University Archives receives records from historic Buffalo church

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The UB Libraries has received a collection of historical materials from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, one of the oldest African American Episcopal congregations in the country. The records, dating from the mid-19th century, will be added to the collection of University Archives, which will care for and ensure the conservation of the ledgers and documents that hold invaluable insights into the social, cultural, political and religious history of Buffalo’s Black community.

“The University Archives is thrilled to add the St. Philip’s records to a growing number of archival manuscript collections that highlight the history of the Western New York area and the African American community,” says University Archivist Hope Dunbar.

St. Philip’s, today located at 18 Sussex St. in Buffalo, welcomed its first parishioners in 1861, more than a year before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 

The church began under the leadership of a white clergyman, Rev. Orlando Witherspoon, in the basement of a building that no longer exists on Elm Street in Buffalo, between North and South Division streets. In 1865, the first Black full-time rector, Rev. Samuel L. Berry, established the church as a home for Black Protestant Episcopalians, one of the original seven African American Episcopal congregations in the country.

The materials, donated to University Archives by Rev. Stephen Lane, the church’s current rector, date from the church’s founding. The collection includes parish registries and other material relating to church history, and vital records from the congregation including baptisms, confirmations, communicants, marriages and burials. 

“These archives talk about the interests of the parishioners, their political activities, their involvement in anti-slavery movements and the benevolent associations that addressed community issues,” says Lillian Williams, associate professor in the Department of Africana and American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences. “We wouldn’t know about these people and their leadership in various reform movements in the African American community without these vital records.”

Her perseverance is largely responsible for beginning the preservation process of the St. Philip’s archive. In the 1970s, Williams was among the founders — with fellow UB doctoral students Monroe Fordham and Ralph Watkins, who became faculty members at SUNY Buffalo State and SUNY Oneonta, respectively — of the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier (AAHANF), where she currently serves on the executive board.

The three were discouraged from writing on the interests in the African American community in Buffalo because it was largely believed that primary sources to document their research proposals didn’t exist.

They set out to prove otherwise.

“We knew intuitively that the documents existed,” says Williams, a specialist in United States social and urban history. “The issue was that repositories were not interested in collecting the records of African Americans.”

The St. Philip’s collection is part of a narrative the trio eventually assembled and preserved: The Buffalo Cooperative Economic Society (Fordham); microfilm copies of The Buffalo American, one of Buffalo’s early Black newspapers (Watkins); and records from the YMCA (Williams), which detail among other things the civil rights activities, educational programs and recreation experiences of the African American community.

As that work progressed in those areas, Robert Pope, a UB professor of history, was asked to serve as interim pastor at St. Philip’s. He provided access to the church records, which Williams and Fordham had microfilmed and deposited at SUNY Buffalo State and the North Jefferson Branch Library. The original documents were returned to St. Philip’s.

Those records helped Barbara Seals Nevergold, a historian and co-founder of the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education, with her study of Buffalo’s earliest Black churches. But the records were alarmingly fragile. So Nevergold, who retired as director of Student Support Services at UB’s Educational Opportunity Center and serves on the executive board of AAHANF, reached out to University Archives about safeguarding the records.

Nevergold and Williams joined Sarah Cogley, digital collections and repositories librarian, and Marie Elia, archivist for special collections, as well as Lane and Josephine Cross, senior warden of the church, to discuss a stewardship plan to help organize the collection and develop a plan to digitize parts of the collection while working to stabilize and preserve the aging documents.

BreAnna Rice, a UB graduate student under the supervision of Cogley and Elia, worked to arrange and describe the collection, including creating partial transcriptions, finding aids and experiential learning opportunities. Rice also conducted interviews with Williams and Nevergold to help with chronology and other historical details.

“This project exemplifies the ways that collaboration of UB faculty, community members and students can amplify the preservation of local history and foster a deeper understanding of the contributions of underrepresented communities,” says Dunbar.

All the St. Philip’s material is accessible to the public, but as with all the archives’ collections, guests are strongly encouraged to make an appointment prior to their visit.