Soon after she became the first Black female vicar in the Church of England in the 80s, the Rev Eve Pitts walked into a bar. She had finished theological college at the Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham and had just received her first posting, in Bartley Green, Birmingham. The area was notoriously unwelcoming to minorities, with a strong far-right presence (in 2019, a neo-Nazi living in Bartley Green was jailed for three years under the Terrorism Act). When Pitts took up her post at Saint Michael and All Angels’ church, in 1987, she remembers seeing graffiti with “‘National Front’, ‘niggers go home’, all over the place”.
Her training vicar was worried enough to advise Pitts against going into the local pub. Looking back, Pitts laughs, “he obviously didn’t know me!” Instead, one night the young, diminutive Pitts walked in, past men who looked like “archetypal” neo-Nazis, with “tattoos all over their hands”, marched up to the bar and asked: “So, who’s going to buy me a drink, then?”
Meeting Pitts, it comes as no surprise that there was a rush to take her up on the offer; she exudes a no-nonsense authority that makes it clear it is best not to confront her. Pitts remembers her three years there fondly and says she still gets calls from the relatives of former parishioners, asking her to lead funerals, more than 20 years later.
Becoming the first Black female vicar in the Church of England was a mixed experience, she says. It was exciting, but difficult being a Black woman in such a white church. “I felt like a trophy; it was bit like: ‘Wink, wink, we’ve got one now,’” she says. At her next stop, Saint Nicolas’ church, 15 minutes away in Kings Norton, Pitts met the full force of institutional racism – and made national news.
Pitts says she was constantly marginalised because of her race and gender. In 1997, she delivered a sermon denouncing fellow clergy for ignoring and sidelining her. As a result, she was asked to resign by the then bishop of Birmingham. It was, she says, a “hellish experience of being treated as ‘less than’ because I stood up for myself. When you are in an institution that is so powerful and you are experiencing racism, it is very difficult to stand up alone, and very lonely. Walking into a shop and seeing my face on all the broadsheets was not much fun.”
She briefly considered quitting the church to pursue her former ambition of being an opera singer, but the high-profile confrontation ended when she was sent to a nearby church, Immanuel Highters Heath. It had no money and desperately needed to be rebuilt. Pitts believes that “they sent me to Immanuel to die, to wither up” – but if that was the intention, the diocese underestimated her.
Instead, over more than a decade, Pitts completed a refurbishment that cost more than £200,000. Immanuel church was a modern building, so no help could be provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund or other agencies. Instead, Pitts started doing sponsored activities – including sleeping on the church roof. There was a 13-day walk to Canterbury, too, which raised £25,000. It was a tough fight, but her eyes light up as she remembers how she “loved the challenge”.
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Pitts was born in Jamaica. Her mother, Kathleen Sewell, was not “overly Godly”, but Pitts was a deeply spiritual child and visited different churches. By the time she was seven, she was teaching in Sunday school. She remembers her aunt commenting: “She going to go far … God has called her.”
But a career in the church was not a certainty – because, “as a Black woman, knowing something about the history of our people”, she struggled to reconcile “how faith has been used to control our minds”. From a very early age, she believed Christianity had been used to put Black people into “new chains”. On plantations, for instance, reading was strictly prohibited and a brand of Christianity rooted in white supremacy was the only “education” that enslaved people received.
Even today, she says, this legacy means she refuses to touch on hell and damnation in her sermons, believing “Black people are terrified enough”. She has, she says, “sat through too many sermons over the years that, by the time you’ve come out, you’ve been totally damaged by this God who is going to punish you. I see the fear in our people. Sometimes, you can touch it, you feel it in your bones.”
Pitts is also critical of what she sees as the “colonisation of the image of God”; how, over hundreds of years, images showed Jesus as white with blond hair and blue eyes and how whiteness and godliness were promoted explicitly as synonymous. She believes this has done “deep damage to the people who don’t look like that image”. I am interviewing Pitts in a church hall surrounded by stained glass representations of that very image. Pitts says that, when children ask her if the images are of Jesus, she replies: “No, they are just a picture.”
After her mother died, one of Pitt’s first acts was to go to her mother’s house and burn the image of a white Jesus that hung in pride of place in the living room. It is a battle, she believes, against “cultural annihilation” – and one she is not willing to abandon, whatever the stakes: “If going to heaven means I must concede that I am inferior, then I think I’ll give heaven a miss.” To those who think that the image of Christ is not an issue, she responds: “If it doesn’t matter what colour Jesus is, then let them paint him black.”
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Pitts’ parents moved to England in 1956, where her father, Stanley Sewell, worked in a chemical plant in Nottingham. Pitts remained in Jamaica to attend boarding school. A few years later, aged only 35, her father died. Pitts explains that “Black people were not given protection and left to breathe in the fumes”. Her father was not the only one of his colleagues to die from throat cancer. His death meant that Pitts had to leave Jamaica at 12 and join her mother in England.
