African American artifacts from antebellum Baltimore are extremely rare. Bringing this tapestry back to Baltimore for the 200th jubilee of the city's St. James Episcopal Church was a multiyear undertaking led by JHU Professor Lawrence Jackson. The sampler—a handsewn gift from the founder of the first Black Episcopal church below the Mason-Dixon Line to the lawyer who donated the land—"could be the earliest or the oldest artifact that we know about," Jackson says. Its loan was coordinated through Inheritance Baltimore, a 3-year-old Hopkins program charged with "using the humanities to transform the relationship between Johns Hopkins University and Black Baltimore."
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