Saint of the Week: Anna Alexander
10/1/2025
Anna E. B. Alexander
1865 - 1947
Deaconess and Teacher
Anna Ellison Butler Alexander was the first African-American to be consecrated as a Deaconess in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, serving the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia for her entire career. Born to recently emancipated parents on St. Simons Island’s Butler plantation, her family soon moved to Pennick, (near Brunswick, GA) to take advantage of a land grant south of the Altamaha River previously held by poor whites. Her father became a carpenter-builder and a community leader. Anna first taught at Pennick’s public school, but moved to Darien, where her sister Mary had founded a school affiliated with St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church. In 1894, with the help of a Brunswick priest, Anna founded a mission in Pennick while still teaching at Darien during the week--a 40-mile round trip by boat and on foot. The mission faltered, though, when Anna accepted a position at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia. In 1897, however, she returned to Pennick and revitalized the mission. The congregation was renamed Church of the Good Shepherd and Anna started a school there. She supported herself as a seamstress and, by 1902, had saved enough money to buy property. There, her brother Charles and other men then erected a church. In 1907, at the 2nd annual meeting of the diocese’s “council of colored churchmen” at Good Shepherd, Bishop Cleland K. Nelson consecrated Anna as a deaconess. For the rest of her life, she worked in the Altamaha River area where she taught not only academics, but sound moral values! That same year, the Diocese of Georgia split and Bishop Nelson chose to associate with the new Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. Unfortunately, his successor in the Diocese of Georgia, Bishop Frederick Reese, excluded African-Americans from diocesan government and extended almost no diocesan financial support to black Episcopalians. This forced Alexander and others to make do with what they had and to seek support from outside the diocese, including the Episcopal Board of Missions. Anna continued to work in her hardscrabble community, whose members built the current wooden church building in 1928. When she died, she was initially buried at the cemetery at Camp Reese, a diocesan camp on St. Simon’s Island. In 2004, however, she was reinterred at Pennick’s Church of the Good Shepherd, the church she had founded and where she had worked for many years.
