Bias and Margaret Stanley are buried at New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery. She was equally involved in supporting Black women of the Church. Margaret Stanley continued the work of her husband’s charities in service to New Haven’s Black Christian community. Bias Stanley died in 1845, the same year the congregation celebrated the opening of a newly renovated building. He proposed the Society to prevent slander, and his writings document the rise of race consciousness among Black leaders in New Haven in the 1830s. He was a founding member of the African United Ecclesiastical Society and served as first deacon of the Temple Street Church of Colored People, the preceding entity to the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church. Beman, 1937-1992Ĭharles Beman Army discharge papers, 1865īias Stanley was a major figure of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church community.

Sources: Kurt Schmoke,“ The Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, 1829-1896.” (1971) - contact the Beinecke Library for document assistance, Amos Beman Scrapbooks.Īmos Germon Beman and Jehiel C. His grandfather, Caesar Beman, was manumitted after serving in the Revolutionary War. The Reverend Beman’s father worked tirelessly for emancipation and civil rights. The Reverend Beman grew up in Colchester and later Middletown where his father, the Reverend Jehiel Beman, was appointed pastor to the first African American church in Connecticut. The Reverend Beman was pastor during the Amistad Case, during which he and church members crusaded for liberation and the fight against slavery. From 1837 to 1857, the Reverend Beman served as pastor of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ (Dixwell Church), the oldest formally recognized African American Congregational Church in the world.

He was a proponent of abolition, suffrage, temperance, education, and moral reform. The Reverend Amos Gerry Beman (1812–1872), a Black minister in New Haven, was a national leader during the mid-nineteenth century.

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