| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Bishop: Edward T. Demby and the Struggle for Racial Equality in the Episcopal Church. By Michael J. Beary. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xviii, 305 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02618-7.)

In 1934, after Edward T. Demby had held the office of bishop in the predominantly white Episcopal Church for sixteen years, a report to his denomination's governing body judged him "ineffective in the episcopate." This assessment was a cover for the ways in which white Episcopalians had rendered it impossible for Demby to exercise either creativity or leadership as assistant bishop for "Negro work." Michael J. Beary's biography rescues from obscurity an African American whose career as a bishop (1917–1939) was a chronicle of disappointments and humiliations; it is a case study of the ways in which racism operated within a major American religious denomination. 1

Born in 1869, Demby was one of eleven children whose parents were poor, respectable members of the black community in Wilmington, Delaware. After struggling to gain an education, he secured a teaching and administrative post in a Methodist college for blacks. Drawn to the Episcopal Church by its liturgy and theology, he was ordained a priest in 1898. Quickly proving himself an able cleric, he also published regularly. Though Demby questioned Booker T. Washington's legitimacy as a black leader and educator, he was as much an accommodationist as Washington. . . .

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