RVA Talks @ St. Mark's - Race and Racial Healing resources

What One Community of Faith Can Do to Produce Racial Healing

RVA Talks @ St. Mark’s was offered in celebration of the 150th anniversary of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Founded in 1866 to serve the working people of Richmond, St. Mark’s moved to its current home on the Boulevard in 1922. St. Mark’s was in 1967 the first Episcopal church in the city of Richmond to integrate – inviting members of Osgood Memorial Church (displaced from its Randolph community home by the construction of the Downtown Expressway) to join in worship and fellowship. In the 1980s St. Mark’s was on the forefront of the compassionate response to AIDS/HIV disease and is credited by the Fan Free Clinic as hosting more funerals for victims of AIDS than any other faith community in the commonwealth. St. Mark’s has long been an inclusive and welcoming church, advocating for social justice and equal rights for all people.

The 2015-2016 programs included bringing Rev. Mike Kinman then dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Louis to talk about his work with the Black Lives Matter movement to protest the killing of Michael Brown and ongoing injustice, a panel discussion that considered racial and social justice through experience, personal perspective and personal story, a theatrical production Uncle Tom Deconstructed, and a presentation from Rev. Phoebe Roaf, now Episcopal Bishop of Western Tennessee on being the first black women ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

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RVA Talks continues through St. Mark's Reads!