The American slave trade was integral to Rhode Island's early economy; between 60% and 90% of Rhode Islanders were connected to the Colonial and Post-Colonial American slave trade as ship builders and crew, insurers, and financiers. State residents were also involved in more indirect ways, including as iron and firearms manufacturers and farmers and food producers in South County. Rhode Island sat at the center of New England's power in the business of international slave trading. Slavery is thus at the core of Rhode Island's founding story. The Cathedral of St. John, which sits on a contained but expansive campus on North Main Street, offers a similar narrative.
I can spot the tip of the stone cathedral's clock tower from Benefit Street, and it grows before me as I walk the winding brick paths down the hill, through the cemetery. Though the exterior of the building appears indestructible, the interior tells a story of gradual decline. The ceilings and columns in the vestibule are dripping with peeling white and blue paint. Inside the church, massive white tarps cover the pews and I spot a web of cracks along the right base of the dome overhead. Upstairs, I am instructed not to enter the side chapel, or risk being struck by a three-inch-thick chunk of crumbling ceiling. Missing swaths of plaster on the walls expose the building's wooden frame in the former Sunday school rooms.
The Cathedral of St. John has not functioned as a church since closing its doors in 2012. Several community organizations now operate within the church's deteriorating walls and next-door in the Diocese, including The Center for Reconciliation. Elon Cook is The Center's Program Director and Curator. In partnership with the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island, which owns the Cathedral, Cook and her organization have a vision to equip Rhode Islanders with a safe space for community dialogues around American histories of race and slavery.
The Center for Reconciliation bases much of its programming on the complexity inherent to the history of race in the United States. The Cathedral of St. John itself embodies those layers of narratives, rendering the church an ideal permanent home for The Center. The congregation of the church first organized in 1722 within a wooden structure much smaller than today's grand, stone Cathedral. The present building was completed in 1811 and consecrated as a Cathedral in 1929. From the church's founding through the Civil War, the building and congregation grew in part through their connections to slavery. An enslaved man who was owned by a Senior Warden of the church is believed to have been foreman during the construction of Brown University's University Hall. Additionally, members of the Chace family, who worked for and worshiped at the church, were slave-owners. They are buried next to the church's side doors, while the names of three of their female slaves are listed on a headstone erected on the periphery of the Colonial Era cemetery.
The legacy of these histories is what The Center for Reconciliation has already begun to engage. As they work with the Diocese to renovate and restore the Cathedral of St. John, The Center is also planning to further expand its capacity to engage the public in discourse around racial reconciliation. In the musty, community basement space of the Cathedral, Cook says permanent exhibitions exploring the history of slavery in Rhode Island will soon replace the temporary exhibit that currently inhabits it. As a "flexible" space, the room will also be equipped with infrastructure for community conversations, film events, theater productions, and more. This multifunctional character of the space is part of what Cook hopes will set this museum apart from others in the country.
The idea, Cook explains, is that "the whole building will become a center for reconciliation. There will be several different programs living in this space and we will be one of the main ones…The Center for Reconciliation." The Episcopal Diocese is still considering which organizations will join The Center in the Cathedral, but they may include theater, art, or youth-centered organizations. A diversity of areas of expertise will enable the chosen organizations to collaborate on building dialogue around race and reconciliation.
Without forcing an analogy, there is a useful correspondence between the repairs being made to restore the Cathedral and the healing dialogues around racial reconciliation that the Center is working to establish. "Anytime you have a house, and no one's living in it, it falls apart," says Cook, referring to the structural and cosmetic disrepair of the building (Hard Hat Area signs are posted outside most rooms). At the same time, Cook explains that local community members – teachers, church leaders, office managers – frequently approach the Center looking for programs to help them engage in or facilitate conversations around the challenging topic of race.
"People don't feel comfortable talking to other people [right now], because they're afraid that if they bring [race] up that other people will get angry – that it will cause greater divisions." Cook says that people want a safe space in which to reconcile American histories of slavery, and in which to start to build an inclusive public dialogue around race in the 21st century. "Even though [conversations about race] are difficult, we recognize that they are very necessary and the reason they are so difficult is that we haven't been having them for so long." Discourse around these histories in both Rhode Island and the Cathedral are indeed overdue. The Center endeavors to become a resource to inform and expand public conversations around racial injustices of the past and present, and to provide a platform on which to build toward reconciliation for the future.
Custom rosettes have replaced the light bulbs that once circled the interior base of the Cathedral's dome.
Immerse yourself in The Center For Reconciliation's plans for the Cathedral's future.


