James Theodore Holly

James Theodore Holly was born on the third of October 1829 in Washington, D.C., to free Black parents, and learned shoemaking at his father's bench. Brooklyn took the family when he was fourteen; he clerked for the abolitionist Lewis Tappan and kept a bootmaking shop with his brother before moving in 1851 to Windsor, in Canada West, to help edit Henry Bibb's Voice of the Fugitive. When Rome would not ordain Black priests he left her communion for the Episcopal Church — deacon at Detroit in 1855, priest at New Haven in 1856, rector of St. Luke's.

He was an emigrationist of conviction: commissioner of the 1854 National Emigration Convention, negotiator with Haiti's imperial government on his 1855 mission, and author in 1857 of A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government — the argument, set in print, that Haiti's revolution had already proven what prejudice denied.

On the first of May 1861 he sailed from New Haven at the head of about a hundred and ten emigrants. The first year was pitiless: fever took roughly forty of them — his mother, his wife Charlotte, and two of his children among the dead — and he buried his own and stayed. The mission he planted at Port-au-Prince grew into the Église Orthodoxe Apostolique Haïtienne under the covenant of 1874 — today the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, long among the largest in the church.

On the eighth of November 1874, at Grace Church in New York, he was consecrated the first African American bishop in the Episcopal Church, missionary bishop of Haiti. At the Lambeth Conference of 1878 — reported the first Black bishop at that table — he preached at Westminster Abbey. He kept his see thirty-six years and died at Port-au-Prince on the thirteenth of March 1911, at eighty-one. Honored be James Theodore Holly, who buried his dead and built the church anyway.