No Turning Back: The Black Presence at Virginia Theological Seminary

No Turning Back: The Black Presence at Virginia Theological Seminary explores both the history of racism in the life of the prominent Episcopal seminary and recent efforts by the seminary to address its past failures. Several of the Southern Episcopalians who founded the seminary in the 1820s were members of the American Colonization Society, which aimed to resettle freed blacks in West Africa, instead of integrating them in American society. Many of the founders and early faculty were slave-owners, and some manual labor and construction on the campus was almost certainly done by rented slaves. Following the Civil War, high demand for theological education for black Episcopalians created an opportunity for racial integration at Virginia Theological Seminary. Instead the Board of Trustees decided to establish a separate school to train black clergy in Petersburg, Virginia. The Bishop Payne Divinity School opened in 1878 and prepared an estimated 260 students for ministry in its 70 years of operation. Desegregation would not come until 1951, when the Bishop Payne Divinity School was merged with Virginia Theological Seminary. That year John Thomas Walker became the first full-time black seminarian enrolled at VTS; following his graduation and ordination, he would go on to become the Bishop of Washington and the Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, as well as the first black candidate for Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. No Turning Back follows the story of Virginia Theological Seminary through the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the addition of black studies to the seminary curriculum, and the hiring of the Rev. Lloyd A. Lewis, Jr., the seminary's first full-time black professor, in 1978. A 1972 VTS graduate, the Rev. Dr. Lewis provided the foreword for this book a few years before retiring from his position as the Molly Laird Downs Professor of New Testament in 2012. An elegant hardbound volume beautifully illustrated with more than 140 photographs, No Turning Back features 26 fascinating interviews with black alumni of Virginia Theological Seminary who graduated between the years 1961 and 2008.