The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland Contemplates Paying Reparations For Enslaving Black people.

How will this historic institution make amends?

The Claggett Center in Frederick, Maryland. Photo by Gary Allman (Flickr).

The wind blew as the Rev. Eugene Sutton, the first Black Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, and the Rev. Waymon Wright, former vestry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Frederick, Maryland, and activist, walked onto the Hasselbach farm, once a plantation where enslaved Black people labored. It was 2019, and they were at the former plantation to remember, as they said, the Black people who were enslaved by the Hasselbach family, a wealthy European family who had settled in Maryland. The men stood before a stone grave marker that is mounted with a bronze-colored square-shaped plaque. The plaque reads: “The Gravesite of An Unknown Enslaved Man of African Descent.”

The Rev. Eugene Sutton and Rev. Waymon Wright pray in front of the grave marker at the Hasselbach Farm, a former plantation. (a screenshot).

They prayed.

At one point, still standing in front of the grave, Waymon told Sutton, who held a golden staff, that the Hasselbach family “had the area bricked-in, in order to preserve the graves of the enslaved [Black people].”