privileged suburban upbringing. Although he knew that he was descended from the Ridgelys and the Howards, and that the Ridgelys were one of the largest slaveholding families in North America, it was not something that he had to reconcile growing up. Although he regularly drove by the land that was owned by his ancestors, there was “never a word about slavery, never a word about the slaves that lived on that property.”
Conway was raised in Baltimore, not too far from the church where she now serves. Although a plaque in Charles Ridgely Howard’s honor was displayed in Memorial, Conway didn’t know the history behind it until she and her brother began to research their past. When he called with the news, she was sitting in the church. “I thought ‘Ridgely Howard, Ridgely, Ridgely… oh dear,’” she described, “I looked up, and on the wall in the back of the church was a plaque dedicated to Charles Ridgely Howard.”
“I was angry that still in this day and age there were still plaques to people who held other people in bondage,” she said when asked about the roles of guilt and anger in the reconciliation process. The church has since covered the display until the congregation can come together and decide how to address what to do next as a group.
That both Conway and Howard are Episcopalian holds its own significance; the Episcopal church has had to reckon with its own role in slavery in recent years. A number of early US presidents were both Episcopalian and slaveholders, and the southern Episcopal church sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Episcopal church issued a formal resolution in 2006, “apologiz[ing] for its complicity in and the injury done by the institution of slavery and its aftermath,” and have made attempts to reconcile with its past.
“So often in persons who were enslaved, they don’t want to talk about it,” Conway pointed out. “It’s buried, it’s gone, it’s dead. So, for this to all of a sudden rise up… it became a reality. I’m still sort of processing what’s going on.” She pointed to the fact that she and Howard had a relationship prior to uncovering their shared past as something that helped her come to terms with this information. “As I tell my little one, once you start telling the truth and stop hiding the lies, then we can all be on the same page. Right now we’re on all kinds of pages in different encyclopedias.”
In an attempt to come together, the majority white Memorial Church and majority black St. Katherine’s Episcopal Church took a trip to the Hampton plantation, once the property of Howard’s ancestors. They toured the manor and the slave quarters, and then performed a libation ceremony to honor those who had lived on the property. Conway and Howard were the last to take up the blessed water, and the two symbolically poured the flagon together.
“When that article came out in The Baltimore Sun, more people went back to their census and their records and came back and said, ‘Look what I found,’” Conway said. “That was the first step.
“Now what are you going to do with the second step? That’s what we’re trying to do, we’re just trying to get a story out that somehow; without blaming or shaming, we can all have a legacy that we can be proud of.”
The full event was filmed and will be made available to those in the Tri-Co through Canaday Library.
Image credit: via Steve Howard
