Continuing to Tell the Story of Anna Alexander

Deaconess Anna Alexander, whom we commemorate today, is a fairly recent addition to the Episcopal calendar of saints. She was initially recognized as a saint by the Diocese of Georgia in 1988, then added to Lesser Feasts and Fasts by General Convention in 2015. She was the first and only African-American deaconess ordained in The Episcopal Church. 

Anna Ellison Butler Alexander was born the youngest of eleven children to recently emancipated parents just months after the end of the Civil War. Her father had been taught to read, which was illegal for those enslaved, but his education may have ignited the spark that led to Anna’s career as an educator. 

At a young age, Anna’s family moved off of St. Simons Island to Pennick, Georgia, where land was made available after poor white families moved to Florida. Her father became a community leader there, and her sister Mary founded a school associated with St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in Darien. Anna also taught school, first in Pennick, then with her sisters at the school in Darien, until she moved north to study and teach at St. Paul’s Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, VA.

In 1894, three years before heading to Virginia, Anna Alexander started a mission church. Though the mission faltered during her absence, Anna revitalized it upon her return to Pennick a few years later. The mission became the Church of the Good Shepherd and grew to include a school, purchased land, and, with the help of her brother Charles, its own building in 1902. For the next dozen years, Anna taught an average of 40 rural, Black students per day, of whom none had access to an education outside of Good Shepherd’s walls.

In 1907, she was consecrated a deaconess by Bishop Cleland Kinloch Nelson and spent the rest of her career teaching in the Altamaha River area. Deaconess Anna Alexander died on September 24, 1947 and was buried at Camp Reese on St. Simon’s. Her body was reinterred in 2004 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Pennick, the congregation she founded and where she dedicated her life to teaching. 

I had the pleasure of learning about Deaconess Anna Alexander many years ago as I live in the neighboring diocese of South Carolina and was honored to be at General Convention in 2015 to vote for her to be added to our calendar of saints. What I hear in her story is a woman who had the odds stacked against her, but she did not stray from her faith and life of service. Time and time again, she had circumstances that would have made it easy to give up. She lived through Reconstruction, widespread racism, and the Great Depression.

The International African American Museum recently opened in Charleston, South Carolina where I live. It is located on Gadsden’s Wharf, which is estimated to have been the disembarkation point for 40% of the enslaved Africans who were forced to come to our country. The museum “tells the unvarnished stories of the African American experience across generations, the trauma and triumph that gave rise to a resilient people.” When I visit, I learn how much I still don’t know. I can read all the books, watch all the movies, have conversations with friends and colleagues, and never reach the end of understanding the trauma and triumph. But that is the pain and the joy of lifelong learning. 

Deaconess Anna Alexander is one of those resilient people whose story we must continue to tell. I love that our calendar of saints grows with us and leaves room for more. Who are the saints in your life that have kept their faith and continued their teachings despite great odds?

“They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one too.”
—Hymn 293 “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God”, Hymnal 1982

Pray with me her collect for today.

Loving God, who called Anna Alexander as a deaconess in your church: Grant us the wisdom to teach the gospel of Christ to whomever we meet, by word and by example, that all may come to the enlightenment that you intend for your people; through Jesus Christ, our Teacher and Savior. Amen.

[The collect for Anna Alexander is used with permission from Church Publishing.]