The contrast between the private school “training us to be little English girls” and the “rough comprehensive” she attended in England could not have been sharper. Pitts remembering it as a “terrible shock to the system, which I still think I haven’t recovered from”. She hated the process of what she called “Black miseducation” – being taught just enough to know her place in society. Pitts felt she was being trained to take on menial tasks and discouraged from believing she could aim for success. Refusing to accept this, she spent her Saturday mornings reading in the local library.
At the age of 17, she joined the Black People’s Freedom Movement in Nottingham, where she found “learned Black men and women” who exposed her to books by activists such as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and George Jackson. Her mother was not happy; Pitts jokes that she might have preferred books on sex education to Malcolm X.
Before receiving her church calling, Pitts worked for the civil service in Nottingham (where she met her husband of 41 years, Anthony Pitts). She remembers with pride being “one of the first Black women in Nottingham to work in an office”. It was so rare that “Black men would come outside and wait for me, just to be seen with me”.
As one of the few Black female clergy in the Church of England, Pitts finds herself in a similar position now: a figure of representation on the outside, battling the institution on the inside. So why she has stayed in the Anglican communion? Racism has led to Black people setting up their own churches; indeed, Sunday mornings can be one of the most segregated times of the week.
But she says having a church led by someone who looks like her is no solution: the emphasis on hellfire, damnation and using whiteness as a synonym for holiness can be even more overwhelming in Black-led churches. She remembers being thrown out of a Pentecostal church at 13 for questioning the pastor. In the Church of England, “I can stand up and say this and not be condemned. They may not like it, but duplicity will not allow them to say anything.”
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For the past 10 years, Pitts has been leading the Holy Trinity church in Birchfield, Birmingham, her first majority Black congregation. Holy Trinity sits at crossroads, directly opposite a mosque. Walking towards it, the flyover in the background looks like a bridge between the two buildings – and feels symbolic of the area’s diversity. This is an inner-city ward where 90% of the population come from an ethnic minority. It has witnessed its share of turmoil and change. A stone’s throw away, the drive-by shootings of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in 2003 rocked the city; there were also the Lozells riots, sparked by conflict between African-Caribbean and Pakistani communities in 2005.
Pitts chose to move to the church in 2010, to the surprise of some of her former congregants; they still get in touch to ask if she is OK because they “assume it is unsafe”. She remembers a young person in the neighbourhood telling her they couldn’t believe she chose to live in the area. But she feels it is a privilege to serve “forgotten people of this neighbourhood” and spends her time in local takeaways, barbers and bookies, listening. Pitts, who has two sons and a daughter, gave her son her car because she prefers riding the bus to truly experience the city.
For six years, Pitts has been holding an “ancestors arise” ceremony in honour of those killed through the slavery and imperialism known as the African holocaust, or the Maafa. I first witnessed this in 2018. The church was packed, with people in the street trying to squeeze in. On entry, we were greeted by Rastafarians, red, gold and green and reggae music. To hushed silence, Pitts and others entered in shackles.
Pitts says she was inspired to hold the service “because enslaved people, dragged out of Africa, were not given dignity. I knew in my heart that, if people die in such terrible circumstances, then it is not possible for them to be at peace.”
The first time she held the service, she was worried, because the idea of honouring the ancestors was “very alien” to her congregation; many of them said that “we mustn’t deal with the dead” and should leave the past behind. But Pitts says she is as much inspired by African spiritual traditions as Christian ones, keenly pointing out the two images of sankofa birds in the church. This is an Adinkra symbol, depicting a bird looking forward and backwards, from the Akan tradition of Ghana. “In order for us to move forward, we have to look backward, however painful it may be,” says Pitts.
Despite her fears, the first service was packed with more than 800 people, drawn from across the Black community. Pitts remembers that she saw “Rasta men cry and felt as if God approved”. The service is almost wholly secular. Only a few from her congregation went to the first one, but one lady who did come thanked her, saying: “For the first time, me feel truly Black.”
Black Lives Matter, she believes, has been a breath of fresh air – like coming out of “this secret hole, to my generation who have lived with racism within the confines of the church”. With racism finally getting national attention, Pitts is pushing the church to recognise that its past means it carries an extra burden to address issues of racism. The Anglican church not only provided the propaganda for slavery, but as an institution received slave-owner compensation in 1833, as well as money given to a number of individual clergy.
She is petitioning the archbishop of Canterbury to recognise 1 August – the date the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force the following year – as ancestors’ day, in honour of those enslaved Africans, and has the blessing of the bishop of Birmingham to visit every slave port in Britain to pay respects to the dead. On these visits, she wades into the water and says prayers for the souls lost to the barbarity of transatlantic slavery.
But she gets annoyed when asked what the church should do to battle a “monster” she did not create, insisting that “none of us, Black people, Black Anglicans – whether you are lay or ordained – are here to clear up the mess of racism within the border of Anglican communion”. She is “hoping Black priests coming will not experience the kind of destructive, racist, silent abuse as I have and find a church that is more politically mature and honest”. But Pitts is not holding her breath.
Nonetheless, she remains hopeful that society is “becoming mature [and] embracing its history in all its ugliness”. We have, she says, inherited “the consequences and privileges of slavery, so we are in this together”.
