Grace Young Experience brings Baptist abandon to St. Philip’s Episcopal Church

Accented by rhythmic clapping, singing along, and dancing, Sunday afternoon’s performance at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church was billed as the Grace Young Experience. That’s when, accompanied by a late lunch, the Cultural Committee of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church presented the fantastic music diva, headlining a sensational quartet.

St. Philip’s is a church with a certain reputation. Think of a Ralph Lauren ad with debutantes; legacy graduates of Howard, Spellman, Harvard, and Smith. Those pictured belong to clubs like the Links and Gay Northerners. Their impeccable children are Jack and Jill members. They “summer” at Sag Harbor or Oaks Bluff. Envisioning all that, you have the picture. Intellectual erudition and a bougie heritage are a longstanding tradition in this Neo-Gothic edifice on 134th Street. It was the first major commission of early Black architects Vertner Woodson Tandy (an Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity founder), working with George Washington Foster, in 1911.

Once, St. Philip’s counted as a pantheon of Black excellence. Renowned past congregants included the phenomenally rich oysterman Thomas Downing; his son George T. Downing, who operated the Congressional dining room in Washington and was a leading caterer in the posh Gilded Age resort of Newport, R.I.; professor, public intellectual, and statesman W.E.B. Du Bois; educator Mildred Louise Johnson, founder of the New School; her composer father J. Rosamond Johnson and historian uncle James Weldon Johnson; first Black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; and poet and playwright Langston Hughes.

Feeling that so prestigious a church was in need of something to remind folks of its illustrious past, Ms. Eugenia Clarke (wife of the great scholar) started the Cultural Committee in 1986. On a recent bleak day, with intermittent rain, more than 100 music lovers filled St. Philip’s undercroft (the same basement where Dr. Eva Jessye rehearsed the chorus for the landmark staging of “Four Saints in Three Acts” in 1934). Such was the intensity of expressiveness and high energy that not much time had passed before one thing seemed quite clear. “These artists are extraordinary,” I thought. “They are filled with the spirit and the way they play and sing old favorites, with a new verve, they are it — but they are not Episcopalians.” Indeed, I learned, they were not.

Booker T. Washington famously noted, “If ever you discover a Negro who is neither a Baptist nor a Methodist, some white man has been tampering with his religion.” Not acknowledging Black pragmatism, Washington overlooked all the routes whites take when seeking success. In the past, it didn’t take much investigation to notice that the Episcopal church used to be the leading faith of the nation’s elite. It began, after all, as an American version of the UK’s authorized Church of England, so it follows that more U.S. presidents, including George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, Pierce, Arthur, FDR, Ford, and Bush Number 1, have identified with the Episcopal Church than with any other Christian denomination. For becoming an Episcopalian to find favor among prominent African Americans, in short, was far more about agency and initiative than the mere servile copying of “the Wizard of Tuskegee” infers.

Initiated in 1809, St. Philip’s is New York State’s third-oldest Black congregation. It was formally organized as the Free African Church of St. Philip by Black worshippers at Trinity Church. Enslaved and free, both outraged over racial segregation and incessant bigotry, they broke away to start a church of their own in 1818. It was first led by abolitionist Peter Williams Jr. (son of Peter Williams Sr., who established the city’s oldest Black congregation, Mother AME Zion Church, in 1796).

Started on Centre Street, St. Philip’s left their third location on 25th Street by 1909, heading for Harlem. Making this move, they sold their old property for $600,000.00. With the highly strategic real estate acquisitions they made here, through pioneering Black property agents Nail and Parker, St. Philip’s helped to facilitate Harlem’s transformation into the country’s Black Mecca.

The Rev. Hutchens C. Bishop was a catalyst in accomplishing this crucial relocation uptown, who served as rector (minister) for 47 years, from 1886 until 1933. Bishop was succeeded by his son, Shelton Hale Bishop, from 1933–1957.

St. Philip’s was once the county’s richest, largest African American Episcopal Church. In 1917, it was the lead organizer of New York’s silent march protesting the Tulsa race massacre. In 1923, it was the venue for the “million dollar wedding” of A’Lelia Walker’s adopted daughter Mae Robinson. The Delaney family, of “Having Our Say” fame, were also all members. In addition to once boasting an endowment backed by Harlem apartments worth tens of millions today, the church also once owned its own 300-plus-acre summer camp in New Paltz.

Mass abandonment of Harlem by most who were able to move, during the heroin epidemic (1950s) that morphed into the crack epidemic, took its toll. After years of losing valued members and valuable assets, St. Philip’s has changed and evolved, and is finally making a comeback. “I grew up down South. I’m from North Carolina,” said Jean Garrett, Cultural Committee and 67-year St. Philip’s Church member who has been widowed for nearly a decade. We were Baptist. “There were six of us. We had never even met Episcopalians. I first belonged at Abyssinian when Adam Powell was minister. When I met my husband, his family were members of St. Philip’s and his mother asked me to join, too. Now, our four children and their children are a part of this tradition.”

Garrett added that “We’ve made adjustments over time. Today, in addition to beloved Episcopal hymns like ‘All things Bright and Beautiful,’ a visitor is just as liable to hear ‘Jesus, the Light of the World’ that we sang at Abyssinian. We’ve relaxed our ritual, but our sermons are still never as long as an hour and more.”

A proud native of Detroit, Young maintained an engaging banter amidst her powerful soulful singing. She informed us about who she was in a way which was thoroughly entertaining. She recalled how when still quite young, to be able to move to New York, she told her mother one little fib: She said she’d been accepted at Juilliard. She secured a job with a show touring in Europe, which was enough of an accomplishment for her mother to forgive the deception. Knowing the reason why, because of the acceptance and recognition she received so readily abroad, it didn’t even matter that her year’s tour turned into Young’s exciting 10-year stay on the continent and in Japan. She was killing it. All but unknown on her return, she took a retail job before devising the dream job she enjoys today.

Enraptured by the nostalgia of Young’s song stylings, her skilled accompaniment like the perfect jeweled setting of a magnificent gemstone, her audience was definitely transported. Were they as unbridled as Baptists can sometimes be? Just a couple times, almost, I think.

The true test? That was when Bajan soca artist Alison Hinds’s song “West Indian” was played. Instantaneously, an undulating conga line formed. “In the old days, looking down on Caribbean natives, American-born people at St. Philip’s would say, ‘St. Martin’s is their church,’” explained Laurie Thornton (Mrs. Garrett’s daughter). They wouldn’t say that now, though; West Indians have saved St. Philip’s from extinction.