Remember the Robert E. Lee window in Boise? A new historic figure just replaced him
Leontine Kelly raised her children a few streets away from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, once the capital city of the Confederacy. Lining Monument Avenue were enormous memorials to Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson.
Kelly had no idea, passing by the statue of Robert E. Lee riding a horse, that someday an image of him would be taken down and replaced with one of her.
All the Monument Avenue confederate monuments were removed over the last two years. The statue of Lee, former commander of the Confederate Army, was the last one standing. It was removed on Sept. 8.
On the other side of the country, residents of Boise recently reckoned with their own object honoring Lee. The Cathedral of the Rockies First United Methodist Church had a stained glass featuring the general standing with Presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington that was put up in 1960. It was taken down in August 2020.
“We voted to remove it, not knowing whom we would put in the window, but we would figure out something to represent,” Duane Anders, senior pastor, told the Idaho Statesman. “... So for a year and a half the windows have been clear. In a sense, we let some light in.”
On Tuesday, that window was finally replaced with a new person: Kelly, the first Black woman — and second woman ever — to be selected as a Methodist bishop. The ceremony in which she was chosen was held in the Cathedral of the Rockies in 1984.
Anders said the hunt for the next figure to be honored started with about 50 names submitted by the congregation.
“As we started working through the names, one just kept rising to the top, because of our connection to the person and their connection to Boise,” Anders said. “And that’s Bishop Leontine Kelly.”
The window was made for $25,591 by the Minnesota stained glass studio Willet Hauser Architectural Glass and was bought through the church’s endowment fund.
Kelly died in 2012. Her daughter, Angella Current Felder, didn’t want to presume what her mother would have said about the new window. But she had no such reservations about sharing her own thoughts.
“The Lord finally got it right,” she said with a laugh in a phone interview with the Idaho Statesman. “He straightened it out.”
The day Kelly was elected in Boise was a historic one. Current Felder flew down at the last minute for the ceremony. She recalls the Cathedral of the Rockies “filled to the brim” and “buzzing with excitement.” Current Felder wore a lei of orchids and a purple Nigerian dress meant to be “symbolic of the presence of the ancestors.” She later included this moment in her book about her mother “Breaking Barriers: An African-American Family and the Methodist Story.”
“Some people were saying it can’t happen, it’s not going to happen,” Current Felder recalled. “So the fact that it happened, for those of us who recognize and believe in the Holy Spirit, it was divinely guided.”
Kelly wasn’t the only history-maker that day. The first Japanese-American bishop, Roy Sano, and the first Hispanic bishop, Elias G. Galvan, were elected as well. Both bishops’ names are included in the window, along with a small image of Martin Luther King Jr.
Kelly served the San Francisco Episcopal Area until her retirement in 1992. According to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, as the bishop of the California-Nevada Annual Conference and president of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops, Kelly was the “chief administrative officer and spiritual leader of more than 100,000 United Methodists in California and Nevada.”
Born March 5, 1920, Kelly was at other times a teacher, professor and social activist. She first became a church leader when her husband, Methodist minister James David Kelly, died in 1969. Kelly was one of the only college-educated people in the Edwardsville, Virginia community, according to her son John Current, and the congregation asked her to step into the role in his place.
“What she inherited there was a wooden church that had been built 100 years earlier, probably right around the time of the emancipation of the slaves, and a hole that had been dug for a new foundation for a new church,” Current said. “She, confronted with ‘Where do I go from here?’ responded, ‘God.’”
As she rose through the ranks of church leadership, Kelly was firm in her belief that she belonged there.
“We must recognize the kind of culture in which Jesus and his disciples lived,” she told USA Today in 1989. “It was a very male-dominated culture. However, Jesus did violate the customs of the culture in that he talked with women, shared with women. Women were part of the entourage of Jesus Christ. God calls whomever God would call.”
Her children hope to travel to see the window someday. Current followed in his mother’s footsteps and serves as senior pastor at the Hope United Methodist Church in San Francisco.
“Her life is a culmination of many generations in the Methodist Church,” Current said. “She was a daughter of a Methodist pastor, sister of a Methodist pastor, she married a Methodist pastor and she’s the mother of Methodist pastors. That’s a unique legacy, and we’re honored to see her memory in stained glass.”
The Lee window will be preserved in the Idaho Black History Museum and used as an educational tool. Museum Director Phillip Thompson hopes it will get people asking questions, such as why the window was first erected, and why it stayed up for so long. The move, said Thompson, is an “example of a community resolving an issue without having to destroy.”
The Idaho Statesman reported last year that a committee investigating the origins of the window discovered that then-pastor Herbert E. Richards likely had helped choose the image of Lee with Lincoln to promote a spirit of reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners living in Idaho.
Thompson pointed out that the museum is housed in a former church. In some ways, the item has come full circle: it will still be symbol of the past and reconciliation, but the things being remembered and reconciled are different.
Sally Krutzig is a breaking news and general assignment reporter at the Idaho Statesman. Have a story suggestion or a question? Email Krutzig at skrutzig@idahostatesman.com.
This story was originally published December 11, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
