Light on a Divided Church

Daisy Tibbs Dawson had been trying to tell the story for 50 years. No one seemed to care. The few who heard didn’t believe.

Then along came this guy from California, the Rev. Boyd Stockdale. He wanted to know and Dawson poured it all out.

They made a curious silhouette as they walked the corridors of Madrona Presbyterian Church, where they met every Saturday for more than a year. He was white, tall and thin; she was black, short and round. They looked like a number 10. Their roles were clear: She spoke, he paid attention. In the end, an ugly chapter in the church’s history was brought to light.

She told of how her congregation, the only black Presbyterian church in the Northwest, was nearly extinguished by a then all-white presbytery, the local governing body. The church was deceived, forced to integrate with a white congregation that didn’t want it, and then neglected for five decades. The presbytery recently acknowledged its racism and publicly repented in a Service of Reconciliation.

“They hoped we would disappear,” Dawson says plaintively.

She is 79 and the youngest of four black churchgoers still alive who lived through the upheaval. She has white hair and thick glasses that magnify attentive brown eyes. A polite smile belies her descriptions of “feeling hurt for 50 years.” She says pain, carried long enough, sometimes becomes part of the body.

At the moment, she’s sitting around an old walnut table in a cramped conference room at the back of Madrona Presbyterian. The church is a second home to her, but before Madrona, she worshipped at another church in the city.

Dawson was 20 when she left her small town in Alabama to attend the University of Washington. She was a converted Presbyterian and naturally gravitated to Grace Presbyterian in the middle of a residential neighborhood in the Central area, one of the oldest sections of the city and at the time predominantly black.

The wood-frame church, worn but still sturdy, looked like just another house, only bigger. Between 40 and 50 people attended regularly, many of them transplants from the South. Dawson fit right in.

“We were like a big family,” she says. There were impromptu potlucks with the whole neighborhood. It was the kind of place, she says, where “if you didn’t show up Sunday morning, someone would check on you Sunday afternoon.”

Then in 1953, a week before Easter Sunday, the presbytery announced the church was to be sold, and the members had one week to move to the all-white Madrona Presbyterian Church half a mile down the road.

“We were shocked. We couldn’t believe it,” Dawson says. “Nobody talked to us beforehand, nobody asked us, prepared us. We were just told, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’ Nobody said why.”

As stunned members asked questions, the presbytery said it was being done for the purpose of integration.

To placate Grace members, the presbytery made two promises: The proceeds of the sale of Grace would be used to improve Madrona, and Grace’s black pastor, the Rev. Ray Day, would become co-pastor of the newly integrated church.

Integration at Madrona lasted about a month.

Thelma Ross, 82, a tall woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a slow, halting way of talking, recalls the first Sunday at Madrona. She and her husband, Fordie, 89, were among the first Grace members to arrive. Everybody was polite, white and black, but it was a nervous politeness marked by furtive glances. Few spoke.

“We looked around and it was packed,” Ross says. “The next Sunday we saw a lot of the whites had gone, and the next Sunday after that they were almost all gone. Little by little. They never came back.”

In what seemed an instant, Madrona had become a black church, and the new congregants soon realized they’d inherited a sagging building. The roof was in bad shape, leaking in numerous spots. One member described the raindrops hitting all the pails scattered in the church as sounding “like Jamaican steel drums.”

The money from the sale of Grace -- $6,000 -- never came. Instead, the presbytery used it to help buy land for a new church on Mercer Island, a suburban islet in the middle of Lake Washington, a few miles away.

Day was never reassigned to Madrona. He moved to Chicago and died in 1991. Fordie Ross recalls the day when the presbytery refused Day’s transfer. “I’ve seen a lot of people cry,” he says, “but I’ve never seen anybody cry as Ray Day cried.”

For decades, the black congregation at Madrona was led by white ministers who, congregants say, didn’t understand them or take them seriously.

Members told a number of the ministers what happened in 1953 in the hopes of receiving an apology or even just an acknowledgment from the presbytery that what was done to Grace was wrong. But nothing ever came of those exchanges.

The tone was set early in the relationship between pastor and congregation.

Gladys Eddleton, 92, the granddaughter of a slave, now a gray-haired matron with a quiet air of dignity, recalls a home visit by a white minister within the first month of the move. Eddleton had skipped those first services, and the minister encouraged her to attend, but not to join the choir. Other Grace members had tried to join and were rejected.

