The Time-Honored Traditions Of People
[EDITORS’ NOTE:
To be honest and historically accurate,
we have quoted directly
from original sources.
As a result, we have used words
or phrases that would not be part
of our speech or writing today.
We trust you will understand
our editorial choice.]
On July 30, 1921, the Rev. William B. Spofford, managing editor of The Witness, was in no mood to be polite.
“A nice story,” he wrote, referring to a front-page article datelined “Miami, Florida, July 17.”
“A priest of the Church, in performing his duties, is waylaid by a gang of ruffians. He is escorted to a lonely spot, there stripped of his clothing, beaten and abused, then covered with hot tar and feathers. This little party is but a warning, so he is informed by this marked band of thugs, for unless he leaves the locality within twenty-for hours they proposed to hang him from a tree by the neck. From the newspaper reports one gathers that Mr. [Rev.] Irwin had the foolish courage to preach of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man in that part of the country where the ‘best people’ seem to limit their religion to pious words.
“One has more faith in southern justice than I have who believes that the officials of Florida will do anything about the matter. A judge, who has sworn to see justice done, has already had his say. ‘Mr. Irwin should have been more careful,’ says this modern Pilate.
“So it is up to the Church. Several southern [Anglican/Episcopalian] Bishops have issued strong statements denouncing mob violence. Let them now support their own words with action. Let them demonstrate to the lawless ones the power of the Church. Last week I made the statement that I thought that the church should concern itself with more vital things than ecclesiastical politics. Here is a case in point. One of our own priests has been shamefully abused by a band of outlaws. The Church deserves no freedom if it fails to vindicate his honor. And it is not alone a matter for the Bishops of the South. We have a Presiding Bishop and Council that spends thousands of dollars each month in telling the world of the glory of the Episcopal Church. Let us use a few of these dollars in hounding down the criminals so that the world may know that an Episcopal priest has behind him the power of a God inspired organization.”
Bishop Cameron Mann of the Episcopal/Anglican Diocese of Southern Florida recruited Father Philip Sidney Irwin, a married man and father, from the Diocese of Connecticut and “appointed him as Archdeacon in charge of the colored missions along the east coast of this diocese, with headquarters in Miami,” the bishop explained in a statement published in the August 6, 1921 edition of The Witness, an independent publication (1917-2003) of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company.
Irwin was invited to South Florida “largely due to the fact that he had for many years been a missionary to the colored people in the Bahamas and consequently knew their characteristics. And by far the greater number of Negroes along our east coast came from the Bahamas,” the bishop’s statement explained.
Irwin “was indefatigable in his ministrations, usually holding five or six services each Sunday, and very many during the week.” He was “a gentleman, a scholar, a man of fine personal character, a man of utmost zeal, and a man of kindly manner. I may add that he is by birth and early education an Irishman,” the bishop wrote.
Bishop Mann took special note of Father Irwin’s challenge in bridging the cultural differences between Florida’s Blacks of Bahamian heritage and “the native American Negro… But outside of all of this is the fact that by the lower class of white people the spectacle of a white clergyman laboring among the colored folk is a displeasing one. And if he stands forth as a champion of the rights of those under his charge he immediately provokes bitter criticism…”
The bishop reported that two years prior to the tarring and feathering incident he had investigated complaints “from certain white people in Miami” and “found not one supported by any proof.” Among the accusations against the priest, “He was charged with opposition to the public schools, and it was shown that he had given up the parochial school in Miami in order that the colored children might attend the public school in Miami and so become better Americanized.”
With words that would cause a firestorm in 2023, the Bishop declared, “Perhaps this is as good a place as any form to declare that Archdeacon Irwin does not hold to what is called social or political equality for the Negro in the United States. He has never taught it. [Emphasis in original text.] On the contrary he has incurred disfavor with some of the Negroes themselves by his opposition to the societies and movements which had it as their object.”
The bishop described his Archdeacon as “attending to the needs of his own flock and bravely standing out for justice to them in cases where he thought they were not getting it.”
Bishop Mann noted that Father Irwin’s “captors told him that this was done because he had advocated negro equality and intermarriage of the races.” In his statement he reported that Father Irwin “denied having ever advanced such ideas as those for which he was ostensibly assaulted.” [Emphasis in original text.]
