A stained-glass church window that portrays a brown-skinned Jesus Christ and several women from a New Testament scene in the Bible has raised questions about Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade, the Associated Press reports.

First installed at the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Warren in 1878, the window is believed to be one of the oldest stained-glass depictions of  Christ as a person of color in the country.

Measured at 12-foot tall, and 5-foot wide, one image depicts Christ speaking with Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus which is found in the Gospel of Luke. The other image shows Christ speaking to the woman at the well in Samaria, a story from the Gospel of John.

Virginia Raguin, a professor of humanities emerita at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and a leading authority on stained-glass art spoke about the rareness of the imagery.

“This window is unique and highly unusual,” Raguin said. “I have never seen this iconography for that time.”

“To me, being of African American and Native American heritage, I think that it could represent both people,” added Linda A’Vant-Deishinni, the former executive director of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. “The first time I saw it, it just kind of just blew me away.”

Created by Henry E. Sharp in New York, the window had been forgotten until recently when Hadley Arnold and her family purchased the church building.

In 2020, Arnold removed the four stained-glass windows to replace them with clear glass. During the process, she discovered that images were of brown-skin people.

“The skin tones were nothing like the white Christ you usually see,” Arnold recalled.

While have offered many reasons why the images are painted dark brown, Mary P. Carr, the woman who commissioned the window in memory of her two aunts, Mrs. H. Gibbs and Mrs. R. B. DeWolf, who both married into families that profited from the slave trade.

The DeWolf family accrued their wealth as one of the country’s leading slave-trading families. Eventually,  Gibbs married a sea captain who was employed by the DeWolfs. Additionally, the American Colonization Society, a controversial program established to send slaves to Liberia in Africa as an alternative to emancipation in the U.S. Black Americans overwhelmingly rejected the formation and the purpose of the ACS.

Victoria Johnson, who was the first Black woman named principal of a Rhode Island high school, argues that images in the window are Black.

“When I see it, I see Black,” Johnson explained. “It was created in an era when at a white church in the North, the only people of color they knew were Black.”

Arnold hopes that the window could be housed in a college or institution where they could be on public display.

“I think this belongs in the public trust,” she said. “I don’t believe that it was ever intended to be a privately owned object.”