VTS breaks ground on reparations memorial honoring at least 557 African American laborers

descendants and members of the VTS board break ground for the Reparations Memorial. Photo: VTS

[Episcopal News Service] Virginia Theological Seminary held a groundbreaking ceremony Sept. 25 for a memorial on its campus in Alexandria that will honor African Americans, enslaved and free, who labored at the seminary from 1823 to 1951.

The memorial, to be completed by early 2027, is part of the Episcopal seminary’s ongoing Reparations Program, which has identified more than 200 descendants of those laborers to receive annual payments from the seminary’s $2.8 million reparations endowment.

The Reparations Program’s historical research has identified 557 African American laborers who contributed to the seminary’s growth for more than a century, from its 1823 founding through its desegregation in 1951. The seminary launched the program in 2019 in recognition of the fact that those individuals were not compensated or were not fully compensated for their contributions to the seminary.

“Remembering the past is a Christian obligation. Forgetting is a sin,” the Very Rev. Ian Markham, the seminary’s dean, said in a news release. “This memorial is a recognition that people labored on this seminary in an unjust and cruel environment. We honor their memory. We pray that God will use this memorial as a vehicle that changes the present and creates new options for the future.”

The seminary continues to conduct research in an attempt to identify 234 of the 557 Black laborers whose identities are still unknown. Those and related efforts are overseen by Ebonee Davis-Hays, the seminary’s director of reparations.

“It is the goal of the VTS Reparations Program to acknowledge both the moral and material transgressions of the seminary’s participation in slavery and oppression,” Davis-Hays said in the news release. “Remembering is a vital step in that process, and the memorial is an outward expression of the program’s inner work of bringing forth the memory of a community VTS once ignored.”

An artist’s rendering of the Reparations Memorial.

The memorial was designed by a mother-and-daughter team, Martha Jackson-Jarvis and Njena Surae Jarvis, and will feature stained-glass windows set in ironwork, inspired by features on the seminary’s campus. All of the 557 known laborers, both named and unnamed, will be honored by etchings in the glass, with space remaining for later additions as more are identified.

The memorial will be located prominently near a campus thoroughfare, Quaker Lane.

VTS is one of The Episcopal Church’s oldest seminaries. At least one building, Aspinwall Hall in 1841, was built with slave labor, and three of the four founding faculty were slaveowners. In the early years, white students were permitted to bring enslaved people on campus as servants. Those Black laborers were denied access to dining halls and other campus facilities when not working, and such conditions continued under Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation. Black students also were excluded from attending the seminary until the 1950s.

VTS began making cash payments, about $2,100 each, to the oldest living descendants of Black campus laborers in 2021. The eligible relatives, whom the seminary calls “shareholders,” also are offered access to on-campus amenities that were off-limits to their ancestors.

In addition to the reparations payments, the seminary also has formalized relationships with two local Black congregations, Meade Memorial Episcopal Church and Oakland Baptist Church, and it has awarded $20,000 in grants to support the ministries of alumni working in Black contexts.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.