He also reported,
“About the middle of the afternoon, while I was consulting with the mayor and the circuit court judge [handling the grand jury investigation], the commander of the local post of the American Legion came in and stated that he had reliable information that if Archdeacon Irwin remained in the city he would be lynched and that in all probability the church property would be burned and numerous lives lost. He therefore asked that Archdeacon Irwin should agree to leave the city that afternoon.”
The bishop concluded his statement by reporting that he gave Father Irwin “five hundred dollars, and so furnished him with the necessary money for his journey. He and his daughter departed on the late afternoon train.”
The July 30, 1921 edition of The Witness covered Father Irwin’s abuse with report datelined “Miami, July 18”:
“The Dade County grand jury began an investigation last night of the Rev. Philip S. Irwin, white pastor of St. Agnes’ Episcopal church, who was whipped, tarred, and feathered, then dumped out of an automobile into one of the main streets of Miami. Irwin’s alleged doctrines of racial equality were said to have provoked the aattack.
“Judge Branning, in charge of the grand jury, said:
“’The court suggests that while the country allows freedom of speech, one exercising this constitutional privilege, should advise himself or bear in mind the time-honored traditions of a people.’”
In 2015, Chanelle Nyree Rose, Ph.D., who received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Florida International University and her doctorate from the University of Miami and is an Associate Professor at Rowan University (Glassboro, N.J.), reported in The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami:
“The attacks on Irwin served as punishment for his teachings on racial equality…. A few years later the Klan erected an obelisk at the [Miami-]Dade County courthouse near the location where they had left Irwin that read: ‘On this Spot a few years ago a white man was found who had been tarred and feathered because he preached social equality to negroes.’”
It appears that, with Father Irwin’s departure, the case was dropped – from history and text books and everywhere that might make the descendants of his attackers uncomfortable or ashamed of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles or themselves.
Writing in Church Times, an independent publication covering Church of England - Anglican/Episcopalian - issues worldwide in August 2021, Father Irwin’s great nephew Patrick Irwin reported:
“Family tradition records that he was spared the death by hanging with which he was threatened only because one of the gang was dating his 17-year-old daughter and had enough intelligence to realise that killing the young lady’s father would be unlikely to assist his courtship. Nor did tarring and feathering him, and the romance came to a sudden end…
“The Bishop publicly stated that Irwin did not believe that blacks were equal to whites, which, on the contrary, he did. Irwin had previously worked for years as a missionary on Cat Island in the Bahamas, and did not share the racist views then popular in the American South…”
Black churches were targeted by arsonists in the mid-1990s, when more than 70 black and multicultural churches were burned in a 20-month span, according to news reports.
In 2015, during a ten-day period beginning shortly after a white gunman massacred nine Black men and women who had gathered for prayer at Charleston’s Mother Emmanuel AME Church, seven Black churches across the South were torched. Among the targets:
Mt. Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C, which had been rebuilt after the Ku Klux Klan burned it to the ground twenty years earlier.
The predominantly Black Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, which also housed two Nepali congregations.
College Hills Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Knoxville
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2022 “Individual Freedom” bill is designed to prohibit individuals and businesses from making others “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”
Days after a former student murdered fourteen students and three faculty/staff members and wounded seventeen others at her Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, senior Emma Gonzalez addressed a memorial service. She began with emotion-evoking six minutes and twenty seconds of silence – the length of time it took the gunman to complete his massacre. Commentator David Corn called it the “Longest silence in the history of US social protest.”
Emma Gonzalez ended with these words:
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.”
As counselors and priests, we know with certainty that honest History, Truth and Facts cannot make anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”
There’s not a politician in the land who can define “woke” or “woke ideology.” The words are meaningless. And, their meaninglessness has but one purpose: To justify and protect bigotry and prejudice, white supremacy and ignorance or distortion of History.
The next time we hear a politician or commentator echo the themes of the “Individual Freedom” bill, regurgitating noxious misogyny or spewing against “woke,” we will pray for the survivors and the families of MSD, we will recall torched Black churches and an Episcopalian/Anglican priest who was tarred and feathered and forced out of Miami, and we will think “We call BS.”