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Garnet's spirit still guides Grace Memorial Church Thursday, February 13, 2003 By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Obscured by history and the shadow of Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave turned Presbyterian preacher, advocated that black people should die for freedom rather than live as slaves.
By using his wit and passion to push for independence, he become known as an "apostle of liberty."
Though he lived mostly in New York and Washington, D.C., and served as ambassador to Liberia, Garnet made a home on Canal Street in Pittsburgh's old Allegheny City from 1868 to 1870. He came here to head Avery College, a North Side school founded in 1849 to provide a preparatory education to blacks.
During his stay, he was instrumental in establishing Grace Memorial, the "mother church" of Pittsburgh's black Presbyterians.
He ministered to a nucleus of about 30 people who wanted to begin a colored Presbyterian church. Under his leadership, they planted the seeds for Grace Memorial's first building, which was erected in 1870s Arthursville, a mixed community in the Lower Hill District. He also left behind a record of activism.
Much of the community and social justice work that Grace Memorial does today is because of Garnet, said the church's present pastor, Johnnie Monroe.
"He called on preachers and churches to fight against oppressive systems," said Monroe. "We've tried to carry on that legacy."
Garnet, a dark and handsome man, was a liberator who never had his story told, said Monroe.
His views on advancing the black community were strong. He envisioned black-controlled institutions, calling for black printing companies and black banks.
In fact, Garnet presided over Avery at a time when it was upgrading its curriculum. Before he came, the college offered reading, writing and arithmetic as well as manual training and home economics.
After Garnet arrived, the school added history, rhetoric, philosophy and political economy.
It was a long way from Kent County, Md., where he was born a slave in 1815.
His father, George Trusty, was a shoemaker who was the son of a Mandingo warrior. He was a prayerful man who changed the family's name to Garnet when they settled in New York City, after escaping slavery in 1824. The elder Garnet opened a cobbler's shop and became involved in the African Methodist Episcopal church.
The move afforded young Henry, then 9, a chance at formal education. He attended the African Free School, and many of the classmates he met there left their mark on American society. Among them were Alexander Crummell, Episcopal minister and black intellectual; James McCune Smith, the first black to earn a medical degree; and Ira Aldridge, a celebrated actor.
At 13, a free-spirited Garnet traveled as a hired helper on schooners to Cuba and Washington, D.C. When he returned in 1829 -- his family on the run from slave catchers -- he worked as a farmhand for a Long Island family. After a severe leg injury, he quieted down and joined a Presbyterian church, becoming an elder in 1841.
That same year, he married Julia Ward Williams of South Carolina, whom he'd met in college. The family settled in Troy, N.Y., and Garnet filled his days teaching and preaching. In 1843, he was ordained a Presbyterian minister.
During this time, Garnet had grown more involved in the abolitionist movement, arguing vehemently for black male voting rights. At an all-black convention in New York in 1843, he electrified the group when he urged slaves to take action to free themselves..
He told the assembly, it was better to "die freemen than live to be a slave. ... Let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance!"
Reports say Garnet, who was known for his stirring oratory, moved people to tears.
U.S. statesman and long-time black activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, at the same convention, was not one of them.
Douglass took a more conservative stance and argued that conventioneers should not adopt Garnet's plan, which many considered revolutionary.
If he were a modern-day figure, Garnet would be compared to Malcolm X. Both advocated freedom by any means necessary. Douglass was more like Martin Luther King Jr., a figure who embraced a nonviolent view that the moral improvement of blacks would eradicate the evils of injustice.
Following his own belief in black emigration, Garnet moved in the early 1850s to Great Britain, where he spoke out against slavery and advocated a boycott of cotton. After missionary work in Jamaica and a stint at Shiloh Church in New York he returned to England in 1861, representing the African Civilization Society. His plans to visit the continent were interrupted by the start of the Civil War.
He organized black troops to fight for the North and, in 1865, became the first black American to preach in the House of Representatives.
In New York, around 1876, Garnet's health and mental state declined and "at times the wounded spirit signed out for relief," a friend wrote of his condition.
Despite his health, Garnet lobbied for and became ambassador to Liberia, West Africa, in December 1881. Before leaving for his post, he had this to say:
"Please the Lord I can only safely cross the ocean, land on the coast of Africa, look around upon its green fields, tread the soil of my ancestors, live if but a few weeks; then I shall be glad to lie down and be buried beneath its sod."
He died in Africa two months later.
Ervin Dyer can be reached at edyer@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1410.
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The fourth annual Henry Highland Garnet Day takes place Sunday at 3 p.m. at Grace Memorial Church, 1000 Bryn Mawr Road, Hill District. It will honor six people who exemplify the life and work of the minister.