Elevated role and impact of Black Episcopalians
Already an experienced civil rights activist while attending high school in Virginia, the Rev. Edward W. Rodman once drew an imposing police response in the late 1950s for simply distributing fliers.
“They came to arrest me for littering, that was the charge,” he said years later in a video interview. “They sent seven police cars for one 17-yearold kid.”
He went on to lead a sit-in to integrate the lunch counter of his local F.W. Woolworth department store. And in college, he entered the national leadership ranks — meeting with, working alongside, or sharing a podium with activists such as Ella Baker and Malcolm X.
At one meeting, Rev. Rodman recalled, Baker said that “what we need are movement-centered leaders, not leader-centered movements,” and that became his motto in activism. “It’s not about me, it’s about the people,” he said. “It’s not about me, it’s about the work.”
Rev. Rodman, a guiding force for racial justice during his years as canon missioner with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, was 81 when he died April 2 in his Framingham home.
“Ed was the social conscience of the diocese and the bishops who came through the various offices while he was there,” said the Rev. Thomas Kennedy, a seminary classmate of Rev. Rodman’s and a former dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston.
“He would keep them focused on what was important and what really mattered, particularly with social justice — not just in the diocese, but nationally.”
Spending nearly his entire ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, Rev. Rodman was ordained a priest in 1968. That year, he would later say, “marked the arrival of Black consciousness within the Episcopal Church, and as a result, it would never be the same again.”
In 1968, he also was a founding member of the Union of Black Clergy and Laity, which later was renamed the Union of Black Episcopalians.
The organization’s role, Rev. Rodman told The Boston Globe in 1995, was “to be a constant force combating racism in the church, to promote Black participation for diocesan committees, and through special events, to promote Black contributions to the Episcopal Church.”
Byron Rushing, a longtime friend and former state representative who has been a deputy to the Episcopal General Convention, said Rev. Rodman “did everything he could to get the Episcopal Church to be involved in social action — and specifically in the action around involvement of Black people in the Episcopal Church.”
Seeking social justice while fighting oppression is “daunting because it’s relentless,” Rev. Rodman said in a video interview posted on an Episcopal Church website.
“That’s the advantage of being a polio survivor,” he added. “I learned at a very early age to deal with pain, be patient, and persevere.”
And his decades-long activism, he said, was guided by what he learned from Baker.
“When you’re in a struggle, the people you can rely on are the ordinary people, just the regular folks — not the prima donnas, not the stars, but just the regular people who are willing to engage and be persistent without wanting a lot of fanfare,” Rev. Rodman said in the video interview.
While many praised his leadership over the years, he insisted that the group effort was always more important.
“Everything that I’ve done, to my knowledge, has been in collaboration with other people,” he said. “I’ve never flown solo.”
Born in Indianapolis on Aug. 6, 1942, Edward Willis Rodman grew up in and around Portsmouth, Va.
His mother, Charlotte Reid Rodman, founded and was executive director of the Black YWCA in Indianapolis, according to her 1989 Globe obituary. After moving to Portsmouth, she was a civic and Episcopal Church activist, a leader of the local housing authority, and a master contract bridge player.
Rev. Rodman’s father, Orlando Rodman, was a pioneering Black postal inspector in Indiana.
While attending I.C. Norcom High School in Portsmouth, “I led the first high school — and only, really — sit-in, in 1960,” Rev. Rodman said in the video interview.
His activism landed him on the cover of Life magazine as he stood with other sit-in activists.
While attending what is now Hampton University in Virginia, he volunteered with the Congress of Racial Equality, became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and attended gatherings that included activists such as the writer James Baldwin and the performer Harry Belafonte.
One day Rev. Rodman spoke in New York City at a Harlem event where Malcolm X introduced him at the podium.
At Hampton, he also met
Gladys Carroll. They married in 1964 and she went on to work as a health care advocate and as a nurse at Newton-Wellesley Hospital and what is now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
“He really loved family time. He really loved time with my mom,” said their daughter Claire Rodman of New York City.
Kennedy said Gladys Rodman “was really the glue that held it all together for Ed. They were a real gift to the diocese and the church.”
Rev. Rodman graduated from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and initially was assigned to what is now the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in New Haven, Conn., before moving to the Episcopal Diocese
of Massachusetts.
“There were very few people who carried as much water in the movement as Ed did — inside and outside of the movement,” said the Rev. Ike Miller, a seminary classmate of Rev. Rodman’s who is now retired from the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia.
“Ed’s legacy is to remind the church as a whole that you can’t sit on the sidelines as an observer,” Miller said. “And he didn’t.”
A couple of years into his work at the diocese in Boston, Rev. Rodman helped keep the peace at the Walpole prison in 1973, when corrections officers went on strike and inmates filled some of their roles. Rev. Rodman coordinated outside citizen observers and chaired an ad hoc committee on prison reform.
Within the diocese, he also “was so passionate about women’s ministry,” Claire said.
“He formed and shaped my understanding of the priesthood and the church,” the Rev. Margaret R. Rose, a former deacon at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston who is now ecumenical and interreligious deputy to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.
Rev. Rodman also “helped a predominantly white church and its governing bodies understand its mission as a justice mission,” Rose said. “He never stopped reminding the governing bodies of the church of that, and then he created institutions to help live that out.”
In addition to his wife, Gladys, and daughter Claire, Rev. Rodman leaves two other daughters, Alice of Natick and Sarah of Los Angeles.
A service to celebrate Rev. Rodman’s life and work will be held at 10:30 a.m. May 25 in the Cathedral of St. Paul on Boston Common.
Along with his ministry, Rev. Rodman was a founding member in 1985 of The Consultation, a collaboration of progressive organizations in the Episcopal Church. He also held leadership roles in national denomination organizations and taught at the Episcopal Divinity School.
“He had a profound effect on where the Episcopal Church has moved after those years because of his teaching in the seminary,” Rushing said.
At a divinity school dinner honoring his service, when he retired in 2009, Rev. Rodman encouraged everyone to follow his path and to do so with kindness.
“Keep the faith,” he said, “but spread it gently.”