James Theodore Holly
| James Holly | |
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Bishop Jack Holly
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| Born | James Theodore Holly October 3, 1829 Washington, D.C., U.S.A. |
| Died | March 13, 1911 (aged 81) Port-au-Prince, Haiti Interred at St. Vincent's Home, Port-au-Prince |
| Venerated in | Episcopal Church (USA) |
| Feast | 13 March |
James Theodore Augustus Holly (born in Washington, D.C., 3 October 1829; died in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 13 March 1911) was the first African-American bishop in the Protestant Episcopal church, and spent most of his episcopal career as missionary bishop of Haiti.
His parents were freed slaves of African descent and his mother was Roman Catholic. Holly was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and attended public and private schools. When he was 14, he moved with his parents to Brooklyn, New York, and his father taught him to be a shoemaker. While in the national capital and New York City, Holly met several prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and by 1848 was working with Lewis Tappan. In 1850, he and his brother Joseph opened their own bootmaking shop.
In 1851 Holly married his wife Charlotte and also withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church because it refused to ordain black priests locally. They joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. The young family soon moved to Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit, where Holly helped Henry Bibb as associate editor of The Voice of the Fugitive, a weekly paper. Holly helped organize the Amherstburg Convention of free blacks in Canada. In 1854, Holly returned to the United States to become principal of a public school in Buffalo, New York.
He also attended the first National Emigration Convention in Cleveland that year as an Episcopalian, and became a commissioner of the National Emigration Board. Afterward, Holly traveled to Haiti for the first time, to explore possible emigration options there for free blacks. Holly knew that the American Colonization Society had helped 6000 African Americans to emigrate to Haiti beginning in 1824, but that many had returned because of harsh conditions on the island. Holly believed that free blacks could avoid rampant discrimination by emigrating to Haiti, which had thrown off its colonial rulers, as well as that such emigration would help stabilize the society on the island of Hispaniola, which had experienced many coups. Although he many times requested a commission from the Board of Missions of the Episcopal Church to serve in Haiti, each was denied.
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