Reverend William J. Alston
Third Rector (1863-1872)...

The Rev. William J. Alston was the 3rd rector of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. He holds the distinction of being the parish’s first rector who graduated from an Episcopal seminary and who was ordained to the transitional diaconate and then ordained to the priesthood. A free-born native North Carolinian, and a trained tailor, he became interested in the ministry through a church choral society. Alston attended a preparatory school in Chapel Hill, N.C. before enrolling in Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. After graduating from Oberlin he enrolled at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio founded for the purpose of educating Episcopal clergy. Alston was the only black student at Kenyon and his days were lonely but in 1859 he was ordained to the diaconate by the Rt. Rev. Charles Pettit McIlvaine the college’s president and the Bishop of Ohio. Bishop McIlvaine, ordained by Bishop William White, was a leader in the evangelical Anglo-Catholic Episcopal community, an abolitionist, and President Abraham Lincoln’s pro-Union envoy to England where he was credited with advancing pro-Union debate in the House of Commons.

Deacon Alston was ordained to the priesthood in 1860 in New York City by the Rt. Rev. Horatio Potter. Bishop Horatio Potter was the younger brother of the Rt. Rev. Alonzo Potter who as Bishop of Pennsylvania had used the weight of his episcopal office to try to help St. Thomas gain admission to diocesan convention. In response to President Lincoln’s declaration of September 26, 1861 as a “National Fast Day” Bishop Alonzo Potter declared “At no period of our history could such an observance be more proper. Our greatest sin is forgetfulness of God; our greatest peril presumptuous trust in our own wisdom and might.” Fr. Alston, then an assistant at St. Philip’s Church, New York, preached from Isaiah 58 “Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free.” He went on to say that slavery had left the nation “basely corrupted” and lamented that before the war, “our wealthy and influential citizens, in both sections of the country, with some honorable exceptions” coexisted too easily with slavery. He exhorted President Lincoln to free the slaves.

In 1863 Fr. Alston became the rector of St. Thomas. He experienced a near tragic incident in July 1864 that highlighted the immorality of Philadelphia’s streetcar racial segregation policy. One afternoon Fr. Alston had taken his sickly two-year old son, James, to the Delaware River to get fresh air. When the boy collapsed Alston, wearing clerical attire, tried to board a streetcar but the conductor physically forced Fr. Alston and little James from the car. They reached home and as the boy began to show signs of recovery Fr. Alston wrote a letter about the incident that was published in the Philadelphia Press. Fr. Alston addressed his letter “To the Christian Public” and challenged readers to reject policies that prohibited “respectable colored citizens” from using “public facilities” especially given that these citizens had relatives fighting in the Union Army and their churches – like St. Thomas – were assisting wounded soldiers. The “Alston incident” galvanized the black community and many fair-minded white Philadelphians. Meetings were organized and petitions were circulated but little changed until 1867 when Republican governor John W. Geary signed into law a bill championed by the Equal Rights League that outlawed racial segregation on streetcars. St. Thomas member Caroline Le Count – denied a seat on a car – forced a local magistrate to uphold the law. The passage of that law was largely the result of ingenious and aggressive organizing by Octavius V. Catto - Caroline’s fiancée - and a young vestryman in Fr. Alston’s church. Catto’s assassination in 1871 may have been a factor that led to Fr. Alston’s decision to return to New York in 1872 as the rector of St. Philip’s. The Rev. William J. Alston died in New York in 1874.