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Henry McNeal Turner and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were pioneers of the black social gospel, both as militant anti-lynching activists and within the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Turner paved the way for new abolition movements and organizations that he did not join, and Wells-Barnett had embattled relationships with them.

This chapter focuses on the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its meaning for free men and women in rural Maryland. Founded in 1816 by Reverend Richard Allen in collaboration with other African American Christians from across the Middle Atlantic states, the AME Church on the Eastern Shore expressed the values, culture, and experience of a distinct group of free African Americans while reinforcing their membership in a regional community. This chapter examines how the AME Church gained worship communities on the Eastern Shore through evangelism and how Methodism, along with Catholics and Quakers, contributed to the religious education of African Americans. It also considers the AME Church's denunciation of slavery and concludes with a discussion of the role played by the men and women who participated in rural prayer classes in propagating the AME mission.

Support of the Federalist Party and opposition to the Democratic‐Republicans afforded Lemuel Haynes his first engagement with a public sphere beyond church congregations and revival audiences. He supported Federalists George Washington and John Adams, both of whom had some reputation in the early republic as enemies of slaveholding. New Englanders Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, each man a president of Yale College, articulated a vision of blacks and whites united in a Christian postslavery society. This was a patrician vision that Haynes and black contemporaries like Richard Allen, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, found convincing insofar as it suggested that a class of social and religious leaders would act to protect black rights. However, Jeffersonian ideology spread even into western Vermont; in 1818, Haynes was dismissed from his pulpit because of his Federalism and his criticism of the War of 1812.

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.

This chapter opens with a detailed bibliographic study and publication history of the Recorder and a discussion of the broader history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church print culture. The chapter builds from this work to offer the fullest history available of the newspaper’s beginnings, its resurrection at the eve of the Civil War, and its structures and management during and just after the war. The chapter (re)introduces a crucial figure in both the African Methodist Episcopal Church hierarchy and the development of nineteenth-century Black periodical literature, Elisha Weaver, the driving force behind the paper’s 1861 resuscitation and its long-term survival. It places Weaver’s efforts, the paper’s growth, and important additional work by figures like Daniel Payne within the frames of larger narratives of national, racial, and church history and Black print culture studies.

This chapter on the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Levi Jenkins Coppin describes how ideas of race and racial, as well as regional, identity were generated and circulated around the Atlantic World at the turn of the twentieth century. It uses the writings and photographs of Coppin, a southerner who became the first AME Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, to demonstrate how conceptions of the Atlantic World and its constituent parts, including the American South, and its peoples were at some level created by acts of imagination as well as symbolic constructs enacted through textual and visual representations and misrepresentations, as well as through commercial, demographic, military, and legal encounters and exchanges. It also uses Coppin’s attempts to work through notions of diasporic black identities to complicate how we think about the Black Atlantic and its manifestations in Africa and the United States.US South

This chapter examines the varieties of religious freedom talk in African American history. It argues that the racial assemblages of the dominant white society severely limited the utility of religious freedom as a way to (re)define African American identity. It begins by showing how often religious freedom worked in support of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy; and how black church leaders rearticulated this freedom as one way to assert the full humanity of black people and to reposition themselves as fully modern, rational and moral modern subjects. The chapter goes on to argue that many of the new religious movements of black urban life—including Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam—used religious freedom talk in their efforts to redefine their communal identity away from the negative valences of blackness, either replacing race with religion or infusing their blackness with a new cosmic significance. But however they defined themselves, the dominant society denied their claims and overwhelmingly dismissed them as fraudulent and overly political rather than legitimately religious. For the vast majority of African Americans, religious freedom provided little escape from the confines of a racialized oppression.

This chapter describes rising tensions between Protestants and Catholics and the outbreak of religious violence in Ohio and Kentucky in the 1850s. It reveals intense efforts to proselytize across the Ohio River Valley, and the conflicts resulting from heated competition between Protestants and Catholics. This first chapter reveals the growth of powerful churches and missionary organizations based in urban Ohio and Kentucky, and especially in Cincinnati and Louisville. These Protestant and Catholic institutions sought to evangelize throughout the entire Ohio River valley. The chapter treats black and white Protestant revivals and evangelism, and reveals Catholics’ deep interest in fostering missions throughout the region.

David Walker pioneered Mosaic subjectivity, that is, portraying Moses primarily as the epitome of self-sacrificing race loyalty, rather than as a uniquely empowered prophet, liberator, or law giver. In his Appeal, Walker exhorts free Blacks to imitate Moses’s selflessness in leaving the luxurious Egyptian court to suffer with his fellow Hebrews. Walker’s use of Exodus is paradoxical because he argues that American slavery is worse than Egyptian bondage, yet he claims the U.S. as African Americans’ rightful homeland. Walker inherited rhetorical models from African Methodist Episcopal Bishops Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Walker was the first Black American writer to treat Moses predominantly as a model for ordinary people to imitate. Whereas the bible portrays Moses as a singular figure, a prophet and law giver with unique access to God, Walker focused on Moses’s decision to identify with the suffering Hebrews, rather than the powerful Egyptians.

The most important immediate result of the war was the rapid expansion of self-directed Black churches and denominations. That expansion included deeper and wider Black engagement with Scripture, but still on terms largely different from those found in white communities. The immediate postwar years also witnessed the first serious publications giving Black spirituals extensive publicity. “Scientific racism” grew stronger in these years, which led some white Christians to reemphasize biblical passages that, while affirming a unified human species, placed Africans in a permanent subservient place. Cincinnati witnessed a much publicized “Bible War” over daily Bible reading in the city’s schools in which the most interesting contribution came from a conservative, Bible-believing Presbyterian, Stanley Matthews, who opposed Bible readings in school because they were bad for the Bible! The establishment of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union drew heavily on scriptural language and themes, even though the Bible itself is actually ambiguous about the use of beverage alcohol.

This chapter explores the history of Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis after the kneel-in crisis that engulfed the church in the mid-1960s. Its focus is the ways the church has acknowledged and sought to address its exclusion of African Americans from the church at that time. The chapter traces the church's emphasis on urban ministry and racial reconciliation in Memphis, particularly since the 1990s. The chapter tells the story of Second Presbyterian's failed attempt to partner with an African American congregation to found an interracial congregation at Clayborn Temple, former home of Second Presbyterian and later headquarters for the Sanitation Workers' strike of 1968. It concludes by highlighting external and internal perspectives on the church's efforts to address the problems of racial injustice and alienation.

The multifaceted career of Henry Alexander Saturnin Hartley (1861–1934) has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. It however offers us a window into the way the study of classics traveled up and down the Atlantic seaboard and through the Americas. His peripatetic life which took him from Trinidad, to Paris, to maritime Canada, to South America and also to parts of the U.S. figures into the larger history of black classicism when knowledge of classical languages was a “currency” of its own. His 134-page book Classical Translations (Nova Scotia, 1889) was a singular achievement. It is the first book of translations taken from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that was written and published by a person of African descent in the western hemisphere.

This chapter examines the ways the ancestral memory of Civil War service by such groups as the Sons of Confederate Veterans became hotly contested in the second decade of the 21st Century. What for some southerners was personal heritage, particularly as represented in the Confederate Battle Flag, was for many others a symbol of slavery and a continued belief in white supremacy. Matters came to a head in the killing of nine parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church during a Bible study. Yet the deeper issues of reverence or revulsion for the southern past continued with religion and religious leaders playing key parts.