text:
THE LAST WORD by TONY HAZELL: An immoral tax attack
By Tony Hazell for the Daily Mail
Updated: 17:49 EST, 3 August 2010
Men and women should be equal partners in marriage and deserve equal treatment and equal wealth in their old age. But our skewed pension system ensures that many elderly women are locked in poverty.
The Government has an opportunity to address this with its pension reforms, but instead is being steered by the Treasury's wish to raise money, rather than by fairness.
One contributor to the problem is private pensions, which pay out only until the husband dies, leaving the widow to eke out her remaining years on benefits.
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Through short-sightedness, selfishness, short-term greed or plain bad advice, many men buy single life annuities with their pension savings. These pay an income for as long as they live, but don't guarantee to pay an income to the widow.
The decision to abolish compulsory annuitisation offers an opportunity to rectify this problem. Investors will be able to draw an income directly from their pension savings.
But the Government has thrown a hefty and unnecessary spanner into the works. When the investor dies, 55 pc of the remaining fund will be snatched in tax before it can be inherited — this compares with a 35 pc charge now.
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What are these people thinking? It is still the case that the man will often have built the bigger pension and it will usually be his wife who inherits. Are these Treasury mandarins and Government ministers deliberately trying to force women into poverty?
My proposal is that there is a spousal exemption so husbands and wives can inherit the whole of each other's pension fund without this immoral tax charge. Once the second partner dies, then the remaining fund could be taxed at a slightly higher rate if necessary.
A spousal exemption would recognise that even today men have greater opportunities to build bigger pensions than women. And, crucially, it would help to prevent
women, who slog to raise children, work and care for parents, from being cast into poverty in their old age.
Villa killer
Wherever there is easy money to be made, some form of pond life will emerge to fleece unsuspecting consumers. The latest example is holiday villa scams infiltrating legitimate internet sites.
These cruel scammers hijack an entry offering a real villa or invent a property. The holidaymaker picks the villa, sends their money and knows nothing of the scam until they receive an email telling them they don't have a holiday or turn up to find the villa already occupied.
So what can be done? Obviously those running the sites must do everything
possible to make sure entries are legitimate — they are making money and must accept some responsibility for what appears there.
Unfortunately, this is another area where the travel and insurance industries and consumer law have not kept pace with our changing lifestyles. Consumer law assumes we all still buy package holidays.
As payments are usually made directly from our bank account to the villa owners without using debit cards or PayPal, there is no comeback on the banks.
Realistically, this may be a challenge for the insurance industry.
Travellers who use these sites are choosing to circumnavigate the travel industry in order to save money, so it is reasonable to expect to pay to insure the holiday.
There is a handful of independent traveller policies, but these don't appear to cover villa scams.
I'd happily pay a few pounds for a bolt-on to my insurance to cover against this and help with a last-minute rebooking - and I'd wager that many other families would, too.
Tax fiasco
When we're tardy with our tax, HMRC can levy punitive fines and charge interest. Yet the reverse doesn't apply when it owes us money. In exceptional circumstances, it will pay a bit of interest, but the vast majority of those owed tax rebates won't get a penny in recompense.
HMRC currently owes £3billion to us. These aren't cases where the taxpayer has been lazy and hasn't bothered to work out what they are owed. They are cases where people are chasing money that is theirs and HMRC is bungling the payments
— again.
This time the excuse is increased security to combat fraudsters. But it holds no water.
Banks do daily battle with fraudsters, but they don't make me wait months to withdraw money from my local cash machine.
The real problem at HMRC is that they have wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on a hopeless computer system whose prime objective is to snoop more deeply into our lives by gathering and collating ever more information.
If this system had simply been set up to do what we want it to do —collect due tax and return any overpaid — then we would not have suffered the recurring fiascos that have plagued us for the past year.
For many years, insurers have trotted out the same answer when asked about young drivers: 'If they take the Pass Plus course we will cut up to 35 pc off their premiums.'
They promised the Government they would cut premiums to those who took Pass Plus, and the Government relays the myth on its consumer internet site Directgov.
I've always been suspicious of this claim, so we decided to put it to the test by running some potential young driver scenarios on comparison websites.
Out of 150 companies, just one offered a discount for Pass Plus. This was in one case and the discount was insignificant.
Any 17-year-old driver wanting to cut insurance premiums would do far better to spend an afternoon shopping around on the internet than climbing into a car with an instructor to gain more experience.
That is an appalling reflection on the insurance industry, which appears to place no value on this course whatsoever.
They may moan about parents putting children on their insurance, but most consumers will feel they are being left with very little choice.
No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
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Nearly half of home-owning pensioners do not claim state benefits they are entitled to They could be missing out on nearly £1,200 per year
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