PROVIDENCE — With its 189-foot-tall white spire jutting skyward, the First Unitarian Church of Providence stands against racism, striving to be “a force for public good.”
But for much of its first 150 years, the church and many of its members benefited “from the worst imaginable form of oppression: hereditary, race-based chattel slavery,” according to a new book the church is set to release on May 16 as part of an “Owning Our History” exhibit.
The 305-year-old church is confronting its history of benefiting from the slave trade as part of an inquiry launched during its 300th anniversary celebration in 2020.
And it’s doing so at a time when the Trump administration is trying to silence such narratives and downplay matters of race and racism in US history. On March 27, Trump issued an executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History‚” and claimed that the Smithsonian Institution has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order is part of a series of actions against cultural organizations that Trump claims have been overtaken by “woke” ideology.
But the Rev. Elizabeth Lerner Maclay, First Unitarian’s senior minister, said, “The administration’s position feels so weak to me. Why in the world do we need to hide or deny or ignore the truth?”
To move forward, we need to know our history and where we‘re starting from so that can help shape what we do in the future, Maclay said.
“If you believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and justice, you can’t ignore or gloss over the truths of so many people who struggled and suffered,” Maclay said. “History is real, and it has to be acknowledged.”
She said the project could serve as a model for other entities — whether a family, a business, a city, a state, or a nation.
Maclay said she suspected the church would find uncomfortable truths when it began researching its history.
And the book — titled “A Church in a Triangle: Race, Religion & Power in a Rhode Island Congregation 1720-1850” — reveals that the fortunes of the early church members were built on the Triangular Trade, as Rhode Island ships carried 11 million gallons of rum to Africa for slave trading purposes between 1709 and 1807.
When the Revolutionary War began to limit trade in enslaved people and rum production, leading church members pivoted to spinning and weaving cloth, with many Rhode Island mills making the “Negro cloth” used to clothe and stigmatize enslaved people, the report says.
Many church families took up full- or part-time residence in the South, aligning themselves with Southern business interests and defending chattel slavery.
“We had hoped to find abolitionists among the early white leaders, but we found none,” the book says. “We found, instead, that church leaders were in the forefront of an anti-abolitionist expression in Providence during the 1830s and 1840s.”
Actively campaigning against abolition is “so awful,” Maclay said, but she said she was also struck by more personal details.
For example, a woman named Anna Bowen was enslaved to a member of the church, and her “small crumbling gravestone” in East Providence’s Newman Cemetery reads, “Thou [was] a good master, I was a good slave, I now rest from my labor & sleep in my grave.”
“That is heartbreaking,” Maclay said. “That was the sum of her life.”
But she said the research also revealed “moments of revelation, goodness, blessing, and beauty.”
For example, it unearthed details of the life of Daniel Nelson Morse, a free African-American man who served as the church sexton. He was active in anti-slavery causes, opened a grocery store, and helped to incorporate the Second African Methodist Episcopal Church in Providence, now known as Bethel AME.
“He was just a powerhouse,” Maclay said. “He was important businessman in the Black community, and he was a very early contributor to Wilberforce University, the oldest [Historic Black University] in the country.”
As part of its path forward, the church is trying to build relationships with congregations of color, including the Bethel AME Church in Providence, and the church can’t form real bonds like that if it’s not honest about its history, she said.
“It’s a step forward because if we want to live into that mandate of being a collaborator and partner for others, you have to know your history,” Maclay said. “You have to have a reckoning with whatever problems and taints you have in your past.”
It’s also important to confront that history because it reflects a wider truth about the prejudice directed at various other groups over the years, including those from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Latin America.
“The target changes, but it’s the same ugliness and destruction and suffering every time,” Maclay said. “The way to end it is to know it for what it was.”
The Rev. Peter Laarman, a retired United Church of Christ minister, joined the First Unitarian Church of Providence in 2020. He began working on this project a part of the church’s history committee, and the church hired Traci Picard, a public historian from Providence.
Laarman said the project did not begin as a counterpoint to Trump’s approach, but it’s reaching fruition as the administration is not only targeting the Smithsonian Institution but also is trying to control how American history is taught in schools and colleges.
With America’s 250th anniversary coming up in 2026, groups may be reluctant to go beyond a “hip-hip-hooray” approach to US history, Laarman said. But, he said, “Our determination to move forward is greater than ever because churches in particular have to live into their commitments and can’t retreat.”
While the “impulse to erase is strong,” Laarman said, “you can’t talk about American freedom without telling the whole story.”
The aim is not to make people feel bad about their ancestors, he said. “Guilt is an unhelpful response on the part of white people. The response is: ‘OK, what do I do with this in terms of how I live my life going forward?’”
The book, available for $50, is simply “a place to begin this work from the church’s point of view,” Laarman said.
The church is inviting the public to take part in “Owning Our History/No Turning Back: A Weekend of Truth and Healing” May 16-18. The weekend will include a new exhibit linked to the book’s findings and curated by Christopher West, founding director of the African American Museum of Rhode Island.