Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the A.M.E. Church

Race Patriotism Race Patriotism Protest and Print Culture in the AME Church Julius H. Bailey The University of Tennessee Press Knoxville o Copyright © 2012 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. Frontispiece: The Christian Recorder masthead. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bailey, Julius. Race patriotism: protest and print culture in the AME Church / Julius H. Bailey. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. eISBN-13: 978-1-57233-880-7 eISBN-10: 1-57233-880-6 1. African Methodist Episcopal Church—History. 2. African Methodist Episcopal Church—Publishing. 3. African Americans—Race identity. 4. Blacks—Race identity—United States. 5. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 6. Christian literature—Publishing—United States—History. I. Title. BX8443.B35 2012 287'.83—dc23 2011041679 To Jayden and Aleah Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Chapter 1. Public Protest and the Emergent Black Religious Press 1 Chapter 2. The Christian Recorder and the Cultivation of a Reading Culture 19 Chapter 3. Western Zions 39 Chapter 4. Should “African” Remain in Our Title? 63 Chapter 5. The Rhetoric of African Emigration 83 Conclusion 111 Notes 115 Bibliography 131 Index 147 Acknowledgments The idea for this book has been nurtured through a series of conversations with generous colleagues over a number of years. It was at the NEH Sum- mer Seminar, “Roots: African Dimensions of the Early History and Cul- tures of the Americas,” at the University of Virginia where I was drawn to the connections between Africa and the early AME Church. My fellow par- ticipants in the Young Scholars of American Religion program read early chapter drafts and provided thoughtful suggestions. Judith Weisenfeld and John Corrigan emerged from the seminar as invaluable mentors in my pro- fessional growth. Laurie Maffly-Kipp has remained a caring and dedicated advisor long after my graduate-school days. Keith Naylor at Occidental College, who was a central reason for my becoming a religious studies major, is still my academic role model. An American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant and fund- ing from the University of Redlands made this project possible. I am grateful for my colleagues at the University of Redlands—Fran Grace, Karen Derris, Bill Huntley, Emily Culpepper, John Walsh, and Lillian Larsen—and their constant support. I am thankful for the love and encouragement of my fam- ily. To the lights of my life, my son Jayden and my daughter Aleah, this book is dedicated to you. Introduction On June 21, 1883, Henry McNeal Turner wrote an article titled “The Afri- can Question Again” for the Christian Recorder, the official denominational newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which he assessed not only the state of the African emigration movement but also the nature of African Americans in America. “The whole tendency of our ignoble status in this country is to develop in the Negro mean, sordid, selfish, treacher- ous, deceitful and cranksided characteristics,” he declared. “There is not much real manhood though far more learning and general intelligence, I grant, but far less race patriotism, and wherever race patriotism does not exist among a people treachery in its worst form does.”1 In this brief state- ment, Turner voiced the nature of slavery and discrimination and what that legacy might mean for the future of African Americans, which turned on and culminated in what he referred to as “race patriotism.” Turner’s word choice is revealing. For race does not simply entail shared physical features; rather, in his estimation, conditions and treatment in America could foster certain characteristics and, in some cases, stunt cultural and moral traits in individuals that would directly affect their behavior in the world. In other words, historical moments in the black past influence one’s present world- view. Even further, Turner invoked a “patriotism” that asserts an affinity for a particular homeland, nation, and place. Who African Americans were, are, and will be in the future, Turner suggested, pivots around who they un- derstand their people to be and the spatial location to which they are loyal. Yet Turner ascribed a coherence and self-evidence to issues that had been debated from the inception of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination as leaders and laity publicly sorted through the varied options that were believed to weigh heavily upon and impact the future trajectory of the church and race. He utilized many of the rhetorical tropes that stretch back to the earliest American protest pamphlets and continue throughout the formation of a formal black press. Most prominent among these is the invocation of the past to substantiate claims and portend the future. This his- toricization process would be repeated time and again, from the reframing of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia by the early denominational founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, to the varied renderings of the exodus from St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, to the mean- ing of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Many of these explicit arguments were undergirded by sometimes subtle and often unarticulated assumptions about place that also figured into assessments of an author’s racial and religious authority to speak for African Americans—or as Turner cast it, “race patriotism.” This book examines AME print culture and the ways leaders and laity protested and constructed historical narratives around varied spatial loca- tions to sway public opinion on key social issues. I use the term “protest” in two interconnected ways. The first examines the ways literature has been employed to express dissent and disapproval and often offer a corrective to erroneous assumptions and representations of particular African American constituencies. The second concerns efforts to proactively persuade through earnest, passionate, and sometimes solemn declarations and assertions of truth. The inclusion of the latter component is important, for too often protest in African American religious history is framed as solely a response to injustice or as reactive to discriminatory practices. The type of historical writing that took place in the AME tradition and in African American communities more broadly were active affirmations of black self-worth and achievement; they were confident prognostications that were not subject to or always catalyzed by external renderings of the race. Although the editorials and articles that appeared in the black press are not often categorized as historical writing, the AME Christian Recorder functioned as a type of ongoing multivocal communal narrative whose for- mat lent itself to the types of heated debates that took place in its pages and the wide range of topics whose terms and stakes were constantly shifting throughout the nineteenth century. Denominational historians, through the continual process of retelling and asserting an orthodoxy about a shared religious past, employed the genre for particular activist purposes that sought to have an impact on black behavior and attitudes. Each chapter in this book examines the diverse but interrelated ways AME leaders, laity, and interested observers, drawing upon this burgeoning black religious public sphere, crafted historical formulations that addressed contemporary con- xii Introduction cerns and shaped the perception of locales offered as viable options to hold the future of the race and denomination. This rhetorical strategy was particularly apt for an AME tradition built around the compelling lore surrounding leaders such as Richard Allen and pivotal events such as the departure from St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787, which catalyzed the formation of the new denomination. Few narratives as dramatically demonstrate the exodus of African Americans from white denominations in the early nineteenth century as the founding of the AME Church. In November 1787, St. George’s was undergoing renovation. During the construction, the location of the segregated areas designated for African American congregants kept chang- ing. On one particular morning, some black members inadvertently sat too close to the white section and were pulled up off of their knees during the worship service and prevented from even finishing their prayers before being escorted toward the “Negro pews.” This was the final indignation. Richard Allen, who would become the denomination’s first bishop, wrote in his jour- nal that “we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.”2 This group of African Americans, led by Allen, left St. George’s determined to begin their own denomination. The event lent itself to the triumphant historical interpretations that dominated AME histories as it was repeatedly invoked as exemplifying an immediate response to injustice and as a harbinger of ever-increasing black autonomy in the face of white oppression. Yet despite the invocation of the dramatic walkout of St. George’s as a sym- bolic departure from white Christianity, the future of the AME denomination would be intricately interwoven with the Methodist Episcopal (ME) denomination for years to come. Far from rejecting their white brethren, Allen strove to fashion a working relationship within the broader ME con- nection. Disputes over property ownership, membership requirements, and leadership positions caused tension and led to some inventive efforts to stem the movement toward separation. ME Church leaders and congregants filed lawsuits, opened an alternative African American church, and denied or de- manded large sums of money to offer communion to AME members. Despite these tactics, in Philadelphia Mother Bethel Church’s membership in 1813 has been estimated at thirteen hundred. Two years later, the relationship had grown so testy that a white minister was physically prevented from speaking from the pulpit. The preacher filed a writ of mandamus, which reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

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