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VOL. 14, NO. 4

Display shows conferences roots in race relations

BY MELISSA LAUBER UMCONNECTION STAFF

Within the Baltimore-Washington Conference, a complex history of race spans more than 200 years, reflecting the best and worst of the people called Methodist.

At this winters three Leadership Days events, the Rev. Ed Schell set up a display on the Rev. James M. Hanson, a white pastor who in 1829 awoke abolitionist Frederick Douglass to the claims of Christ.

Hanson served as the first pastor of Asbury Methodist Episcopal church in Washington, D.C., started by black members of Foundry Methodist Episcopal church who left to begin their own congregation. He was also pastor of Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington when its black members broke away to form their own church.

The display on Hanson was not intended to offer any moral, Schell said. Rather, it provided a glimpse into a complex past and a pastor who had an extraordinary ministry.

According to Schell, the executive secretary of the United Methodist Historical Society, Hanson first attracted notice in 1816 when he was mentioned in a Presbyterian newspaper as a worthy Methodist, teaching 120 free black children in a school in Alexandria, Va.

In the 1820s Hanson was assigned to Baltimore Station, where a storm was brewing over mutual rights and the desire of some to rid the denomination of bishops.

This is an era of stone-throwing and knock-down, drag-out, Schell said. Although there is no documentation to back it up, Schell imagines Hanson got tired of the noise the reformers made. Hanson, I think, amounts to quite a soul winner, and I think he was wanting to do the Lords work and not fight about church governance, he said.

Soon after, Hanson was sent to East Baltimore, a charge that included Strawberry Alley, a black church at which he probably preached two to four times a month. Although there are no notes of Hansons sermons, Francis Asburys journals from the period state that when he preached at Strawberry Alley, it was so cold he had to put a handkerchief on his head.

Into this culture of revivals and Methodist camp meetings came Frederick Douglass, whose last name at that time was Bailey.

I was not more than 13 years old, when, in my loneliness and destitution, I longed for someone to whom I could go, as to a father and protector. The preaching of a white Methodist minister, named Hanson, was the means of causing me to feel that in God I had such a friend, Douglass wrote in his autobiography.

However, the Methodist Church also tolerated evil in its ranks, Douglass pointed out. His owner, Thomas Auld, for example, was converted at a camp meeting in 1833. Douglass had hoped that his masters religious experience would lead him to free his slaves or at least treat them less savagely. But this did not happen.

Douglass had read in the Methodist Discipline that We are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery; therefore, no slaveholder shall be eligible to hold any official station in our church.

Nevertheless, Aulds countenance soured all over with the seemings of piety, and he became more rigid and stringent in his exactions. If religion had any effect at all on him, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways, Douglass wrote.

Douglass, who ran away from slavery and became a nationally known orator and statesman, also left the Methodist Church when he watched a half dozen black members of Elm Street Methodist Church in New Bedford get pushed to the end of the line and humiliated as they went forward to receive communion, his autobiography states.

He went on to to join the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Methodist Church and became a class leader and local preacher.

No known records of Hansons exist to describe the preachers impressions of Douglass. After his time in East Baltimore, Hanson spent 20 years serving churches in Washington, D.C., including Foundry and Ebenezer before they were segregated, and Asbury and Ebenezer after these black congregations were formed. He also served Ryland Church in southwest Washington and taught school at Ebenezers log cabin church on Capitol Hill.

I dont know anybody else who was doing this kind of work with elevating black people. I was just astonished when all this fell together, said Schell, who found Rev. Hansons efforts highly extraordinary.

Before the Civil War all of the black churches, even if they were separate charges, had a white preacher in charge. There was actually some law in Maryland that black people were not supposed to have a religious meeting without a white person in attendance. But that seems to seldom have been obeyed.

And as for Douglass, Schell said, he was so enamored with the fact that he had begun his religious life at the old Strawberry Alley (which was later renamed Centennial), that when the building was sold to become a dance hall, he bought it and converted it into houses.