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Observe Black History Month

The General Board of Religion and Race offers a number of ways to learn about the history and culture of African Americans. Below are a few ideas that your congregation can use to gain greater awareness.

• Invite speakers - Invite older people in your church or community to share with your congregation their experiences of being a black person in The United Methodist Church and in the world. Teachers and professors can also provide valuable historical information.
• Hold concerts - Many churches hold choral concerts focusing on African-American spiritual and gospel music, which is an important element in black culture and history.
• Research a leader - Have people in your congregation, especially young people, research the life of a prominent black person and speak about it during a Sunday worship service or write about it in the church bulletin or newsletter.
• Hold study groups - Hold a small group discussion about a book on the life of a prominent black figure in American History or about black history in general.
• Pulpit/choir exchange - Exchange pastors or choirs between a black church and a non-black church. The black church can relate its experience through song and sermon and the non-black church can honor black history in the same way.
• Join with the community - Your congregation can support and participate in community events celebrating Black History Month.
• Research your own family - Make a family tree, explore family traditions, hold a family reunion.

Runaway slaves found refuge at Emmarts UMC

BY LINDA WORTHINGTON

Tradition has it that Emmarts UMC was a stop on the Underground Railway.

Whether or not that is accurate, the Emmarts-Pierpont house, a short distance away, and its master, Caleb Emmarts, who gave the land on which the church is built, certainly were. The current owners of the house have found artifacts in the basement, which show that it housed many runaway slaves.

Emmarts was the church treasurer, and his cousin, Gerard Emmarts, was secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which before 1855, worshiped at Gerard's home and at the Humane School House.

"It's an undisputed fact that religious services were held in Gerard Emmarts' house before the erection of Emmarts Church," says a history of the church compiled in 1949.

"Members of the Methodist Episcopal denomination in White Grounds met in neighborhood homes and at the Humane School (later known as Hebbville School)," for at least a half century, a published history of the Woodlawn communities states.

That first building, then called Whitegrounds Church, in the same location as the current church at the intersection of Rolling and Dogwood roads in Woodlawn, included a place to worship, which had pews for "paid" members and benches for the others, a Sunday school room and a slave gallery above the Sunday School room. It was one of seven or eight churches on the Summerfield Circuit.

After Shirley and Jeff Supik bought the Emmarts-Pierpont property in 1980, they discovered a number of artifacts in the basement of the old house proving that fugitive slaves had stayed there, according to a feature story in the Owings Mills Times last November.

One artifact is a brick with a raised insignia of a cross ringed by a circle and flanked by outstretched arms, a symbol that told runaway slaves the house was a safe hiding place.

Caleb Emmarts "was a stationmaster on the underground railroad, who hid runaways in his basement and in a garret of Emmarts church," said Jeff Supik. Emmarts was repeatedly arrested by Confederate soldiers as they traveled through Maryland but was never convicted of harboring runaways "because no neighbor would speak against him," he added.

It's unclear whether slaves were actually given safety in the garret of the church, which perhaps didn't exist. The Woodlawn Villager as late as Feb. 2005, a month before Emmarts UMC began celebrating its 200th anniversary, said that "runaway slaves were hid in the belfry of the church until they could further their journey by the Underground Railroad." The bell tower, however, was not built until 1904, well after slavery ended in 1864 in Maryland.

Old records show that the original church included a gallery or balcony in which Negroes sat to worship, as was the custom of the day.

But without question church members helped runaway slaves. Several local histories tell of a local cooper, Nicolas Smith, Gerard Emmarts' brother-in-law and a member of the Emmarts building committee in 1855, who hid runaway slaves in barrels and carried them to safety across the Pennsylvania line.

The Zimmerman sisters, wives of Emmarts and Smith, raised money to buy the freedom of some of the slaves of landowner Thomas Worthington, who local records show owned 72 "Negroes." The Worthington family operated several quarries in the area. It was this quarrying area that gave the Emmarts church its first name, "Whitegrounds."

The Supiks and local historian Louis Diggs, of Owings Mills, are working with volunteers to restore the Emmarts-Pierpont house and a black church a few miles away, as well as gain recognition as a historic area that includes Emmarts UMC and Union Bethel AME as safe houses, slave quarters and significant gravesites. They've secured a grant to begin restoration on the house and add an interpretation center.

"The house" said Shirley Stupik, "is a testament to courageous people working together - those who needed to be housed and the ones who housed them. During a time when people should not trust each other, during a civil war, two totally different groups of people came together to do the right thing."

That might also be said of Emmarts UMC.

Today Emmarts UMC is an interracial congregation of predominately African Americans. The church council is holding weekly observances of Black History Month during February. For information, call the church at 410-944-1131.

A voice for God and emancipation

One of this nation's best-known leaders against slavery was Frederick Douglass, a Marylander.

In 1835, Douglass was hired out by his master to William Freeland, a farmer living in Talbot County. He secretly organized a Sunday school, where he taught other slaves to read.

"I held my Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man. ... I had at one time over 40 scholars, and those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. I look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul."

Douglass was a lay preacher in the Methodist Church, but became disenchanted with the segregation and condescending manner he found there and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1839.

Speaking out against slavery and the complacency of the church, he wrote in his autobiography, "We have sold men to build churches, women sold to support the Gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and bitter cries of heart-broken slaves are drowned in the religious shouts of pious masters."

Negro History Week, which was established in 1926 to help people remember the lives of Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln, became Black History Month.

Toogood preaches the Word

Jacob Toogood, from the Carroll County area, was believed to be the first black licensed preacher in Methodism.

In the last decade of the 18th century, black local preachers led the charge to form black Methodist churches.

Chronicles of these efforts are sparse. But evidence of African Americans active in the Methodist movement can be found in other sources, like the following "wanted" ad for fugitive slaves from 1793.

"Sam, absent from the services of Charles Gosnell in Baltimore County, has been raised in a family of religious persons, commonly called Methodists, and has lived with some of them for years past, on terms of perfect equality. He has been in the use of instructing and exhorting his fellow creatures of all colors in matters of religious duty."

Jem, a runaway from James Brice in Annapolis in 1797, "is or pretends to be of the society of Methodists. He constantly attends the meetings, and at time exhorts himself."