“He looked straight at me and said very politely that the members wouldn’t want to look at black faces during the service,” she recalls. “What he was saying was, ‘I want you to sit in the pew and not do anything or say anything. Just sit there.’ ”

After decades of neglect, attendance at Madrona’s Sunday service averaged about 30 this year with only 23 members tithing. The building, now 92 years old, was lopsided and barely functional. The furnace didn’t work, and the windows of the bell tower, once adorned with stained glass, were boarded up. The place looked condemned.

Eddleton says she stayed “from pure cussedness.”

She and Dawson and the Rosses began believing that their story, and the story of Grace, would die with them.

Streak of Kindness

Then in 1995, Stockdale, 63, took over the Seattle Presbytery. The members of Madrona looked him over during meetings and debated whether he looked like a skinny Charlton Heston or a gangly Tom Brokaw.

He had the baritone voice of an anchorman but often broke out in a laugh that sounded like a boy’s giggle. He was an inquisitive man with an obvious streak of kindness.

When Madrona’s minister retired in 2000, Stockdale met with leaders of the congregation to discuss the search for a new one. In the middle of the meeting, he recalls, “the room suddenly became hostile. There were bullets flying and arrows sailing, and afterward I checked to see how many holes I had.”

The one doing most of the talking, as was her predilection, was Dawson, who looked straight into Stockdale’s eyes in the middle of the meeting and said, “You’ve been trying to shut us down for 50 years.”

Stockdale wanted to know the source of Dawson’s anger. He arranged to meet with her the following Saturday with the sole intention of listening. In subsequent weeks, he talked with the other three survivors of Grace. Over 18 months, Stockdale pieced together what happened all the way back to the spring of 1953.

Stockdale dug up dusty boxes with minutes of old presbytery meetings and records of financial transactions.

“The records confirmed exactly what Daisy and Gladys and Fordie and Thelma had been saying to us,” Stockdale says.

“This is a case study in how racism works. They had a good intention, but they went and did it in a way that was informed by racism,” he says. “It’s the attitude of: ‘They’re not like us. We don’t have to take them that seriously. We know better and we’ll just tell them what to do and they’ll go do it, and it’ll all be OK.’ ”

Stockdale shared the story with the Rev. Dale Sewell, pastor of Mercer Island Presbyterian, the church whose beginnings were made possible in part by the sale of Grace.

Today, Mercer Island is among the most prosperous of the 53 churches under the Seattle Presbytery. Its modern, angle-roofed buildings, renovated in 2001, nestle in a seven-acre meadow with towering pines and maples. About 1,200 people attend, nearly all white, and membership continues to grow. Sewell shared the story in private conversations with members of his congregation.

Service of Reconciliation

The two ministers got together with the newly appointed pastor of Madrona, a black woman named Flora Bridges, and earlier this month, they held a Service of Reconciliation during which 200 people from Mercer Island and Madrona, white and black, packed into Madrona’s sanctuary to hear the story publicly told for the first time.

The four survivors didn’t want to tell their story in front of a crowd, so Stockdale persuaded them to tell it in front of a camera. The result was an 11-minute video of the four sharing their grief.

“I’d heard the story by then, but it didn’t prepare me for the video,” says Mark Spranger, a longtime member of Mercer Island Presbyterian who attended the service with his wife and teenage daughter. “Their stories were painful to hear. I was overwhelmed.”

Sewell gave the sermon that day and he spoke for many from his congregation. “It’s tempting to say we did not know and therefore we are innocent,” he said. “But to say that would overlook the reality that the congregation of Grace Presbyterian was done a great injustice and the congregation of Mercer Island benefited from that injustice.”

By all accounts, an abundance of tears was shed in the sanctuary that afternoon. Dawson wept, as did the three other survivors. Another member of the Mercer Island church, Jack vanHartesvelt, was so moved by the story that he organized a volunteer construction crew to put in a new bathroom and furnace at Madrona.

VanHartesvelt then hired workers to install a $30,000 roof, paid for by the Mercer Island congregation. The roofers began banging away atop the building a week after the service. Also planned are a kitchen, nursery and back porch. The exterior will get a makeover, and maybe one of these days the windows on the bell tower will shine again.

Mercer Island Presbyterian has also committed $50,000 to Madrona over the next five years.

“We hate that this happened. If Mercer Island had known about it, we would have done this years ago,” VanHartesvelt says.

Stockdale and Dawson still meet to talk about church matters. They’ve become friends, bonded by faith and a shared tale, their silhouette of a number 10 ambling across Madrona’s creaky floors.

Dawson, speaking in the conference room as workers took apart the roof, says the hurt hasn’t all been erased. “But it’s a beginning. I have faith in it,” she says. “The hurt is being replaced by understanding. It took one person to listen, and look what happened.”

The banging above, to her ears, was as good as a hymn.