Monthly Programs

A presentation by Christopher L. Webber

Chris Webber will talk about his latest book, Black Doctor , the first full biography of James McCune Smith. Dr. Smith was born in slavery in New York City in 1805. Raised by a self-emancipated single mother in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, he still managed to get an excellent elementary education in a school established by the Quakers for Black children. Beyond that, however, there was nothing open to a Black student. His pastor, Peter Williams, the second Black priest in the Episcopal Church and Rector of St. Philip's Church, Manhattan, therefore raised money to send Smith to the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In just five years, Smith earned an AB, MA, and MD with honors, and returned to New York City better qualified than most white doctors. Establishing himself as a doctor serving both Black and white patients, Smith also worked closely with Frederick Douglass, James W.C. Pennington and other leaders in the pre-Civil War abolition movement. He died in 1865, but he had lived to see the end of slavery.

Christopher L. Webber is a graduate of Princeton University, where he earned his degree from the School of Public and International Affairs, and the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, where he earned two degrees in theology and was awarded an honorary doctorate. He spent over forty years as a parish priest serving congregations in Brooklyn, N.Y., Tokyo, Japan, Bronxville N.Y., and Canaan, CT. After spending twenty years in retirement in Connecticut, he moved to San Francisco twelve years ago for family reasons. He continues to serve in local Episcopal Churches. His first publications were a Vestry Handbook , now in a fourth edition, and a New Metrical Psalter still widely used. After writing a number of books for Episcopalians and Christians more generally, Webber wrote the first biography of James W.C. Pennington, a fugitive slave who became the first Black American to study at Yale and to be granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg. That biography, American to the Backbone , was very favorably reviewed by the Wall Street Journal . Webber then published the first sequels to the ancient Beowulf saga, The Beowulf Trilogy, and a modernized version of St. Paul's Epistles, Letters to American Churches. He has also recently published a hymnal, Songs of Justice, Peace, and Love.