Stained Glass With an Unsettling Backstory

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The windows at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn were donated by families whose ancestors had owned slaves. And inmates at Sing Sing have a disturbing tale of brutality by guards.

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By James Barron

Good morning. It's Friday. We’ll see what a venerable Brooklyn church discovered when it dug deep into history. We’ll also look at allegations that corrections officers at the Sing Sing maximum-security prison stripped and beat inmates in November.

There is usually a story behind the stained-glass windows in a church. The story that congregants at Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, are telling goes well beyond mentioning the famous artists who designed them and the Bible verses they illustrate.

It is a story of the late-19th-century families that donated the money for the windows — money the congregation now says came from inherited wealth built on the labor of enslaved people.

The donors themselves did not own slaves. Slavery had been abolished in New York more than 50 years before the windows were installed in the sanctuary, which was dedicated in 1891. But recent research by a working group of church members found that earlier generations of the donors’ families had relied on enslaved Africans as farm laborers and household workers.

"The settlers’ personal wealth grew and was passed on to their heirs," the working group wrote in a litany that has been read at Sunday services each week this month.

And it was the heirs who donated the stained-glass windows.

"Our thinking is this is where a lot of the wealth of the church came from," said Margaret Kearney, a co-chairwoman of the church's Reconciliation and Racial Justice working group. "The windows were a very visible, tangible manifestation of it."

After reading wills and property records going back to the 17th century, the working group has recognized more than 430 enslaved people who had been held by ancestors of the donors.

As its name suggests, the church was one of the first in New York City, established in 1654 by Peter Stuyvesant, New York's Dutch governor at the time. When it moved to Park Slope, the windows came from Tiffany Studios and from the stained-glass artists William Willet and Otto Heinigke.

Thirteen decades later, the working group said its task was "to unlearn a long practice of forgetting," a practice it said had started with colonial-era families who willed slaves from generation to generation, "forgetting their humanity in order to enslave them." The families had farms and other holdings in upstate New York.

Jane Barber, also a co-chairwoman of the working group, said that as far as church leaders know, no descendants of the slaveholders are still involved with Old First.

New York had abolished slavery in 1827 under a law that had been passed 10 years earlier. By some accounts 4,600 men and women were freed, or about 11 percent of the Black population in New York. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, in "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898," noted that "slavery's grip had lasted longest in outlying farm country; as late as 1820 slaves constituted one-sixth of the population of the agricultural communities" in Brooklyn.

The research by the working group led to some painful specifics about ancestors of donors. For the "Rest Window," in a front corner of the sanctuary, the committee identified 16 slaveholders over six generations of the two donor families.

One of the 16 was a man named Samuel Salisbury, who was angry that an indentured servant had gone dancing at a neighboring farm — so angry that he tied her to a horse to lead her home. Along the way, something spooked the horse, throwing Salisbury out of the saddle. The horse galloped away, dragging and killing the indentured servant. Salisbury was convicted of murder and was sentenced to hang, but the court said the sentence was not to be carried out until he was 99. He died, in 1801, at 87. Barber said that in accounts she had read, Salisbury's descendants denied the story.

Barber said it was "edifying" for people who had not grown up in Brooklyn to understand that slavery had existed in New York. "So many people in the congregation were surprised, as I was, when I moved to New York," she said, "so the history's new to us. People wondered ‘What kind of a church did I join?’ ‘Who were the people who built the church?’"

Weather

Expect a breezy, mostly sunny day with temperatures around the mid-40s. The evening is mostly clear, with lows around the low 20s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until March 7 (Purim).

Saipov trial: The jury in the death penalty case of Sayfullo Saipov, convicted last month of killing eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan, heard from more than 20 witnesses before the prosecution rested its case.

Alligator found in Brooklyn: An alligator rescued from Prospect Park Lake on Sunday had swallowed a bathtub stopper, the Bronx Zoo said, calling the alligator too "weak and unresponsive" to eat on its own.

Neo-Nazi demonstration outside Broadway theater: The producers and star of "Parade," a Broadway musical about an antisemitic lynching in Georgia a century ago, condemned a small neo-Nazi demonstration that took place outside the show's first preview performance.

The diner, redux: A Times editor looked at new (and sometimes old) restaurants that are breathing life into the diner as we know it.

What we’re watching: Metro reporter Jeffery C. Mays will discuss progressives in the city and how Mayor Eric Adams is doing as mayor on "The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts." The show airs on Friday at 5 p.m., Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. [CUNY TV]

Most accounts of what happened over two days in November begin the same way: A prisoner was ordered to strip to his shorts and carry his mattress out to be scanned for contraband. The prisoner was then directed to return to his cell and face the back wall, with his hands touching the wall above his head.

Then the beatings began, according to affidavits in a lawsuit filed against New York State by 26 inmates at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison where the November episode unfolded. At least seven prisoners were sent to the hospital and more than 20 others were treated in a medical unit.

The inmates described abuse by special teams of correctional officers who, with officers from Sing Sing, converged on cells. The affidavits say the officers punched and kicked the inmates and slammed their heads against walls or floors. One prisoner said he was blinded for days after he was pepper-sprayed after being handcuffed.

"Every part of my body was burning, like nothing I ever experienced," the prisoner, Vincent Poliandro, said in his account.

My colleague Benjamin Weiser writes that the allegations were buttressed by hospital records and a separate interview with Shamel Capers, a former inmate at Sing Sing. He is not part of the lawsuit but gave a firsthand account of violence in the days just before he was released.

Other prisoners said they were accused of disobeying orders even though they say they had not resisted. One inmate, Aaron Jackson, said he stripped and faced the wall as directed. "I complied. I said nothing," he said.

Officers then began punching his head, back and genitals. "It felt like they were all trying to get blows in," he said. "They kept saying, ‘Stop resisting’ and ‘This is our house.’"

Later, as he was led in handcuffs to the medical unit, officers from a special Corrections Emergency Response Team "took turns" punching and kicking him, he said.

Bruce Barket, a lawyer whose firm filed the lawsuit in the State Court of Claims, said it reported the allegations to the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which he said was investigating along with the F.B.I. He said that federal investigators have interviewed at least seven prisoners represented by the firm.

"This was nothing short of a planned attack on incarcerated men by correction officers," Barket said. "Worse, it was approved of and overseen by high-ranking officials in the prison."

The U.S. attorney's office and the F.B.I. declined to comment on the investigation.

Thomas Mailey, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prisons, said in a statement that the agency cooperates with all investigations, but does not comment "to ensure the integrity of those investigations."

The department said it has 21 Corrections Emergency Response Teams that are based in prisons around the state, and that conduct facility searches, among other assignments. Many of the officers who participated in the episode at Sing Sing wore black tactical gear with visors, according to the affidavits and Capers.

A spokesman for the state corrections officers’ union said the organization had no comment.

METROPOLITAN diary

Dear Diary:

Rememberinga certain kind of love,The typeThat's precise,Clear cut like the new buds of spring,Only a grandmother could bringIt to the table,A memory that comes unexpected,Like a hot wind through the canyons,Still,When I touch the bracelet she bought meMany moons ago,A rhinestoneFrom a dime store on Broadway,It sparklesLike a moonbeam over the Hudson,And moves mountains.

— Kathryn Anne Sweeney-James

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.

P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist who writes the New York Today newsletter. In 2020 and 2021, he wrote the Coronavirus Update column, part of coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. He is the author of two books and was the editor of "The New York Times Book of New York."

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