Between Free Grace and Liberty

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Richard Allen’s hymnody, when coupled with his anti-racist activism and his encouragement of communal music-making in worship, evoked eschatological freedom from sin and called for socio-political freedom for people of African descent in the years following the founding of the United States of America. To fully comprehend Allen’s hymnody, one should consider the urgency he bore for freedom and justice for black people in America. Allen (1760–1831) first published a hymnal in 1801, followed by a revised edition in the same year; the included hymns articulate his belief that people could receive individual freedom from both sin and God’s wrath at the final judgement. Allen held to the evangelical hope of Christ’s return which would inaugurate the emancipation of all enslaved people; likewise, eschatological justice must include freedom from political bondage for people of African descent in America. While holding the expectation of eschatological freedom and justice, he adamantly pursued this political freedom during his lifetime, as evidenced in his theo-political writings against slavery and other forms of racial injustice. Consequently, While the lyrics in his 1801 hymnbooks do not explicitly speak against contemporaneous racial injustice, Allen’s life’s work and prose suggest that this is an integral part of the context for Allen’s compilation of eschatological hymnody.

“Welcome to the Ransomed”

Less than a week after the carnage at Shiloh, Congress voted to free enslaved people and to compensate slaveowners in Washington, DC. Daniel A. Payne, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, visited President Lincoln and encouraged him to sign the bill, which he did on April 16, 1862. That same week, Payne preached his most influential sermon, Welcome to the Ransomed, or, Duties of the Colored Inhabitants of the District of Columbia. Lincoln impressed Payne as a man of “real greatness.” High praise for Lincoln would be in short supply, especially from African Americans. Lincoln had wavered on emancipation, many believed, and he needed to pursue a harder war focused on abolishing slavery. The war grew in intensity, and so did debates over slavery’s role in the conflict. Through this phase of the war, Americans turned to scripture to defend an even more brutal war for and against emancipation.

Making Madam C. J. Walker

Chapter 1 presents the early life experiences of Sarah Breedlove and their influences in shaping Madam C. J. Walker’s identity, sense of responsibility to others, and philanthropic giving. Her philanthropy began to form when she was a poor, widowed migrant moving around the South dependent upon a robust philanthropic network of black civil society institutions and black women who cared for her during the most difficult period of her life. The chapter shows how she was socialized into respectability, racial uplift ideology, generosity, and philanthropic giving by a group of St. Louis black churchwomen and clubwomen, whose support and mentoring enabled her to change her life course. In outlining her early membership and involvement with key networks of women, including washerwomen, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Mite Missionary Society, and the Court of Calanthe fraternal order, the chapter demonstrates the formation of Madam Walker’s moral imagination as the foundation for her philanthropic life. It situates Walker within the culture of the AME Church, which immersed her in faith, black history, self-help and racial uplift ideologies, education, activism, and internationalism. In the process, the chapter reveals Walker’s formation of a moral imagination that integrated business and philanthropy, embraced particular causes, and forged diverse means of giving.

Religion, Rights, and the Promises of Reconstruction

This chapter investigates how African American activist-artists adopted new strategies to realize the promises of Reconstruction and partnered often with leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church leadership to accomplish these. Black image producers used their reputations and successes to encourage opportunities for, and exercise newly granted rights to, black people after the Civil War. They funded black education, supported black Reconstruction politicians, and celebrated constitutional amendments; one even attained political office. They crafted images that revealed their investment in the visual culture of John Brown, black Union veterans, and the future of Cuba. Just as these black activist artists backed the AME Church, so the AME Church leadership repeatedly encouraged its readers to collect, reflect upon, and draw inspiration from their images and the messages that they communicated.