St. James’ Episcopal Church is celebrating its 200th Anniversary Jubilee Year with the temporary return of a cherished historical artifact, a tapestry knit by its founder and given as a gift in 1832.
At the Jubilee Mass on Sunday, June 9, at 9:30 a.m., a two-year effort led by Johns Hopkins University Professor Lawrence Jackson to secure the lending of the tapestry for the event will come to fruition.
St. James’ Episcopal Church of Baltimore is the first consecrated Episcopal Church with an African American congregation below the Mason-Dixon Line. It was founded in 1824 by William Levington who was ordained in 1827.
Jackson wrote that among the backdrop of great struggles, Levington was supported by several white benefactors. He bestowed gifts to them in gratitude. One of them was a hand-knit tapestry called a “Sampler,” which he gave to James Bosley in 1832 to thank him for his support.
In 1996, the tapestry was purchased by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and is part of the permanent collection of the DeWitt Wallace Museum. Two years ago, Jackson began inquiring about the museum lending the tapestry to the church for this ceremony taking place on Sunday.
Jackson describes an arduous task involving collecting signatures of St. James’ parishioners and petitioning to have the Sampler temporarily exchanged for the ceremony.
He enlisted the help of colleagues at Inheritance Baltimore, a project at Johns Hopkins University that “redistributes resources from inside the university walls to outside of them…[and] focuses the energy of freedom education and directs it toward Black liberation.”
In one of the meetings between the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and St. James’ Rev. Richard Meadows, Meadows recounted his family’s personal and painful Williamsburg history.
These years-long efforts have resulted in the return of a nearly 200-year-old family heirloom, if only for a brief time.
Jackson himself holds several positions at Johns Hopkins University: Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Department of English and Department of History; Director of the Billy Holiday Center for Liberation Arts. He described this accomplishment, though, with pride.
“It was not easy to convince Colonial Williamsburg to adjust their own displays to accommodate our needs,” Jackson wrote. “But wonderfully, they not only agreed to pull the embroidered tapestry from the exhibit ‘I Made This: The Work of Black American Artists and Artisans,’ but they decided to cover the cost of insurance and transportation and installation—significant concerns for us at St. James.”
On Sunday, two employees of the museum will transport the Sampler to St. James’ for the 9:30 a.m. service, then install it at an exhibit Jackson created with Mary Klein, the archivist at the Episcopal Diocesan Center of Maryland (EDCM). The EDCM is located at 4 E. University Parkway, Baltimore, MD.
The result befits a historic church whose congregation included the likes of Paule Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Mitchell, and many more.
The St. James’ Episcopal Church 200th Anniversary Jubilee Weekend begins Friday, June 7 with a dinner at Martin’s West, at which U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock will speak. The Jubilee Mass at the church on Sunday, June 9, takes place at 9:30 a.m., with Bishop Michael B. Curry presiding. There will be a celebratory reception following the mass.
For information and tickets to these events, click this link.
