veiled4allah: a shameful history

In the spring of 1953, members of Grace Presbyterian Church in Seattle's Central Area were abruptly informed that their church was to be closed, the land sold. Under the guise of racial "integration," the local Presbytery directed Grace members to migrate to nearby Madrona, an all-white congregation. When Grace church members arrived on their first Sunday to sing in the Madrona choir, "they were told, 'No, we don't want your black faces in front of our church,' " recalled the Rev. Boyd Stockdale, current head of the Presbytery of Seattle.

"We weren't welcomed," Dawson recalls, being polite. "They didn't want us."

The Grace parishioners, not willing to give up the religion most of them had been born into, kept coming to church anyway. Within two weeks, all the white parishioners left.

"What do they call it? White flight," Dawson recalled. "That's what they did."

It wasn't new to Dawson, an Alabama native. She was one of the first African-American graduates of the University of Washington, which she attended from 1944 to 1948.

"There were 55 of us," she said. "When we saw each other, we'd just about go up and hug each other."

She showed the same mettle in her church, which became a small, African-American congregation when the other members fled.

"We were just determined to stay," she said.

This in spite of the best efforts of the Presbytery, which had taken the $6,000 it made by selling the Grace church land - money that had been promised to the new Madrona worshippers - and sunk it into an all-new church on Mercer Island.

Madrona's black congregation protested, to little avail. Over the years, the Presbytery not only neglected Madrona financially, it tried to make it go away, says Stockdale, who took over the local office about eight years ago.

"The good news is, they're still here," he said, somewhat amazed himself. "They're a great gift, because we can learn about racism from them. This has been a journey for us - a painful one."

Stockdale uncovered the story by reviewing church records. He spoke to the handful of surviving Madrona church elders, most of whom were reluctant to stir up old feelings. Elders who were too shy or unwilling to speak publicly about it finally did so on videotape, for a production about the church and racism. Eventually, plans emerged for a reconciliation service - a long-overdue public apology.

Key to that effort were parishioners from Mercer Island, who apparently never were informed that the seed money for their church had been pilfered from the Madrona congregation.