O Prejudice

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. ACTS 17:26

Julia Foote did not write a book about slavery. She wrote a book about holiness. But she was born to parents who had been enslaved, she lived her whole life in a nation that permitted it or had only just stopped, and she travelled through places where a Black woman could be stopped in the street and examined for the marks of a runaway. So slavery and its offspring, which she called prejudice, run through her memoir like a dark thread. She rarely argues about them. She tells what happened, and names it before God.

At the Lord’s table

The first scene is the most searching, because it happens in church. Her parents, having given up dancing after a near-drowning on the way home from one, joined the Methodist Episcopal church. They were not, she says, treated as Christian believers but as poor lepers. They sat in a corner of the gallery, and dared not come down to take communion until the last white communicant had left the table. One day her mother and another Black woman went forward when they thought all the white people had been served, just as two poorer white members rose to go. An older white woman caught her mother’s dress and asked if she did not know better than to go to the table when white folks were there.

Julia calls this one of the fruits of slavery, and then asks the question that matters most. They professed to love the same God, belonged to the same church, and expected the same heaven. Were they led by the Holy Spirit? Her answer is that the Spirit of truth can never be mistaken and can never inspire anything unholy.

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. JAMES 2:1

But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors. JAMES 2:9

This is the heart of her witness against prejudice. It was, first, a theological argument. A church that divides the Lord’s table by colour has not merely been unkind. It has sinned, and it has shown that whatever it professes, it is not being led by the Holy Spirit. Her own doctrine of holiness gave her the measure: holiness is love, and a love that tells a sister to stand back is not holy.

On the road

The rest of her testimony comes from her travels, and she tells it without self-pity. A passenger on a stagecoach worried aloud at every stop that the public would take him for an abolitionist for riding with her. On a canal boat, a man demanded her berth in the ladies’ cabin with a racial slur, and she stayed put, thinking it best not to leave the bed except by force. Coming home to Boston by steamboat, she caught a severe cold sitting all night on deck, “prejudice not permitting one of my color to enter the cabin except in the capacity of a servant.”

In Baltimore, a slave state, she and her companion were closely questioned about their freedom and examined for marks by which they might be identified as runaways. While they were there, a daughter of the woman they boarded with escaped from the man who claimed to own her, and he and others broke in at midnight, night after night, holding lights to Julia’s face in bed to see whether the girl was with her. In Washington a slaveholder searched the house where she and a number of ministers were dining. She wrote simply: “We realized more and more what a terrible thing it was for one human being to have absolute control over another.”

I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows. EXODUS 3:7

A door refused

Her witness was not only in what she endured but in what she refused. In Chillicothe, Ohio, the white Methodists invited her to speak, but did not want the Black people of the town to attend. She would not agree, and so she did not speak for them. Prejudice, she wrote, had closed the door of their sanctuary against the coloured people of the place, virtually saying that the gospel should not be free to all. Her Master had said the opposite: go and preach to all.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives. LUKE 4:18

It cost her a pulpit, and it was right. Soon after, in Zanesville, the white Methodists opened their house to Black hearers for the first time, and hundreds were turned away for lack of room.

Holiness on the bells of the horses

On that cold night on the steamboat deck, she broke out into a cry against prejudice, calling it a cruel monster and asking whether it would ever cease to exist. Then she answered herself: not until all shall know the Lord, and holiness shall be written upon the bells of the horses, upon all things in earth as well as in heaven. She was thinking of the last chapter of Zechariah.

In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD. ZECHARIAH 14:20

That is her deepest word on the subject. She believed that the cure for prejudice is the same as the cure for every other sin: a holiness that reaches into everything, the common things as well as the sacred ones, the stagecoach and the steamboat as well as the communion table. She expected it of the church, and grieved when the church fell short.

Writing in 1879, she thanked God that such indignities as she had met in Baltimore no longer had to be suffered, and then added a warning that still stands: “the monster, Slavery, is not yet dead in all its forms.” A reader today may wish she had said more, and planned more. She was an evangelist and not a reformer, and she named the evil and trusted God with it more than she organised against it. But she never once suggested that it was not the church’s business. It was, for her, the test of whether the church’s holiness was real.

Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons. ACTS 10:34

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask where the Lord’s table is divided in your own church or community — by race, class, age or respectability — and what part you play in it.

2. Read James 2:1–9 and name, honestly, one person you have treated with respect of persons. Put it right this week.

3. Is there an invitation you have accepted that required you to leave someone out? Consider whether you should refuse it, as she did at Chillicothe.

4. Learn something this month about how slavery and its aftermath shaped the churches of your own nation, and pray over what you learn.

5. Pray for holiness to be written on the ordinary things of your life — your work, your travel, your welcome — and not only on the sacred ones.

A PRAYER

Lord, You made of one blood all nations of men, and You are no respecter of persons.

Forgive Your church for every time it has pushed anyone back from Your table. Forgive me for the ways I still do it, in my heart if not in my hands.

Give me the courage to refuse a welcome that leaves others outside.

Write holiness on the bells of the horses: on my ordinary days, my journeys and my doorstep, until all know You. Amen.