Is a Rare Black Jesus Stained-Glass Portrait a Result of White Guilt?

For nearly 150 years, a stained-glass window portraying Jesus and three biblical women as Black hung at St. Mark’s, an 1830 Greek Revival church in Warren, Rhode Island. It’s said to be the only known stained-glass depiction of a Black Christ. Installed in 1878, the window also suggests a radical representation of gender parity: Christ speaks to three women positioned at the same visual level, who are engaged in household labor. But what might first appear as a transgressive statement on equality may actually represent a group of White women’s efforts to come to terms with their own connections to slavery.

The window, featuring a Black Jesus, was commissioned in 1877 by Mary P. Carr, a wealthy White widow, and donated to the church in honor of two other wealthy White women in Warren’s Episcopalian community — Ruth B. DeWolf and Hannah Gibbs. There is little information about DeWolf and Gibbs, but it’s known that DeWolf married into a family that made its wealth from the slave trade. It’s also known that the two women made donations to the American Colonization Society (ACS), which advocated for formerly enslaved people’s emigration to Africa in the first half of the 1800s. The ACS established a colony on the west coast of Africa in 1822, which became what is now Liberia in 1847. The motives of supporters varied, and the concept was heavily criticized by abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, who believed that African Americans were entitled to independence in the United States.

“However imperfectly, Hannah Gibbs and Ruth Bourne DeWolf sought to address the complicity of their ancestors in human trafficking,” wrote Hadley Arnold and Virginia Raguin in an August 2022 article about the window. “The window was designed to both commemorate, and perpetuate, their work.”

St. Mark’s parish closed in 2010 and the church property was purchased by developers in 2012. It was slated to be developed into condominiums, but Arnold, who is trained in art history and has worked in the fields of visual art, architecture, and design, soon purchased the old structure and began renovating it into her family home. In June of 2022, Arnold invited Raguin, a Holy Cross professor and specialist in stained glass, to investigate the windows.

Raguin told Hyperallergic she went to visit the church with a blank slate, “as any scholar does,” but was thrilled when she saw what was in front of her.

“‘Yes indeed, someone hasn’t messed it up, this is the real thing,” she added.

The window is one of four in the old church, all of which Raguin attributes to the studio of Henry E. Sharp, a 19th-century American stained glass artist (a Sharp work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Only in the last window, however, is Christ depicted as Black. He is rendered as White and portrayed alone in the other three works.

The rare window could reflect the larger societal environment of post-Civil War America. In 1877, the year Carr commissioned the work in the names of DeWolf and Gibbs, politicians passed the devastating “Compromise of 1877” in order to secure the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes. The agreement ended Reconstruction. Federal troops left former Confederate territories and Southern states were allowed to enact legislation that restricted the rights of formerly enslaved people within their borders. These rules prohibited voting and morphed into segregation laws that took almost a century to be overturned.

Just as the window speaks to the women’s ideas about race, Arnold pointed out that the work likely speaks to these women’s ideas about gender. “Christ is seated at eye-level, with — not above — women, as they get the world’s work done,” Arnold told Hyperallergic. In the upper image, sisters Martha and Mary prepare bread and sit in contemplation. In the lower image, the Samaritan woman draws water from a well.

“Think back on wealthy ladies in the 19th century,” Raguin said, “What were they expected to do? Entertain, that was their life.” When Raguin first saw the window, she recognized the depicted stories from two versions of the Bible that were popular in the second half of the 19th century.

Raguin said knowing the commission emphasized gender equality is what makes her confident that the choice to depict the figures with dark skin was intentional. She knows of no other stained glass windows that portray a Black Jesus. For now, the window is propped up on the floor of St. Mark’s. Raguin and Arnold are looking for an institution to take the rare piece into its collection.