The Rev. Jehu Jones and "The 1838 Black Metropolis"

The Rev. Jehu Jones and "The 1838 Black Metropolis" Timothy J. Wengert On November 30, 2023, Nate File, a reporter for the Communities and Engagement Desk of the Philadelphia Inquirer, published an interview with two enterprising African American historians of the Black experience in Philadelphia before the Civil War. They had recently co-founded "The 1838 Black Metropolis," a nonprofit project dedicated to public history and education about Philadelphia's Black history prior to the Civil War. They chose 1838 because of attempts around that time by both mobs and politicians to intimidate free Black Philadelphians and to strip them of their right to vote. The article described the lives and history of a "city within a city," built by the more than 20,000 free Black people then living in Philadelphia (https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/black-metropolis-history-1838-harriet-tubman-20231130.html). Morgan Lloyd, a journalism fellow at Montclair State University in New Jersey, is the President and co-founder of The 1838 Black Metropolis. Michiko Quinones, a public historian and museum docent pursuing a graduate degree in Museum Studies at the Harvard Extension School, is co-founder and director of public history and education for the organization. Its official website (https://www.1838blackmetropolis.com) offers even more remarkable archival material and stories uncovered by these two fine scholars. Upon reading the article in the Inquirer, I reached out to Lloyd and Quinones because of the obvious connection to the Rev. Jehu Jones, the first African American Lutheran pastor, who in 1834 established "St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church" on Quince Street in End Page 223 Philadelphia. In an issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Pennsylvania Ministerium, Lutheran Quarterly published an article on Jones by Karl E. Johnson, Jr. and Joseph A. Romeo, "Jehu Jones (1786–1852): The First African American Lutheran Minister," Lutheran Quarterly 10 (1996): 424–43. Johnson, then a student at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, had discovered that the original worship space still existed, now housing the "Mask and Wig Club" theater of University of Pennsylvania alumni. After Johnson's untimely death, Richard Stewart and I had an historical marker installed at the site, and some years later a second sign was erected after the first was taken out by a snowplow (for the dedication see: https://ministrylink.org/marking-an-african-american-lutheran-pioneer/). For all the mistreatment he endured from the Pennsylvania Ministerium, Jehu Jones managed to build that congregation in the thriving (though oppressed) community. Having not seen Jones mentioned in the Inquirer article, I had asked Lloyd and Quinones whether they were aware of his contributions. Not only did they know of him, but they had also discovered that in 1838 Black community leaders met at St. Paul's Church to draft an official letter urging Pennsylvania voters to defeat an amendment to the Commonwealth's constitution to add the word "white" to the definition of who could vote. (For details, see https://www.1838blackmetropolis.com/1838civilrightsmovement.) In replying to my query in an e-mail on December 2, 2023, Quinones described the contributions of Jones and St. Paul's this way: We built our first walking tour centered on the 1838 fight to keep the right to vote with St. Paul's as a physical narrative and memory 'anchor' on the Social and Political spaces tour; the self-guided tour is here https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a5351cd580734ff385458d5f337ae84d. We've now expanded to three themed tours and may add more in the Spring. All the guides are here https://www.1838blackmetropolis.com/walking-tours. St. Paul's is sacred to us because it is one of the two known planning places where we know for sure Rev. Stephen Gloucester, J.J.G. Bias, J.P. Burr, Robert Forten, Rev Charles Gardner, Rev Jehu Jones and Robert Purvis met and planned the work they did to prevent the loss of the right to vote. The site is identified on the first page of the Appeal of the 40,000. It's one of my favorite places to visit because it still has its 'feel' from that time and you can almost hear them talking. Quince [Street...