Passages from the Black Presbyterian archives

Editor’s note: In celebration of Black History Month, the Presbyterian Historical Society is sharing highlights from its collections. PHS encourages readers to browse digitized RNS images and its African American History Digital Collection in Pearl Digital Collections to discover more voices and stories.

In 1990, a committee of six people was empaneled by the General Assembly to compose a history of the denomination’s all-Black governing bodies. Of necessity, their work expanded from researching and writing to creating and gathering first-hand accounts and original records, in places revealing history barely two generations old.

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Led by James Foster Reese of Knoxville College and Nellye Joyce Punch of Houston, they reckoned with the decline of Black-run institutions, laid plans for the future, and aired out serious questions about power and the production of archives that remain relevant today. Their proceedings, among others captured on audiocassette, give us passages through Black history.

On one tape, committee member Thelma McCrae Harrison relates her encounters with the archivists. A staffer asked her, when she and a colleague were writing a history of Fairfield-McClelland, to incorporate a chapter on the organization/genealogy of the whole PC(USA) and the Presbyterian Church in the United States as an introduction. She said to her cowriter, "When the Church wrote its history it didn't incorporate you!” — challenging archivists’ assumptions that a specifically Black-led history of a Black-led organization must perforce be bracketed by a white point of view.

Listen to Thelma Harrison on writing a history of Fairfield-McCelland Presbytery, from about 1992, here.

Other recordings of the period often reflect on their own historicity —interviewees think about the document they’re making, where it will reside, and who will use it later. In a 1981 interview of Gayraud Wilmore by Oscar McCloud, Wilmore begins, “I’m impressed and overwhelmed with the thought that these words may be listened to by someone at the Historical Society 25, 30 years from now.”

Listen here to a recording of Gayraud Wilmore and Oscar McCloud from a recording made on Dec. 23, 1981, in Newark, New Jersey.

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So with some wariness about white historiographical practice, Black Presbyterians nevertheless trusted the preservation functions of the archives. In the meetings of the All-Black Governing Bodies Committee, having just interviewed Robert Shirley, the committee made an appeal for his father’s personal papers. One committee member counters by asking why Black people should be expected to hand over their family's papers to the archives at all. Another committee member cuts to the heart of why racialized and marginalized people might seek out institutional archives —representation, access and security. "Black people have not been able to invade places of — sanctums, where you go to keep a thing forever," says the committee member, adding that the committee should try to broker trust between donors and the archives, so that people should feel secure "that their papers will be displayed there for years to come."

Robert’s father, Frank Shirley, for his part, carefully documented his work as a roving shepherd of Black churches — his history of the Synod of Catawba, and a photographic report on the work of the Belfonte Church in Harrisburg, North Carolina, were deposited with PHS in the 1940s.

Brochures of the 1950s tout Shirley’s “Lord’s Acre” program. Shirley recruited Black congregants to set aside a portion of their farmland, one acre per family, whose produce would be sold on behalf of the church, helping to build the church writ large across rural North Carolina. Though Shirley’s work was dedicated to an autonomous Black ministry and the self-sufficiency of Black churches, he left records outside the control of the Synod of Catawba, in a sanctum, where you go to keep a thing forever.

This Black History Month, as ever, archivists reflect on the necessity of hospitality to our work, and on the mutual bonds of responsibility to the record that we share with our people, the relationships that make it possible to hear passages through the Black archives.