Carla Peterson's historian friends told her that her research trip to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was a fool's errand. Armed with only with the knowledge that her great-grandfather was named Philip Augustus White, and that he was a New Yorker, Peterson, a literature scholar who has specialized in the work of 19th-century African American women, wanted to learn more about her family's history.

Her pessimistic friends were wrong. Peterson is a patient and tireless (and lucky) researcher. On that first trip to the archives, Peterson found her great-grandfather's obituary, and an obituary of his father-in-law, Peterson's great-great-grandfather. Those obituaries led Peterson to church records, tax records, and a pharmaceutical archive in Madison. (White, a pharmacist, was the first African American to earn a degree from the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York. Naysaying historians, take note: scholars of American pharmacy told Peterson the school's records had "probably long since disappeared," but she found them at the Wisconsin Historical Society.) Peterson wove that research into an impressive and fascinating account of her ancestors' public, political lives, and—to use a phrase of Toni Morrison that Peterson quotes—their "unwritten interior lives." It is a remarkable accomplishment.

Philip White is Peterson's compelling central character. Peterson learns that he was not, as family lore had it, a Haitian native who fled Saint-Domingue at the time of the revolution. Rather, he was born in 1823 to a Jamaican mother and a white, English father. He grew up in Hoboken and Manhattan. As a young man, White apprenticed himself to a pharmacist; by 1847, he owned his own drug store. Throughout his life, he was a devoted churchman and a leader in civic and cultural affairs. In 1883, the mayor appointed him to the Brooklyn Board of Education; at the time of his death, he was a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obituary writers lauded White as "a self-made man[:] studious, temperate, methodical, and always pursuing the ends of a noble manhood, in business, church, and social affairs, with punctilious regard to truth and fairness."

Peterson's account of her great-grandfather's political life is nuanced—discomfitingly so, at times. Throughout his life, White was devoted to two causes: Episcopal religion, and education. He was not especially interested in slavery. To wit, his involvement in an 1852 episode in which an escaped slave named Preston was captured in New York and returned to his slaveowner. When black New Yorkers organized in protest, the (white) priest of White's church insisted it was "our duty" to obey the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (which mandated the return of captured runaway slaves to their masters). The church's vestry, of which White was a member, passed a resolution thanking the minister for his leadership. Pondering the available evidence, Peterson realized that "Philip was indifferent to the plight of the slave. My initial reaction was one of utter dismay. I wanted my great-grandfather to be a dedicated race man, a hero of the antislavery cause." But Peterson ultimately concluded that "Philip did not identify with those degraded by slavery, and their concerns were not his."

In later decades, White's politics evolved. In 1886, an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that White "is beginning to take greater interest in his race and his friends are stimulated by his progressive spirit." Three years before, as a member of the Brooklyn Board of Education, he pushed through a resolution that "the Principals and Heads of Departments of the schools under control of the Board of Education are hereby directed to receive all colored children that may apply for admission on the same terms that they do white children." In 1889, he cofounded the Afro-American League, which lobbied for anti-discrimination legislation. By the end of his life, Peterson concludes, White had become more of "a race man publicly committed to fighting for racial justice."

White's biography is central to Peterson's chronicle, but Black Gotham is far more than a history of Peterson's relatives. Peterson takes the lives of her great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather as a window onto the élite African American community of 19th-century Manhattan and Brooklyn. A major theme in Black Gotham is institution building. Peterson explores the voluntary associations black New Yorkers founded: literary societies, as well as branches of the Odd Fellows and Freemasons, not to mention the New York and Newport Ugly Fishing Club, founded in 1865 "for the object of cultivating a love of piscatorial pleasure." And Peterson investigates the more overtly political institutions that black New Yorkers built, such as the New York Association for the Political Elevation and Improvement of the People of Color, founded in 1837 to work for black suffrage.

The institution that looms largest in Peterson's account is the church, specifically St. Philip's Episcopal Church, where White worshipped for decades. St. Philip's was founded by black members of the predominantly white Trinity Episcopal Church. Trinity's white parishioners tolerated black co-religionists, but did not want to receive religious instruction with, or be buried alongside, black Episcopalians. African American members began pressing Trinity for land for a black parish in the 1790s; it was 1818 before Trinity finally appropriated money for that purpose. St. Philip's quickly became the spiritual home of Peterson's ancestors and their friends.

If the members of St. Philip's no longer had to put up with the condescension of Trinity parishioners each Sunday morning, the new parish still encountered the racism of white New Yorkers: the church building was destroyed in the race riot of 1834. The racism of the Episcopal Church was also unavoidable. Peterson describes St. Philip's unsuccessful efforts to develop a black clergy. The church's first priest was black, but after he retired, there were no black priests to be had. Three African American men who sensed a call to ordination were thwarted by the bishop, Benjamin Onderdonk, who refused their applications to General Seminary. The three men went on to achieve distinction: one became a prominent educator; one was eventually ordained to the deaconate, and moved to Jamaica to do mission work; the third, Alexander Crummell, an outspoken abolitionist and early black nationalist, was ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of Massachusetts. His ministry took him for many years to Liberia, though eventually Crummell returned to the U. S. where, inter alia, he led St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. Today the Episcopal Church recognizes Crummell as one of the most important churchmen of the 19th century, celebrating his feast day on September 10.

Peterson also details St. Philip's efforts to be included in the Diocese of New York's yearly Diocesan Convention. Philip White was among the vestrymen who lobbied the diocese, year after year, to recognize St. Philip's as a legitimate parish of the diocese, with a right to participate in the annual Convention. And year after year, the Conference rebuffed the church: "When society is unfortunately divided into classes," declared the Convention in the mid-1840s,

when some are intelligent, refined, and elevated, in tone and character, and others are ignorant, coarse and debased, however unjustly, and when such prejudices exist between them, as to prevent social intercourse on equal terms, it would seem inexpedient to encounter such prejudices, unnecessarily, and to endeavor to compel the one class to associate on equal terms in the consultation on the affairs of the Diocese, with those whom they would not admit to their tables, or into their family circles.

Finally, in 1853, the diocese relented and admitted St. Philip's to the Annual Convention. But why did the members of St. Philip's want to be part of a denomination that judged them coarse and debased? Why was Peterson's great-grandfather so devoted to St. Philip's, and why was he so determined to see St. Philip's accepted by the Episcopal hierarchy? The obvious explanation might be that as the black élite developed, it gravitated toward the denomination of the white élite. But Peterson offers a more intriguing hypothesis. Black Episcopalians, Peterson argues, found both spiritual and aesthetic sustenance in the High Church forms of the Episcopal Church. They were nourished by the beauty of the church rituals; the order of the liturgy helped them "forget the disordered world of Gotham … and reach closer to their God." White and his co-religionists were devoted to St. Philip's "not despite, but because, it was part of the Episcopal denomination." The patterns of Anglican worship, and even the norms of Anglican polity, "placed New York's black Episcopalians within an ancient, cosmopolitan history and offered them a set of memories to place alongside there more recent history of enslavement, degradation, and Americanization."

So too, in Black Gotham, Carla Peterson has given us a set of memories—memories of the growth of a black middle-class, memories of the development of institutions like St. Philip's, and memories of the familial and private lives of people we thought were lost to history—to place alongside the more familiar story of 19th-century African American history. It is a gift for which students of American history owe her a great debt of thanks.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. She is the author most recently of A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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