All Saints Church to Unveil Plaque Acknowledging Its Role in Pasadena’s Jim Crow Segregation

All Saints Church will unveil a permanent plaque at noon Monday, Sept. 14, acknowledging and lamenting the Pasadena parish’s participation in Jim Crow segregation, in a public act of remembrance at the cornerstone of its church building.

The plaque records both the exclusion and what followed it. According to the inscription, eight African American women responded to that exclusion by gathering in their homes over several years to create a worship space of their own, founding what became St. Barnabas Episcopal Church about a mile away in northwest Pasadena.

All Saints said today’s gathering is intended to create a shared public memory of this history and to affirm that honest remembrance must lead to continuing repentance, relationship and repair.

All Saints clergy will be joined by leaders from local faith and community organizations for an act of public remembrance recognizing the church’s history of segregation as part of the wider history of Pasadena.

The plaque will be installed at the cornerstone of All Saints’ current church building, which was laid in 1923.

The inscription honors “the African Americans and people of color who were turned away from All Saints Church by its white parishioners during the Jim Crow era in Pasadena.”

“We acknowledge and repent of these racist actions, and we ask forgiveness from the descendants of those excluded,” the inscription states. “Today, as we commit to living out our mission that all are welcome, we recognize our past history so that such racist actions may never be repeated.”

The unveiling grows out of All Saints’ Telling the Whole Story project, established in 2023 to examine portions of the parish’s history that had not been fully acknowledged.

The project’s work has included historical research, education and spiritual formation, relationship-building between All Saints and St. Barnabas, and examination of the economic harm caused by segregation.

All Saints and St. Barnabas held their first joint worship service on June 16, 2024.

St. Barnabas traces its beginning to a meeting on June 16, 1909, at the South Fair Oaks Avenue home of Georgia Weatherton, convened to organize an Episcopal mission. Weatherton, Ellensteen Bevans and Rosebud Mims were among the founders. The congregation was admitted as a mission of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles in 1932 and moved to its sanctuary at 1062 N. Fair Oaks Ave. in 1933.

The Rev. V.R. Marianne Zahn, then the priest-in-charge at St. Barnabas, said in 2023 that All Saints “would not allow Black parishioners to attend services at that time.”

The unveiling is scheduled for noon Monday, Sept. 14, at 132 N. Euclid Ave., just east of Pasadena City Hall. All Saints, an Episcopal parish founded in 1883, can be reached at (626) 796-1172.

“This plaque is a significant outward and visible sign of the reckoning we are undertaking at All Saints with our past participation in discriminatory and racist practices,” said the Rev. Tim Rich, priest-in-charge of All Saints Church. “If we are to live more fully into the beloved community of belonging we hope to become, we have to truthfully acknowledge the sins of our past.”