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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

January 31, 2022
"Etta June Johnson comes from Edisto Island, S.C., to the Robert Davis home in Pulaski, N.Y. - 1966. Dr. Patton goes over tests with Etta June alone." RG 303, Box 6, Folder 76

In the 1960s, the UPCUSA Board of National Missions (BNM) established a program that extracted Black students "of promise" from the South and set them up with host...

December 7, 2021 to December 8, 2021

Newspapers advertised the sermon to be delivered June 21, 1903, a Sunday evening. Crowds gathered outside Olivet Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware, to hear Robert A. Elwood warm to his theme, "Should the murderer of Helen Bishop be lynched?"

On June 16, seventeen year old Bishop had been assaulted on a rural roadside near Price's Corner; she died of a neck wound the next day. Late on the 17th a local Black farm worker, George White, was arrested for the murder. Police allegedly found a bloody knife in his possession. There were no eyewitnesses to the attack....

November 11, 2021

In November of 1956 the young pastor Joseph Metz Rollins delivered a sermon called "Faithful to Christ's Command." The Southern church (the PCUS denomination) that paid most of his salary had moved to rescind support, calling his congregation "nothing but a headquarters for integration." Metz, already working nights as a hospital orderly, was threatened with poverty. He asked his church to take up the cross with him.

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September 6, 2021
Roanoke Virginia, 1891, First Presbyterian Church, upper right. and approximate location of lynching, lower left, via Library of Congress

In September of 1893, in Roanoke, Virginia, a Black man named Thomas Smith was accused of assaulting and robbing a white woman, run down by a lynch mob, and hanged and mutilated from a hickory tree at the corner of Mountain Avenue and Franklin Road. Following the lynching, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church, William...

August 9, 2021

"The Negroes and the Puerto Ricans have had it."

So wrote Graydon McClellan, executive presbyter of the Presbytery of New York, in a 1965 pastoral letter supporting the activism of one of its minister members, Milton Arthur Galamison, who had just led a march of students through Harlem in protest of the continued segregation of New York's public schools, and the subordinate treatment of Black and Puerto Rican children. 

"Mr. Galamison dramatically represents that fact. The people he leads are not out to win our favor or approbationbut to win educational rights for their...

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